By now I was expecting an early Christmas present, in the shape of the arrival of my trial electric car, which I have signed up to leasing for a year, as part of the Government funded CABLED trial. However Tata have just announced the latest in a series of delays which means delivery of the car is not now expected until March next year. While frustrating, it is of course the purpose of such trials to discover the glitches in a product and have time to put them right, before they are sold on the general market. Meanwhile the steadily rising price of petrol (at an all time high in cash terms) is testament to the underlying reason  for the trial – that oil is a limited resource getting harder and harder to find in the quantities our economy currently needs. Electric cars are the future, even if my taste of the future has just receeded by a few months.