As I wrote last week and for the coming few weeks, I shall be focusing on two or three different topics in the same contribution, keeping in mind the need to maintain things on a lighter vein in summer.

Summer of love

If you were to ask people my age what they should have been wearing if they were going to San Francisco (the US) exactly 50 years ago, they would know that the right answer is flowers. It may seem like an odd answer but the summer of 1967 was a watershed year in some respects. The cultural change, which that summer brought about, represented a change even for the business sector.

The summer of 1967 is sometimes referred to as “the long hot summer” or “the summer of love”. It is referred to as the long hot summer because of the race riots during the American Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests. Others would refer to it as the summer of love because of what occurred in San Francisco and other cities (but San Francisco was the most publicised location ate the time), where mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behaviour converged.

Where is the link with the business sector? Maybe for the first time people were challenging traditional concepts of authority. People were making it clear that they were no longer willing to go to war for their country. Although the Western world was experiencing economic growth, it was not enough.

To what extent the electric car will change our way of living or improve our quality of life is to be seen

Although Abraham Maslow had already expounded his theory on the hierarchy of needs, some 20 years before, business leaders started to experience the requirement for the use of motivational techniques to manage their staff, resulting from the big changes in society, only in the second half of the 1960s. Maybe it is significant that Frederick Herzberg published his book, One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?, in 1968.

The electric car

France announced that by 2040 it will be banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. The United Kingdom projects that by 2050, 90 per cent of new cars in that country will be electric. Research by the Stanford Institute of the United States says: “Our findings clearly indicate that essentially all vehicle miles travelled will be electric by 2040”.

The Dutch Bank, ING, was much more bullish in its estimates. It stated that that all new cars sold in Europe will be electric by 2035, as a result of lower battery costs and economies of scale. ING believes that electric cars would “become the rational choice for motorists in Europe” sometime between 2017 and 2024, as their car showroom prices fall, their ranges increase and charging infrastructure becomes more widespread. The expectation is that by 2024 the cost of owning an electric car shall be the same as that of owning a car with a petrol or diesel engine.

Car manufacturers do not seem to have been taken by surprise by these announcements. Volvo announced that by 2019 it will be launching only hybrid and 100 per cent electric cars. Add to this the expected disruption resulting from the advent of automated electric vehicles in the early 2020s.

To what extent the electric car will change our way of living or improve our quality of life is to be seen. Moreover, since in Malta we do not produce any cars, many would be tempted to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

It may be worth taking a proactive approach and evaluate thoroughly the impact of the advent of electric cars in Malta. How can they be used to the advantage of the whole population?

The summer of love of 1967 and the advent of electric cars may be seen to be unimportant events. However so was the telephone when it was invented. The chief engineer of the British Post Office thought he could do without the telephone because he had enough messenger boys. History has shown time and time again that it is the seemingly unimportant events that have the biggest impact on our economy and society at large.