London Mayor Boris Johnson: “Make Way for the Mitsubishi Outlander!”
High-ranking Brit goes to Tokyo; electric boogaloo ensues.
Please be upstanding for Boris Johnson: progressive urban-transportation enthusiast and—our man in Westminster tells us—Mayor of London.
Johnson was in Tokyo recently for a test drive of Mitsubishi’s Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid vehicle), and with apologies to Jerry Seinfeld and his coterie of coffee-quaffing comics, Boris gives better camera.
“There’s a faint sort of whine, like a self-satisfied cat,” the phlegmatic mayor says as he coaxes the dual-motor, gas-engine SUV through clusters of paps. Breeze catching his unruly pageboy mop (Johnson is a window-down, elbow-out guy), the mayor opines on the lack of market uptake with EVs, calling range anxiety a red herring.
“I think it’s purely psychological,” he says. “[People] don’t realize that it’s going to be a piece of cake.”
Everything seems a piece of cake with Boris behind the wheel. That is, until he takes both hands off of it.
Join a good bloke, won’t you?