Back in 1994, your servant (myself) was given the opportunity to buy a cellphone.

The phone is an American design that flips open when you want to speak. I buy it with the thought that, if it does not bring me any new work, I will throw it away. The phone battery only lasts about six hours and the reception is just terrible. The phone calls are way expensive and there is no SMS option.

I am driving through Woodstock when the phone rings. An accountant who looks after a building wants me to go and fix the lift. I agree to do so. And, for the next 20 years, I am involved in every alteration to the building and make good fees out of it.

However, the American phone has to go and so my next phone is a Nokia 1610. At this time, the jury is out on whether cellphones are good things or not. Many people say: “I don’t want a cellphone; I don’t want to be available to everybody all the time.” Seemingly, they forget that all they have to do is to switch the phone off.

At the time, there was a lot of community response to cellphones. People wrote about cellphone antennae which would ‘blot the landscape’ and there were fears of cancer induced by electromagnetic waves. It is 21 years later and it is very unusual to find anybody who does not have a smartphone.

The whole cellphone saga reminded me of my student experiences when I was 19. I was at the University of the Witwatersrand and all the engineering students used slide rules or four-figure log tables for calculations. Then, one day in the physics lab, after a practical, one of the students produced a Hewlett-Packard 35 scientific calculator. The HP 35. It was an astonishing device. It could calculate trigs and the square root of two to seven decimal places. I knew that I was one of few people in the world at the time who had seen the seventh decimal place of the square root of two. I wrote it down. At the time, the HP 35 cost about R1 500. You could get a small car in good condition for half that price. But the HP 35 was so obviously amazing that many engineering students (myself included) took out loans from the bank to buy one. So, here we see a trend in a way: when an item appears that is so obviously better, then, regardless of cost and initial lack of functionality, it takes over.

Electric cars have a whole lot of drawbacks. You cannot fuel them in less than one-and-a-half hours. They probably have very little resale value. If an electric car breaks down, you are going to have to get quite a smart person to fix it. If you live in any normal house, you are going to have at least a 30 A, 220 V power supply if you want to charge the vehicle, which may mean you have to juggle hot water cylinders, stoves, irons, kettles and, so on, to charge your car.

But the big attraction is cost. You can go 400 km on an electric-car battery rated at 80 kWh. Allowing for inefficiencies, you can more or less go 400 km at a cost of R160. This is way cheaper than a petrol car by about R250.

Okay, strictly speaking, you can only go 200 km, since, at the end of your 400 km, there will be no charging point. So, you have to go 200 km and come home again. Then, of course, there is the matter of the cost. A Tesla S electric car costs about R900 000. You can get a BMW 5 Series for about R550 000. If your electric car saving is R250 for every 400 km, you will have to travel about 560 000 km until you are evens. Which hardly seems worth it, since the Tesla S will have a much reduced used value than the BM. We will have to wait and see. Are we on the cusp of the electric car revolution or just facing another fad?