Bright spark

Among those minds is that of Abingdon businessman and inventor Barry Shrier, 46. He plans to create 250 jobs in Oxfordshire at a new factory, building luxury cars with zero exhaust emissions, and reckons the first vehicles will be on the road at the end of the year.

He says that his company, Liberty Electric Cars, already has orders in the bag for green Range Rovers - powered by electric motors and selling for between £95,000 and £125,000 each, depending on the model chosen.

American serial entrepreneur Mr Shrier - inventor of the mobile payment system Pay Box for giant finance house Deutsche Bank - says he already has £30m funds in place to back the venture.

Now he and finance director Peter Sylvester, who formerly worked for BMW and Harley-Davidson, are hunting for a site near Oxford to set up the new venture.

He told The Oxford Times: "Our registered office is in South Leigh, near Witney. Now I am looking for a suitable site in Oxfordshire for the new works.

"We think that Oxfordshire is the place for us because it already has a long car-building tradition, exemplified by BMW in Cowley and the fact that it is a centre of the racing-car industry. We think the skills we need will be available here."

He added: "For years, there was less incentive to go electric because oil was cheap. Now we are at a turning point. It is a real shame that the UK is over-dependent on oil - it's bad for the nation's economy and it's bad for its environment."

The business will start by re-engineeering the Range Rover, which Mr Shrier described as an "iconic" car, and fitting it with an electric motor to produce better performance than a traditional internal combustion engine.

The revolutionary cars will need recharging every 200 miles and Mr Shrier said the recharging process itself will be quick and easy. Owners can either charge overnight at home using a normal socket, or he is looking to develop a network of charging points in places such as multi-storey car parks, to offer fast charging.

Mr Shrier added: "We are developing partnerships with energy businesses in the UK which will provide fast recharging stations which will power the car in about ten minutes."

The two versions of the electric Range Rovers vary in price greatly because the more expensive model will be fitted with a diesel "range extender generator" (which Mr Shrier says you run on used chip oil if necessary) for owners who need to travel further than 200 miles in one trip, and who fear being stranded without juice and far from a power point.

Having a factory up and going by the end of the year seems ambitious but Mr Shrier, clearly a driven man, is up against stiff competion from major players in the market such as GM, now developing its Chevrolet Volt car, Renault-Nissan and Mercedes, who will next spring roll out a luxury S400 BlueHybrid.

Speed is also of the essence when it comes to performance, one of the selling points of his Range Rovers. Mr Shrier says the new cars will out-accelerate, and have higher top speeds, than their carbon-emitting cousins.

Many auto analysts believe that if oil prices continue to rise and lithium-ion battery prices continue to fall, the shift towrds electric cars could herald the greatest change in car manufacturing ever, with electricty powering most of the world's one billion cars by 2030. A report from Morgan-Stanley reckons that plug-in vehicles have the potential "to revolutionise the automobile as we know it".

Mr Shrier, who moved to Oxfordshire in 1986 from San Francisco, home of the electric car revolution, said: "It is a little like the time in history when the railway took over from canals."

He added: "Electric cars will help cut pollution. Other cars damage your health. NHS figures show that over 1,000 people a year die in London alone thanks to cars. They also damage your wealth. Mile for mile, an electric Range Rover will cost just a fifth of the cost of running a petrol model. And that ratio is increasing as oil prices rise."

But just how "green" will those Range Rovers be? According to the Stern Report, commissioned in 2006 by the Government, transport accounts for 14 per cent of total emissions of greenhouse gases. But whether electric cars are "green" or not will depend largely on where you live. In Oxfordshire, where most of us obtain power from the coal-fuelled Station A at Didcot Power Station, due to close in 2012-2015 and one of the filthiest power sources in the country, increasing electricity output to charge up cars might not save the planet.

But business maxims spring to mind here: When the going gets tough, the tough get going, for instance, or there is the one about turning problems into opportunities . We wish Mr Shrier luck - but then there is the one about If you've seen the bandwagon, it's too late. Here's hoping he is ahead of the game.