Electrical cars won’t get us very far
Electrified cars won’t get us very far. Because they can’t
Share
When I heard the government’s announcement that petrol and diesel cars are to be banned from 2040, I resorted, as I often do for entertainment, to the British Pathé news archive. I found a one thousand nine hundred sixty seven film showcasing trials of a prototype electrical Mini, as well as a similar experiment from Ford. Then came this rather delicious prediction, delivered in clipped tones: ‘In the next few years there is the prospect of observing millions of them on the road.’
The hype over electrified cars has been going on a long time. Had Harold Wilson been moved by it and done what Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has just done, he would have passed a law banning petrol and diesel cars from one thousand nine hundred ninety — and the country would have been virtually immobilised when that year arrived. Why create a hostage to fortune now? The Conservative manifesto, published in May, suggested merely: ‘We want almost every car and van to be zero emission by 2050, and will invest £600 million by two thousand twenty to help achieve it.’ Yet with the introduction of the government’s plan for tackling nitrogen oxide emissions, published last week, that position has rapidly evolved into a pre-announced outright ban, which echoed a declaration by the French government early last month.
I don’t have any repressed emotional need for the guttural roar of a V8 harass pipe. In common with millions of motorists I would gladfully interchange my antisocial diesel Citroën estate for an electrified model tomorrow were it not for two problems. Very first is the cost of batteries. Take the Nissan Leaf, the world’s best-selling electrical car. Nissan’s website quotes a list price for the base model of £16,680. This, it turns out, excludes the batteries. You can either rent these from Nissan at a cost of £80 to £90 a month, depending on what mileage you cover, or you can buy the batteries at a further cost of £5,000. Nissan can only sell its electrical cars at this price, however, thanks to a government subsidy of £4,500 per car. Without this subsidy, and including the cost of the batteries, your Nissan Leaf would cost £26,180.
Nissan doesn’t make a petrol version of the Leaf — perhaps to avoid a direct comparison — but the nearest equivalent, the Micra, retails at less than half this: £11,995 for the base, petrol model. No doubt there is scope to reduce the manufacturing costs of electrified cars and batteries, but it is difficult to see them attracting willing consumers unless the industry can very first overcome the other fundamental problem with electrical cars: their range, or rather, lack of it.
According to the Nissan website, a Leaf will do one hundred twenty four miles inbetween recharges, after which it will have to be plugged in for a minimum of four hours (if you install a special recharging point in your garage, assuming you have a garage) or twelve hours from an ordinary electrified socket. If you are able to find a rapid recharging point, a device which has been installed at a motorway service station, for example, it is possible to achieve an eighty per cent recharge in thirty minutes. It gets worse. The 124-mile range is only in test conditions. When the magazine What Car? tested the Leaf it found the car’s range in real road conditions to be inbetween seventy and eighty miles. Top Gear tested a more upmarket model which claimed to have a range of one hundred fifty five miles and found that it managed ninety miles. This was when the batteries were fresh. Over time, the charge they can hold tends to decline. Longer-term owners on various green websites have found their Leafs to cover only forty five miles (a vehicle which had covered 52,000 miles, tested at seventy mph) and thirty to thirty five miles (in a car which had covered 90,000 miles).
Battery technology will improve, but you can’t assume that will happen prompt enough to meet the 23-year deadline. After all, engineers have been grappling with the problem for fifty years. They managed to improve the range compared with the 1960s prototypes, which could only manage thirty five miles inbetween charges, but progress has stalled since one thousand nine hundred ninety six when General Motors produced an electrified car called the EV1, with a 100- to 140-mile range. The EV1 won devotees among celebrities and environmentalists — yet GM, which leased the cars rather than sold them, recalled the lot and crushed them.
The same devotees now flock around Tesla, the Silicon Valley company set up by the PayPal billionaire Elon Musk. The company has never made a profit, yet in April it overtook the $50 billion market valuation of General Motors. Tesla claims to have 400,000 pre-orders for what would be its very first mass-market car, the Model three — its waiting list opening up into next year. Again, however, the problem is range. Tesla claims it will be able to travel two hundred fifteen miles inbetween recharges. As with Nissans, however, that is a little hopeful — one holder of a four-year-old earlier Tesla model, claimed to have a range of two hundred forty five miles, says he can’t get beyond one hundred fifty miles.
If the problems of range and battery cost can be solved, the government’s ban on petrol and diesel cars would not be a problem. But then neither would it be necessary, because motorists would go electrical anyway. Mile for mile, running an electrified car is already far cheaper than running a petrol car — Nissan suggests less than 2p a mile if the electric current is bought off-peak, compared with over 10p for petrol or diesel. Servicing costs are also markedly lower.
