FOR MOST OF the past century, petrol and diesel cars were never considered luxury items. They were simply part of everyday life.

They were how we got to work, brought children to school, headed off on holidays, or cleared our heads with a drive on a quiet evening. Noise, vibration and the smell of fuel were just part of the background.

That’s changing, and it’s changing quickly.

This week we saw news that new electric vehicle sales increased by just under 50% year-on-year in January and they overtook petrol and diesel sales for the first time. On DoneDeal Cars more people are searching for EVs specifically than ever before too.

People have mixed views on electric vehicles, but there is now no doubt we are starting to see them become what might be caused ‘reasonably plentiful’ if not anywhere near the targets that were set by various governments since the early 2000s.

I spent some time last week in a very good and very luxurious Volvo ES90. It was a vast electric vehicle sitting over five metres long and with more computing power than it would have taken to put a man on the moon a few decades ago.

The model I was driving was €100,300. Honestly, it was and is a fabulous car, but something struck me over the course of the week when it came to thinking about luxury. Over years of being someone who has had a deep love of the motor car, I realised that I associate luxury very heavily with the internal combustion engine.

I grew up the son of a motoring journalist. My father, Pat Comyn, was the motoring editor of The Sunday Independent during the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. And my first car memory is a 1979 Porsche 911. I don’t remember that much about being three, but I remember this car like it happened yesterday.

The sound of it was something that vibrated my tiny body. I was pretty much hooked then. Over the years, various cars would arrive to our street in Drogheda and the large luxury ones were always fascinating for their array of buttons and gadgets, the smell of wood and leather but for me, mostly because they seemed to have confusion of wildebeest (I had to look that up) under the........

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