Whys Gets Serious: Me and My Cars Yet Again

Electric Cars have arrived

I wrote my first Me and My Cars post in 2016. Then, I lusted after the (to me) inaccessible fantasy motor, the Tesla, and referenced an article in the journal of the Centre for Alternative Technology entitled Has the Time of Electric Cars Arrived? (Clean Slate, no.99, Spring 2016) Well, we can answer that now can't we?

Last year, 2023, despite a small drop in market share at 16.5%, electric car sales in the UK reached a record high. (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, quoted on BBC R5 Wake up to Money 24/ 01/24.)

Jaguar Land Rover are putting out a range of electrics and hybrids, Nissan are cranking up production in the North East and Stellantis/Vauxhall are going in big at Ellesmere Port.

Also, it looks like China's BYD, having overtaken Tesla as the world's biggest selling electric car, will bring us a more affordable product very soon. This, though, is a good news/bad news thing. More affordable means more uptake means good for net zero. But it also means stiff competition for our own product (remember Japanese motorbikes in the seventies?). Fingers crossed then that we can meet the competition. Having said that, as I write, the EU is considering investigating the Chinese for anti-competitive subsidy. (See References at the end)

Another important issue about buying the Chinese product is the sustainability of its manufacturing operation. I haven't looked closely at this but BYD have been working with the sustainability consultancy EDF on this matter and seem to be making the effort. It's a very important point. We should not be exporting our carbon footprint to another country. (See References)

Is electric good for all vehicles?

So, can we sit back and wait for EVs to continue pushing out ICE (internal combustion engine) cars until there are none left and we're all silently zooming about electrically? Well, not according to Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota, who has recently said that EVs will only ever reach 30% market share at most. There's a lot of discussion about this as I write , some of it quite scornful. But I think he should be taken seriously. (See References)

I am a big fan of electric transport, but even in my own experience I can see where it's going to struggle. In the last 20 years I have spent a lot of time working with 4x4's in remote places a very long way from a gas station. I can't replace my jerry cans of spare diesel with spare batteries can I? (I know there are a few electric SUV's coming on the market but I can only imagine they are aimed at the Chelsea tractor market and, maybe, farmers and the like.)

Then there's haulage. The batteries needed to power a great big HGV would be so big and heavy as to leave little capacity for the payload. And how about agricultural machinery and construction industry plant?

At this point I'm not going to fall foul of that 21^st century thinking disability, the curse of the binary. It's not a two sided battle as villainous oil is vanquished by heroic electricity for sole control of transport. It's obvious, and many people are saying it: the future is a mix, a variety of green technologies applied according to relevance.

Mr Toyoda is probably right in principle, though we might argue about that 30%. It doesn't mean electric cars are wrong and we should abandon them. They are certainly going to clear our roads of an immense amount of CO² spewing traffic. But we should accept that we need something else as well.

And there are people working on that. Mr Toyoda's own company for instance, has hydrogen powered cars in its range. Here in Britain, JCB already have applied hydrogen power to the heavy stuff. They have demonstrated a hydrogen digger and have shown a straightforward way of converting a van to hydrogen. (See References)

Good and Bad Hydrogen

Hydrogen is clean at the point of use, producing only water vapour as exhaust.

But there are clean and less clean ways of producing it. The cleanest is 'Green' hydrogen which is produced by electrolysing water using green energy, and is completely carbon zero. Next is 'Blue' hydrogen which is separated out from natural gas (methane), leaving behind carbon dioxide – which has to be captured and locked away if the process is to be clean. This can be done by sending it down to the porous rocks where the methane came from. I believe it remains to be seen if this will work with the amounts of CO² we would be producing.

How the hydrogen is produced is obviously crucial. The currently most common way is like the blue method, except that the CO²is released to air. Pointless of course, in the net zero project. This method is referred to as 'grey' hydrogen. There's a whole spectrum of colours tagged to hydrogen production methods and I'm not going to specify them here. There's a good breakdown on the National Grid's website at: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/hydrogen-colour-spectrum

(I can't, though, resist the temptation to include this quote from the same website:

'Japan and Australia announced a new brown coal-to-hydrogen project recently. This project will use brown coal in Australia to produce liquefied hydrogen, which will then be shipped to Japan for low-emission use'.

Brown coal is very dirty indeed – Google it and see. So Japan's 'low-emission use' is actually very high emission use - exported to an all too willing Australia.)

Even when we acknowledge that there should be a mix of fuel techs to power our vehicles we are restricting our thinking if we leave it at that.

