Smoothing the electric transition

The electric vehicle revolution hasn’t stalled, but it has certainly encountered some significant obstacles. In particular, there is a groundswell of reactionary public opinion against electric vehicles, which typically manifests itself with shrill voices on social media – usually from people who aren’t in the market for new vehicles at all.

Much of this is based on anecdotal nonsense that is fanned into hysteria. No, EVs don’t spontaneously burst into flames on a regular basis – far less, in fact than petrol or diesel cars. Battery packs rarely fail – in fact most battery packs will outlast the cars they’re powering, and once the car heads for scrap, the batteries are likely to carry on having a useful life as storage cells.

And while there’s a grain of truth in some of the environmental damage caused by battery production, the same applies to oil production. No industrial process is truly clean.

Against a background of genuine and mongered fears, the Government has sought opinions on how best to meet its targets of ending petrol and diesel sales by 2035. Professional Driver has responded to the consultation, and you can read more about our response on page 12 of this issue.

We feel that the deadlines have been shunted around enough – previously as part of a political pissing contest within the Tory party. Grandstanding Boris Johnson shunted it forward, cautious Rishi Sunak pushed it back.

Now Keir Starmer wants to bring it forward again. Enough is enough. The changes involve the minutiae of which vehicles should be allowed to be sold between 2030 and 2035. Pure petrol and diesel? Hybrids? Honestly, it hardly matters.

By 2030 non-EVs should account for just 20% of the total sales – roughly 400,000 cars a year. Clearly, most will be hybrids or PHEVs. A few will be diesels – mainly bigger vehicles used for towing. There may be some entry-level petrol cars priced well below the cheapest electric cars. But the amount of emissions these cars will produce is negligible. Just leave the deadlines alone.

What should happen is a more flexible approach to the technologies involved. Just stop prescribing a specific technology – battery-electric - as the only solution. Instead set a level of emissions and work with the automakers to achieve this.

Plug-in hybrids are a case in point. Against a nervous car-buying public, fearful of range anxiety and unable to find urban charging points, PHEVs offer a compromise solution that allows cleaner motoring around town and risk-free longer journeys. PHEVs are gaining popularity, and the technology is continuing to evolve.

Modern PHEVs are a far cry from the 15-miles-of-electric-range models of a few years ago. We’re almost at the stage of having PHEVs with 100 miles of electric range, using battery packs bigger than those fitted to, say, a first-gen Nissan Leaf.

There is a case – a strong one too – to classify these vehicles as zero-emissions vehicles. With home charging, or affordable street charging, the latest PHEVS – an Audi A3 has an 88-mile battery range – can be used just as an EV would. And with sufficient petrol range to reach Scotland from London without stopping, they are not doing too much damage to urban air quality.

Of course, the downside of PHEVs is the fact that you can drive them on the IC engine all the time, never charging the battery. And for sure, we know that has happened in the past.

But technology can help get round this problem. Geofencing technology could be fitted that forces the PHEV to switch to electric mode within a low-emissions zone. If the battery is too depleted to do that, then the car is charged as if it were a non-compliant car. It would pay the driver to keep the car charged.

The main upshot of such a reclassification would be to remove the contentious argument that motorists were being “forced” into EVs that they don’t trust, don’t like and with inadequate infrastructure. Instead, they can drive an “equivalent ZEV” in the form of a PHEV, that can be refuelled just like any other IC-engined car.

It also buys the car industry time. Automakers are not going to stop developing EVs, and battery technology will keep on improving. Range will head toward 500 miles. Charging times will drop to just a few minutes. By 2035, we’ll probably be looking back at 2025 and wondering what all the fuss was about.

But right now, Government policy needs to be pragmatic, not dogmatic. The EV revolution will happen, but it might take a little longer to quell the fears of many motorists.