You know that feeling? That moment when you are sitting on a terrace, an Italian sports car passes by, and for a second you forgive it everything — the fine, the exhaust fumes, the noise — because the sound hits you straight in the stomach. That low, hoarse bark of a V12 being pushed through its revs. Something is being sold to you there that cannot be captured in figures. That is not transport. That is opera.

And now Brussels asks us to believe that the future of that same Ferrari is a stone-silent, battery-stuffed crate on wheels. With a soundtrack that sounds like your mother-in-law's vacuum cleaner.

In this little piece I am going to tell you why it need not be so. And why the solution is probably growing in a garden you have never seen.

The uncomfortable truth of the electric car

The electric car is sold to us as clean. And so it is — in the place where you drive it. What you don't see is what happened before that car ended up on your driveway.

The battery in your new silent wonder contains cobalt, scraped out of the ground in Congo by children under conditions in which you would not let your dog play. It contains lithium, pumped out of the Atacama desert with so much water that the indigenous farmers watch their groundwater vanish. It contains nickel from Indonesian mines devouring rainforest as if it were crispbread. And it contains rare-earth metals whose extraction in China turns entire rivers radioactive.

All that mess is then shipped across the ocean in containers to Europe, glued together in factories using more energy than you draw from the socket in ten years, and you get to call yourself "zero-emission". That is like calling yourself a vegetarian because you did not slaughter the pig yourself.

I am not saying the electric car is nonsense. For the delivery driver with a van and a fixed round through the city: fine. But for a Ferrari? For the dream of an eight-year-old with a poster on his wall? That is like opening a McDonald's inside Notre-Dame.

A grass that grows too fast

Now for the good side of the story. There exists a crop that looks like ordinary tall grass, that grows so fast it stands above your head after three months, and that yields enough fuel per hectare to power every Ferrari, every Lancia, every truck and every home-boiler in Europe. It is called Giant Juncao. In English: giant reed grass. In Italian: erba gigante. In plain speech: a grass that has no idea when to stop.

Giant Juncao grows on land that is good for nothing else. Not on the fields where your potatoes come from. Not in the forest. On the dull, dry, forgotten patches of no-man's-land where the wind blows through and the sheep only pass by on their way to find grass elsewhere. There this crop thrives as if released.

Per hectare Giant Juncao yields three to five times more fuel than sugar cane and six times more than maize. And the fuel you extract is called bio-ethanol — in effect a purified version of the same calorific value that is also in gin. With this difference: the gin you drink, the bio-ethanol from Giant Juncao lets your Ferrari sing.

What the racing drivers already know

Perhaps you now think: nice, a Dutchman with a grass story. But the Americans have known this for twenty years. IndyCar, that fast oval racing at Indianapolis, has run on ethanol since 2007. NASCAR since 2011. And no driver complains of a loss of power, no sponsor has withdrawn its signature, no single engine has blown up in indignation.

Better still: ethanol is almost a better engine fuel than petrol. It has a higher octane number, cools the cylinder better, and lets engines run at higher compression. At Ferrari they know that too. Formula 1 switches this year to 100% sustainable fuel. Vigna and Elkann, the men at Ferrari's controls, have said publicly that they see more in sustainable fuel than in going fully electric. The Ferrari Elettrica will come, but as one model. Not as a replacement for what makes Ferrari Ferrari.

What needs to happen to run a V12 on bio-ethanol? Three things. The control box has to be reprogrammed — standard work for any development department. The rubber of the fuel hoses has to be ethanol-resistant — available for years from Bosch and Magneti Marelli. And the farmers have to be given a piece of paper certifying that their land was not carved out of a food field — a certificate that can be arranged in 18 months.

No mines to open. No battery factories to build. No network of charging poles for which Belgium or Italy would have to double its electricity grid. Just plant a grass, ferment, distil and refuel.

And at home?

It gets better. The same fuel that goes into your Ferrari can also go into your house. Not in an ordinary boiler — that is old-fashioned — but in something called a Stirling engine. That is the invention of a Scottish clergyman from 1816, and no invention has been understood by fewer people and admired by more engineers.

A Stirling engine converts heat into motion without explosions. Very calmly, very quietly, very reliably. NASA uses them in space probes because they run for thousands of hours without maintenance. And in English and Dutch homes a small company called Microgen has already installed tens of thousands of them, hanging beside the central-heating boiler.

A Stirling-CHP, as the thing is called, heats your house and simultaneously supplies your electricity. One litre of ethanol per hour is enough to keep a Dutch terraced house warm and to power the lamps, the TV and the pasta-maker. And — this is the clever bit — if you keep a 250-litre barrel in the utility room, you can go nine days with no deliveries and your house is still warm. Try that with a heat pump during a Russian cyber-attack on the power grid.

The clever bit about the gas pipe

Now for the very best part. We have 140,000 kilometres of gas pipelines in Europe. Written off. Under every street. Into every home. And now, as we want to move off gas, we are going to leave them — empty? Unused? Sealed off, while simultaneously spending billions on thicker electricity cables because heat pumps overload the grid?

That is like building a new motorway alongside a motorway you have just resurfaced because someone told you asphalt was out of fashion.

Through those existing gas pipes we can run a thin ethanol pipe. A pipe within a pipe. The old gas pipe stays around it as a safety sheath, in case a drop should ever want to escape. And instead of waiting for natural gas to come through, bio-ethanol from Giant Juncao will trickle out into the barrel in your utility room. One litre an hour. No tanker lorries, no freight traffic, no queue for the oil-ball — I mean — the tank. Just flow through.

But the opposition

You will of course ask: if this is so wonderful, why have I never heard of it? Good question. Three reasons.

One: the heat-pump industry is large, and has invested a great deal of money in factories that can only make heat pumps. Those people do not much like bio-ethanol-CHP. Just as taxi drivers do not much like Uber.

Two: bio-ethanol has had a bad reputation since a few misunderstandings in 2008. Back then it briefly looked as if we wanted to fill our wheat fields with fuel crops. That was indeed nonsense. But Giant Juncao grows precisely on the places where no wheat wants to grow. Remember the difference: not on your potatoes, but on the gravel plain next to them.

Three: it is much easier to sell policy-makers in Brussels one great big solution ("all electric!") than a mosaic of clever solutions that differ from country to country and from case to case. Politics loves straight lines. Reality is always crooked.

The Ferrari that smells of mown grass

Imagine: a summer evening in 2032. You are sitting on that same terrace. A Ferrari drives past. The V12 roars, the exhaust sings, the sound hits you as deeply as ever. Only now, trailing behind the car, there is a smell you cannot place. No petrol. No diesel. Something… light. Something vegetal. A little like mown grass on a July afternoon, with a hint of grandmother's cooking stove.

That is a Ferrari running on bio-ethanol from Giant Juncao. The same fuel that at home keeps your house warm. No Congolese child has had to crawl into a mine for it. No Indonesian rainforest has been cleared for it. No Chinese riverbed has become radioactive. Only a farmer in Apulia, or in La Mancha, or perhaps even in Limburg, has had a field full of giant grass harvested and got home in time for the evening news.

The Cavallino Rampante still rears. The engine still sings. The opera is not over. It has only become cleaner.

To me — as a materials scientist, as a dreamer, and as someone who also occasionally sits on a terrace — that seems a future worth choosing.

Jacobus van Merksteijn
Malta, June 2026