The road to 2030: How the UK must prepare for an EV revolution

2nd February 2021 | Posted by TEIC

The road to 2030: How the UK must prepare for an EV revolution

2030, EV, transportation

Last year, one in 10 new cars offered for sale in the UK was electrified. This represented a mighty jump from the previous year’s one in 30 and dwarfed the 2015 figure of one in 200. Green car advocates were delighted.

However, a landmark decision reached by the government during 2020 – to ban sales of all new internal combustion engine (ICE) cars and most hybrids by 2030 – made it shockingly clear that all recent EV gains were chicken feed. To meet legislators’ new targets, sales of battery-electric vehicles and plugin hybrids will need to expand from today’s 150,000 to around 2.4 million in just nine years, a rise of 1500%. It was – is – a staggering demand with unprecedented implications.

In nine years’ time, everyone who buys a new car will have to make it electric – either purely battery-electric, hygrogen fuel cell or (until 2035) a heavily battery-biased plug-in hybrid – because the government has decided that such cars provide the best and quickest means of cutting toxic air pollution in cities and of reducing the greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, currently heating the earth’s atmosphere to dangerous levels.

It’s undoubtedly the most radical, universal and expensive alteration to the direction of automobile design in history. Demands for improvements to car safety engineering and engine emissions – both headline-grabbers of the 1970s and 1980s – pale into insignificance compared with what lies ahead.

Huge new questions arise. Will the cars of 2030 fulfil our transportation needs? Will they be desirable enough to buy? Can car buyers be educated to ‘get’ EVs in time? Will there be enough electric power and enough charging points to go around? What will happen to the ICE cars that populate our roads in 2030 and a decade thereafter?

The 2030 change to EVs is tantamount to telling a population, only 10% of whom speak Chinese, that Mandarin will be the nation’s lingua franca in nine years’ time.

The positives

Car manufacturers are already showing not only that they can make the cars to do the 2030 job but also that they can make them desirable – a vital quality. Secondly, the technology is rapidly advancing to meet our ever more sophisticated needs: many pundits now say that by 2030, new battery technology will have greatly reduced our concerns about range, charging speed, weight, cost, ‘dirty’ manufacturing and battery degradation.

Car traction batteries may by then be playing a vehicle-to-grid role in storing renewable energy that is presently wasted. And we now know that the National Grid can provide the extra energy we will need: “This is bread and butter to us” was the reassuring quote.

But if the players in the electric car orchestra seem reassuringly willing and able, serious concerns must be expressed about the capabilities of the conductor: the government. As yet, there appears to be no minister with deep knowledge of the subject or responsibility for overseeing the huge changes ahead. Some politicians don’t even know, as you will have read, the difference between a hybrid and a battery-electric car.

Funds so far allocated to develop a national charging infrastructure – whose poor performance is continually revealed as the main reason open-minded car users haven’t committed to EVs in greater numbers – look inadequate. Vital detail around the 2030 decision, such as what kind of plug-in hybrid can be sold legally beyond 2030, simply isn’t available.

It’s as if the government is now content to allow all decisions to emerge from chaos. Time is short – and shortening.

Source: Autocar

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