You know that feeling? That moment when you're sitting on a terrace, an Italian sports car drives past, and you forgive everything for just a second — the fine, the exhaust fumes, the noise — because the sound hits you right in the gut. That low, hoarse bark of a V12 being pushed through its revs. Something is being sold to you there that cannot be captured in numbers. That is not transport. That is opera.

And now Brussels is asking us to believe that the future of that very same Ferrari is a deathly silent, battery-filled little box on wheels. With a soundtrack that sounds like your mother-in-law's vacuum cleaner.

In this piece I am going to tell you why that doesn't have to be. And why the solution is probably growing in a garden you have never seen.

The uncomfortable truth about the electric car

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

The battery of your new silent wonder contains cobalt, which is scraped out of the ground in Congo by children under conditions you wouldn't let your dog anywhere near. It contains lithium, which is pumped out of the ground in the Atacama desert using so much water that indigenous farmers watch their groundwater disappear. It contains nickel from Indonesian mines that devour rainforest as if it were crispbread. And it contains rare earth metals whose extraction in China makes entire rivers radioactive.

Then all that stuff is 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 are allowed to call yourself "zero-emission." That is like being a vegetarian because you didn't slaughter the pig yourself.

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

A grass that grows too fast

Now the good side of the story. There exists a crop that looks like ordinary tall grass, that grows so fast it towers above your head after three months, and that yields enough fuel per hectare to supply every Ferrari, every Lancia, every truck and every home furnace in Europe with energy. It is called Giant Juncao. In Dutch: reuzengrasriet. In Italian: erba gigante. In plain-people's English: a grass that has absolutely 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 to look for grass elsewhere. There this crop thrives as though it has been liberated.

Per hectare, Giant Juncao yields three to five times more fuel than sugar cane and six times more than maize. And the fuel you get from it is called bio-ethanol — essentially a refined version of the calorific value also found in gin. With one difference: the gin you drink, and the bio-ethanol from Giant Juncao you let your Ferrari sing on.

What the racing drivers already know

Perhaps you are now thinking: nice story, a Dutchman with a grass story. But the Americans have known this for twenty years. The IndyCar races, that fast oval racing from Indianapolis, have been running on ethanol since 2007. NASCAR since 2011. And no driver complains about loss of power, no sponsor has withdrawn their signature, not a single engine has exploded in outrage.

What's more: ethanol is almost a better motor fuel than petrol. It has a higher octane rating, cools the cylinder better, and allows engines to run at higher compression. At Ferrari they know this too. Formula 1 is switching to 100% sustainable fuel from this year onwards. Vigna and Elkann, the men at the controls at Ferrari, have publicly said they see more in sustainable fuel than in going fully electric. The Ferrari Elettrica is coming, but as a single model. Not as a replacement for what makes Ferrari Ferrari.

What needs to happen to run a V12 on bio-ethanol? Three things. The engine management unit needs to be reprogrammed — standard work for any development department. The rubber fuel hoses need to be ethanol-resistant — available from Bosch and Magneti Marelli for years already. And the farmers need a certificate confirming their land has not been taken from a food-growing field — a certificate that can be arranged in 18 months.

No mines to open. No battery factories to build. No network of charging points for which Belgium or Italy would have to double their electricity grid. Just plant a grass, ferment it, distil it, and fill up.

And at home?

It gets even better. The same fuel that can go in your Ferrari can also go in your home. Not in an ordinary boiler — that is old-fashioned — but in something called a Stirling engine. That is an invention by a Scottish minister 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 quietly, very silently, very reliably. NASA uses them in space probes because they run for thousands of hours without maintenance. And in English and Dutch homes, a little company called Microgen has already installed them tens of thousands of times, hanging next to the central heating boiler.

A Stirling CHP, as the device is called, heats your home and simultaneously generates your electricity. One litre of ethanol per hour is enough to keep a Dutch terraced house warm and supply the lights, the television and the pasta machine with energy. And — this is the clever bit — if you put a small 250-litre tank in the utility room, you can comfortably go nine days without any delivery and your house will still be warm. Try doing that with a heat pump during a Russian cyberattack on the electricity grid.

The clever bit with the gas pipeline

Now comes the best part of all. We have 140,000 kilometres of gas pipelines in Europe. Written off. Under every street. Reaching into every home. And we are going to — now that we want to move away from gas — leave them empty? Leave them unused? Close them off, while at the same time we have to spend billions on thicker electricity cables because heat pumps cannot cope with the electricity grid?

That is like laying a new motorway alongside a motorway you have just had resurfaced because someone once told you that tarmac is out of fashion.

Through those existing gas pipelines we can run a slender ethanol pipe. A tube within a tube. The old gas pipeline stays around it as a safety jacket, in case a single drop ever wanted to escape. And instead of waiting for natural gas to flow through, bio-ethanol from Giant Juncao will soon be trickling through to the little tank in your utility room. One litre per hour. No tanker lorries, no freight traffic, no queue at the — what I mean is — the pump. Just flowing through, continuously.

But the resistance

You are probably wondering: if this is so wonderful, why do I never hear about 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 manufacture heat pumps. Those people do not like bio-ethanol CHP. Just as taxi drivers do not like Uber.

Two: bio-ethanol has had a bad reputation since a few misunderstandings back in 2008. At the time it briefly seemed as though we wanted to fill our wheat fields with fuel crops. That was indeed nonsense. But Giant Juncao grows precisely on the spots where no wheat wants to stand. Remember that difference: not on your potato fields, but on the gravel patch right next to them.

Three: it is far easier to sell policymakers in Brussels on one big solution ("everything electric!") than on a mosaic of smart solutions that differ by country and by situation. Politics loves straight lines. Reality is always curved.

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 just as deeply as always. Only now, behind the car, there hangs a smell you cannot quite place. Not petrol. Not diesel. Something... light. Something vegetal. A little like mown grass on a July afternoon, with a hint of the wood-burning stove from your grandmother's time.

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

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

That seems to me — as a materials scientist, as a dreamer, and as someone who also sits on a terrace from time to time — a future worth choosing.

Jacobus van Merksteijn
Malta, June 2026