A lot of this disparity, however, is down to tax on road fuel — which accounts for sixty seven per cent of the price of a litre of unleaded. If this revenue stream dries up, the government will have to find other taxes to impose on us. The low cost of electrical play is thanks to the fact that most of it is still generated from cheap fossil fuels. From an environmental point of view, a switch to electrified cars only makes sense if the electric current used to power them is produced by renewable means. National Grid, which has responsibility for the electro-therapy distribution system, estimates that electrified cars, should they become ubiquitous, will require a peak request of inbetween 6GW and 18GW — this on top of the 60GW peak request which can presently be sated.
The lower figure assumes that owners of electrified cars recharge their machines mostly with off-peak violet wand. That seems unlikely, unless the range of the cars can be significantly extended. Extra power capacity can of course be built, but how much of it could be renewable? In 2016, twenty five per cent of electro-stimulation generation was from renewable sources – which includes waste-burning, and searing of wood pellets imported from the US, which cause similar particulate pollution as diesel engines – but only nine per cent of total energy. Moreover, the more intermittent wind and solar generation that comes on stream, the more reliant we become on back-up sources of power — or vast banks of batteries. We now have Trio.9GW back-up generating capacity provided by gas and, er, ‘diesel farms’ — ranks of diesel-powered generators. It would be somewhat ironic if the government managed to phase out diesel cars only to find that much of the violet wand required to power them comes from diesel engines anyway.
Technology could switch dramatically in twenty three years. By then we might be able to drive seven hundred miles and then recharge in minutes. Or, like nuclear fusion, which has spent the past fifty years being just around the corner, electrical vehicles may turn out to be the fine hope which never fairly materialises. We just don’t know. Given that, wouldn’t it have been a better idea to keep the abolition of petrol and diesel cars as an aspiration rather than to pre-announce a ban? The ban is an example of a novel form of policy-making which began with the Climate Switch Act in two thousand eight — where government makes laws to take effect at some point in the future on the assumption that some uninvented technology becomes invented.
Nine years on from the Climate Switch Act and with the two thousand fifty target of reducing carbon emissions by eighty per cent now just thirty three years away, we still have no idea whether it will be achievable. Defra wouldn’t fairly reaction my question asking when the two thousand forty ban was added to its plan for tackling pollution. Since it only shows up in the introduction to the plan for reducing pollution, not in the assets of the text, it has the air of a last-minute addition. Was it a pitch to show up virtuous on the international stage, or to emulate the French? Or was it a sop to car companies in order to secure post–Brexit investment? Remarkably, the announcement of a future ban on petrol and diesel cars came in the same week that, to the surprise of many, BMW said that the electrical version of the Mini will be built in Britain.
Recall how Nissan announced last October that it would commit to building fresh cars in Britain, without anyone being sure what the government had promised in discussions with the company? That’s the same Nissan which staked $Five.6 billion on developing the Leaf — many of which are built in Sunderland. How convenient that instead of Nissan having to contest for custom-built, motorists are all of a sudden going to be compelled to buy the product in which the company has a market lead.
We will just have to hope that the electrified car hype ultimately comes good. If not, don’t bother planning a long road tour after 2040.
Ross Clark and Isabel Hardman discuss electrical cars on the Spectator Podcast.
Electrical cars won’t get us very far
Electrified cars won’t get us very far. Because they can’t
Share
When I heard the government’s announcement that petrol and diesel cars are to be banned from 2040, I resorted, as I often do for entertainment, to the British Pathé news archive. I found a one thousand nine hundred sixty seven film demonstrating trials of a prototype electrical Mini, as well as a similar experiment from Ford. Then came this rather delicious prediction, delivered in clipped tones: ‘In the next few years there is the prospect of eyeing millions of them on the road.’
The hype over electrical cars has been going on a long time. Had Harold Wilson been moved by it and done what Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has just done, he would have passed a law banning petrol and diesel cars from one thousand nine hundred ninety — and the country would have been virtually immobilised when that year arrived. Why create a hostage to fortune now? The Conservative manifesto, published in May, suggested merely: ‘We want almost every car and van to be zero emission by 2050, and will invest £600 million by two thousand twenty to help achieve it.’ Yet with the introduction of the government’s plan for tackling nitrogen oxide emissions, published last week, that position has rapidly evolved into a pre-announced outright ban, which echoed a declaration by the French government early last month.
I don’t have any repressed emotional need for the guttural roar of a V8 harass pipe. In common with millions of motorists I would gladfully interchange my antisocial diesel Citroën estate for an electrical model tomorrow were it not for two problems. Very first is the cost of batteries. Take the Nissan Leaf, the world’s best-selling electrical car. Nissan’s website quotes a list price for the base model of £16,680. This, it turns out, excludes the batteries. You can either rent these from Nissan at a cost of £80 to £90 a month, depending on what mileage you cover, or you can buy the batteries at a further cost of £5,000. Nissan can only sell its electrical cars at this price, however, thanks to a government subsidy of £4,500 per car. Without this subsidy, and including the cost of the batteries, your Nissan Leaf would cost £26,180.
