Name: This town banned cars (except tiny electric ones)
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T17:02:40.000Z
Duration: 5 min 59 s
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One of the problems with urban planning is that change is difficult.

To-infinitive

Many of them want to switch to something that's more transit friendly and walkable.

But it's a very slow and difficult process.

What if your town was so inaccessible for so long that by the time it became possible for cars to drive in, the people decided they didn't want them?

This is Zermatt, a ski resort in the Alps in the southern Switzerland.

There's no easy way past those mountains.

it's narrow and twisting and only open if you get special permission and pay quite a large fee.

And even then you can't get into the town proper.

Instead, the next town over has a lot of parking and a train to shuttle tourists back and forth.

It used to be, but the only vehicles here were horse drawn carriages.

But in the 1980s, Zermatt modernised jumping straight past petrol cars and internal combustion engines and going fully electric with some very specific requirements.

The hoteliers and all the builders and all the taxis, of course, can't go just by bicycle.

So they ask the local government make the decision.

The business people have to send us the paper, why you need a vehicle, and

We give them permission maybe for three years, and if the business is running, he can keep it.

But if you are a person like Tom Scott, why you need one?

Yeah, I live up here, it's very difficult to go up there.

Then we would say, sorry, you can take a taxi.

All the deliverers, they have a car, but not the shops, also not the restaurants.

We are really strict that since 20 years we have around 520 vehicles.

If you grew up in Britain around the same time as I did, you might be thinking, those are milk floats.

And yes, it's basically the same technology.

A battery electric vehicle with a very long service life, designed for decades of low speed use, to be fixed easily if it breaks and to make a minimum of noise.

In the 20th century, British dairies used fleets of vehicles like that for delivering bottles of milk to millions of homes every morning.

Which seems weird these days, but then so does a lot of the 20th century.

Zermatt here used these vehicles for everything.

Taxis are the most obvious one, but buses, trucks, the police car, they all look like that.

And many of them were designed and built locally by a company just over there that started out with horse drawn taxis.

In the 17th, my father, he was a horse driver.

We had some electric cars with a platform, but nothing for transport people.

And then my father, he did buy, with a company near Zurich, an electric car for transport people.

And then later on, in 1985, I did come to my brother and we did start with the factory steamboat.

We are building in a year about 10 to 15 cars.

And to build an electric car for a small company like we are, it's not so easy here.

And what you can see there, that's a new electric car.

This one is the new generation with lithium ion batteries.

Before, we did work with batteries in lead, and

now with the lithium ion batteries, everything, it's very easy.

You can drive with this lithium ion technology 2, 3 hours through.

These electric cars, they are all handmade, I can tell you.

So every piece you see at this car, we have them many times in our hands.

The other people say the market is not big enough.

The lifetime of these electric cars, it's about 30, up to 50 years.

It took me a while to notice something as I walked around Zermatt.

In every city, in every town, there is a constant quiet roar of traffic noise from somewhere.

But right now, of course, that's very difficult to demonstrate because there's construction, there's the rush of the river that's really audible from this vantage point.

It's carrying all the glacier melt water down the valley.

But at night, when everything's calm, there's no traffic noise.

I know it only works because this is a smooth, small, rich and very expensive ski resort with a weird history that's outsourced its parking to the next town over, I can't help thinking that it'd be nice if more towns and cities sounded like that.

When I tell people from Switzerland we are living in a town without petrol cars.

They said, how you manage by bicycle or by foot or by bus?

But if you are in this system, then it's so normal.