Why Are We Missing Out on the Electric Car?
Memories of the oil tanker drivers' strike in September 2000 remain very poignant for having brought the country so close to breakdown. But it had another disastrous effect too. It led to the ignominious despatch of the fuel duty escalator, the Government's only effective instrument for discouraging use of the car where alternatives were available. Since then cars have become the fastest rising cause of UK greenhouse gas emissions – now 38 million tons a year – and look set to go much higher as road traffic continues to grow by 2% a year.
There is no policy in place to contain, let alone reverse, this trend. It is true that train and bus use has increased, but this is unlikely to have a decisive impact on car use when train and bus fares continue to rise strongly while the average annual costs of motoring are actually falling in real terms. It is also true that a car tax differential has been introduced between small-engine cars and gas guzzlers, though at the last Budget the charge for SUVs was increased by a footling £1.73 a week which as a disincentive for owning a £25,000 vehicle is risible.
So is the Government's goal to cut emissions by 60% by 2050, about to be made a statutory target in the Climate Change Bill published on 12 November, doomed when the fastest rising source of those emissions is still being allowed to rise uncontrollably? Not necessarily. The obvious way out of the car impasse is to incentivise a switch away from the petrol-driven internal combustion engine to an electric or hydrogen fuel cell car.
It has been well understood since the early 1990s that widespread adoption of plug-in electric drive technology could be practical since most cars on the road could be replaced by plug-in electric cars having equivalent performance and amenities to today's fuel-powered cars, without having to build additional generation and transmission infrastructure. The only barrier to implementation at that time was the lack of safe and affordable high-power batteries with a vehicle lifetime service rating. However, as a result of materials innovations in the laboratory, high-power long-life batteries that recharge in 10 minutes are now being manufactured in the US which can power both electric plug-in vehicles and plug-in hybrids.
Several models are now coming off the production line. A Canadian company in Ontario has produced a no-holds-barred all-electric, five-passenger sports utility truck with a 130 mile range that cruises at motorway speeds with the air conditioner running. Phoenix Motors has announced it is about to introduce a family version SUV with an extended range and a 0-60 performance in less than 10 seconds. Moreover the electricity costs will be less than a third, maybe a fifth, of a conventional petrol-driven equivalent. More striking still, the maintenance costs of battery electric vehicles are only a quarter of even the most durable internal combustion configurations.
The reason is that electric engines are much simpler. They need no routine oil and oil filter changes. They require no muffler, no oil pump, no water pump, no radiator, no transmission, no spark plugs, and no catalytic converter. By comparison the petrol-driven car is a noisy, heat-blasting, pollution-spewing machine with far too many moving parts. And electric cars can compete not only in comfort and convenience, but also in speed (sadly, a necessity to achieve a mass market). The electric Tesla Roadster has a giant lithium-ion battery pack which gives it the power to hit 60 in just 4 seconds, to run 250 miles without a recharge, and to charge rapidly at its home charging base. The company even claims energy costs as low as a few pennies per mile.
So why haven't electric cars taken the market by storm? There are two basic reasons – cost and lack of Government support, and (more insidiously) resistance by the oil industry. In 1996 the California Air Quality board required car manufacturers to offer electric cars for sale as part of an effort to reduce air pollution. The big carmakers began to produce electric cars in very small numbers which proved wildly popular because they were fast, clean, quiet and sporty. The carmakers then sued the state of California to have this requirement repealed, and the Federal Government joined this lawsuit on their side – inexplicable until one recalls how close are the Bush ties to the oil industry and that his former chief of staff, Andrew Card, was previously a General Motors executive. The US Government rapidly won and all carmakers stopped producing electric cars. Not only that, they then demanded that those who had bought the cars under lease should return them, and even took legal action to recover some. They then shredded them for scrap.
Yet the reality remains that electric cars are much more energy efficient because the powering system is much lighter, and also much safer than petrol-driven cars where car accidents regularly cause a large number of deaths each year from burning fuel or terrible burn injuries. Petrol-driven cars need imported crude oil or, as the oil gradually runs out over the next 40 years or becomes prohibitively expensive, oil extracted from coal or possibly shale, but this again is very expensive and consumes huge amounts of energy. By contrast, electric cars may be charged from any power source, including renewable energy like hydroelectric, solar or wind.
So why doesn't it happen? The era of the electric car will not prevail till Government, in defiance of the oil industry, forces carmakers to produce them. Government should start by requiring that, say, half the cars and light trucks bought by national and local government and State agencies are electric powered. They could also require that an equal number be produced for sale to the public at the same price. Once this production line begins, it should unleash a huge demand for electric cars and as the mass market takes off the high current price would rapidly tumble. This could offer a breathtaking advance not only in tackling climate change – an end to all CO2 emissions from cars – but a huge gain too in safer and more efficient consumer transport.