Norway, praised on all sides for achieving an 80% take up of electric cars, is now facing some unintended consequences. Environmental objectives such as relief of congestion, cycling, pedestrianisation and reduction of demand for energy have been side-lined as everyone rushes to own a nice new electric motor at a subsidised price. And the public transport system, essential in a country which wants to treat those who are less affluent fairly, is poor. (See References)

And do you know who flagged up this issue 8 years ago? I did.

So I was very impressed indeed by Paul Wilcox, CEO of Vauxhall UK, when he spoke to Deborah Meaden (environmentalist and Den dragon) on BBC Radio in 2022. (BBC Sounds, Best of the Big Green Money Show 09/12/2022 at about 5min 30sec):

Deborah Meaden: ' ...is it genuinely sustainable for households to own one or two, sometimes three, cars?'

Paul Wilcox: 'One thing that's coming and I think it will come quite quickly - I think our industry is facing in the next ten years the biggest change it's ever seen. We're going to see a seismic shift in absolutely everything. Things like subscription models where you can access cars and use them as you need. Deborah, you've got a twenty year old car … you don't drive it that often – maybe in 5 years time or ten years time you probably won't have a car that's not being used that often or is that old. It'll be [more economic more efficient and more reliable] for you to access a fractional ownership model meaning many people using a similar product - and the market's moving that way. It's progressed in the last 20 years and I think the acceleration in the next ten years will be huge.'

DM: 'Does that mean [...] you're getting prepared as a company to sell a lot less cars?'

PW: 'Yes, we'll drive our business to match the market demand. So, there are 35 million cars on the road today. I don't think that's sustainable in terms of the age of the product so I think in the next ten to fifteen years there's enough scope for us to renew the vehicles on the road and it will sustain a healthy business but I think also we need to reshape our business … how we sold cars in the past will need to change in the future - we need to adapt to that.'

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12346238

He also pointed out that the huge majority of delivery vehicles in the UK travel around 50 miles a day, making them ideal contenders for electrification. Well, when I was a kid there was a system: British Railways brought stuff to a depot where it was transferred onto a fleet of electric vehicles for distribution around the city. Now there's a thought.

A quick visit to wikipedia found one of these vehicles for me. It was called by the alliterative but slightly menacing name of the Scammell Scarab.

At the same time of course our milk and bread were delivered to our doors by electric 'floats'.

To sum up

EVs have at last started to come on at a rate to challenge ICE cars.
Production in the UK is being stepped up, and China – already the world's biggest producer - is set to be a big player at the affordable end of the UK market. This will be a challenge to our home grown product.
Battery electric won't be enough on its own to replace all the work done by ICEs.
Hydrogen is coming on as a fuel to go alongside battery-electric especially for heavier duty vehicles, with JCB already demonstrating its use. It was slow starting so it needs to come on very fast if it is to benefit our net zero effort.
One auto industry leader has signalled that current patterns of car production and ownership are set to change. He thinks fewer cars will be produced in future, with vehicles being used more intensively through multi-user, 'fractional ownership', schemes.
Delivery vehicles, which on average travel a low daily mileage, are excellent candidates for electrification.
And beware of unintended consequences. Norway's experience tells us that we need to keep the big picture in mind.

How about me and my cars then? Not electric yet I'm afraid – can't afford it. But, what if I could? Should I go for it – upgrade to an electric?

I drive an old car (11 years) and my annual mileage is quite low*, which makes the answer to that question less obvious than it seems. Jillian Annable of the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds University told Deborah Meaden on the BBC's Big Green Money Show (2nd September2022) that, with very low mileage use, it would probably be better to keep the old one for the following reason:

Using electric power rather than fossil fuel over a small distance would save a proportionally small amount of CO². The amount saved would never cancel out the emissions needed to manufacture a new car for me. Also, if I sell my old car, it is unlikely that the new owner will do a similarly small mileage so its CO² output will go up.

Prof. Annable thinks that at the moment the cut-off is around 7,000 miles a year. More than that, the amount of CO² avoided would justify a change.

I do just about 7k per year. So I'm on the borderline. It's a fast moving scene though, and I feel this won't stay the case for long. For one thing, the second-hand market has yet to take off fully.

(*In my own car that is – I also drive cars belonging to the organisation I volunteer for, for work purposes.)

There's much more to think about though:

When is a person like me going to be able to afford one?

Are there enough charging points and will I have to queue and wait around for ever for my car to charge?

Do electric vehicles catch fire easily?

Are they too heavy for bridges and multi storey car parks?

How is all that energy going to be produced and transmitted to the point of use?

Who will make all the batteries and where will they come from?

All this and more in Me and My Cars Yet Again Part 2, coming soon.

References

Nissan:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nissan-triples-investment-in-electric-vehicle-production-in-the-uk