Question: Firstly, thanks for answering my questions in the online chat session. You're a great engineer and you have a great sense of humour too and you're just an all round legend really. My question is... If you had 3 wishes you could use on anything engineering related what would they be? Thanks! Emily.

Alex Lyness answered on 20 Jun 2014:

Yo emilyhewhew,

Thanks for all of that. I hope you and the rest of your class are enjoying this as much as us engineers are. Don’t forget to persuade your mates to vote!

Three wishes…

1) Change all the road infrastructure in the UK to favour electric vehicles, swap every single petrol station for a charging station and force people to buy electric cars! We’ll all get used to them pretty quickly and that would change peoples attitudes and we can start reducing our carbon footprint.

2) Invest lots of money to make renewable energy really cheap and easy to access. This can then be used to power my fleet of electric vehicles! Imagine being able to have solar panels everywhere that were cheap to install. It would be great. So too would cool tech like Pavegen (http://www.pavegen.com/) that was invented by a friend at Loughborough University!

3) Get way more Engineers on TV showing off how the world is changing and what we can do/make/fix about it! Currently there are a lot of scientists of TV. Scientists are great, but they are nothing without engineers to help them build the tools/equipment and things they need. Sometimes Engineers don’t know how to sell themselves or inspire others and there are loads of great ones in the UK we just need to make sure the public know!

There you go, not very health-related but all are important engineering wishes!