Sunday 9 February 2020

Conversations with taxi drivers: Fourteen

This is the fourteenth in a series of posts relaying conversations I have had with taxi drivers. The first of these posts appeared on 6 June 2018. 

22 January

I had been to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the ‘Japan Supernatural’ exhibition and caught a cab from Macquarie Street to home. I didn’t talk to the driver apart from telling him where to go until we got to the lights just before the Western Distributor, where we drove straight through. Then I said, “All these people complaining about the prime minister but you don’t see many EVs on the roads.”

The driver didn’t answer me straight away, but instead asked me how I wanted to proceed. I told him to take whichever route he preferred and we headed down toward Harris Street beneath the overpass where an arm of the motorway meets with Fig Street.

As we queued at the lights I asked him if his car was a hybrid and he said it was. He said you get mileage of about 100km per seven litres. I told him I was getting a RAV4 hybrid but that they couldn’t deliver to the dealership until April. “They’re not making the car until March,” I went on, explaining about the high demand.

Toyota was bringing out more cars in hybrid models, I said and he said that you would see more EVs in future. “That’s the go for the next five or ten years,” he added. He said that people are blaming the prime minister because of his denial about the link between burning coal for power and climate change. Then he said that Tony Abbott was in Washington saying there was no link. “We dodged a bullet with Abbott,” I said, adding that I thought he should stay in Washington so we wouldn’t have to listen to him.

At my street I paid using EFTPOS and got out of the car, then went in through the side door and up in the lift. Once there I put some clothes on to dry.

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