Nissan doesn’t make a petrol version of the Leaf — perhaps to avoid a direct comparison — but the nearest equivalent, the Micra, retails at less than half this: £11,995 for the base, petrol model. No doubt there is scope to reduce the manufacturing costs of electrified cars and batteries, but it is difficult to see them attracting willing consumers unless the industry can very first overcome the other fundamental problem with electrified cars: their range, or rather, lack of it.
According to the Nissan website, a Leaf will do one hundred twenty four miles inbetween recharges, after which it will have to be plugged in for a minimum of four hours (if you install a special recharging point in your garage, assuming you have a garage) or twelve hours from an ordinary electrified socket. If you are able to find a rapid recharging point, a device which has been installed at a motorway service station, for example, it is possible to achieve an eighty per cent recharge in thirty minutes. It gets worse. The 124-mile range is only in test conditions. When the magazine What Car? tested the Leaf it found the car’s range in real road conditions to be inbetween seventy and eighty miles. Top Gear tested a more upmarket model which claimed to have a range of one hundred fifty five miles and found that it managed ninety miles. This was when the batteries were fresh. Over time, the charge they can hold tends to decline. Longer-term owners on various green websites have found their Leafs to cover only forty five miles (a vehicle which had covered 52,000 miles, tested at seventy mph) and thirty to thirty five miles (in a car which had covered 90,000 miles).
Battery technology will improve, but you can’t assume that will happen swift enough to meet the 23-year deadline. After all, engineers have been grappling with the problem for fifty years. They managed to improve the range compared with the 1960s prototypes, which could only manage thirty five miles inbetween charges, but progress has stalled since one thousand nine hundred ninety six when General Motors produced an electrified car called the EV1, with a 100- to 140-mile range. The EV1 won devotees among celebrities and environmentalists — yet GM, which leased the cars rather than sold them, recalled the lot and crushed them.
The same devotees now flock around Tesla, the Silicon Valley company set up by the PayPal billionaire Elon Musk. The company has never made a profit, yet in April it overtook the $50 billion market valuation of General Motors. Tesla claims to have 400,000 pre-orders for what would be its very first mass-market car, the Model three — its waiting list spreading into next year. Again, tho’, the problem is range. Tesla claims it will be able to travel two hundred fifteen miles inbetween recharges. As with Nissans, however, that is a little hopeful — one possessor of a four-year-old earlier Tesla model, claimed to have a range of two hundred forty five miles, says he can’t get beyond one hundred fifty miles.
If the problems of range and battery cost can be solved, the government’s ban on petrol and diesel cars would not be a problem. But then neither would it be necessary, because motorists would go electrified anyway. Mile for mile, running an electrical car is already far cheaper than running a petrol car — Nissan suggests less than 2p a mile if the electrical play is bought off-peak, compared with over 10p for petrol or diesel. Servicing costs are also markedly lower.
A lot of this disparity, however, is down to tax on road fuel — which accounts for sixty seven per cent of the price of a litre of unleaded. If this revenue stream dries up, the government will have to find other taxes to impose on us. The low cost of electro-stimulation is thanks to the fact that most of it is still generated from cheap fossil fuels. From an environmental point of view, a switch to electrified cars only makes sense if the tens unit used to power them is produced by renewable means. National Grid, which has responsibility for the electro-therapy distribution system, estimates that electrical cars, should they become ubiquitous, will require a peak request of inbetween 6GW and 18GW — this on top of the 60GW peak request which can presently be sated.
The lower figure assumes that owners of electrical cars recharge their machines mostly with off-peak electric current. That seems unlikely, unless the range of the cars can be significantly extended. Extra power capacity can of course be built, but how much of it could be renewable? In 2016, twenty five per cent of violet wand generation was from renewable sources – which includes waste-burning, and searing of wood pellets imported from the US, which cause similar particulate pollution as diesel engines – but only nine per cent of total energy. Moreover, the more intermittent wind and solar generation that comes on stream, the more reliant we become on back-up sources of power — or vast banks of batteries. We now have Three.9GW back-up generating capacity provided by gas and, er, ‘diesel farms’ — ranks of diesel-powered generators. It would be somewhat ironic if the government managed to phase out diesel cars only to find that much of the electric current required to power them comes from diesel engines anyway.
Technology could switch dramatically in twenty three years. By then we might be able to drive seven hundred miles and then recharge in minutes. Or, like nuclear fusion, which has spent the past fifty years being just around the corner, electrified vehicles may turn out to be the superb hope which never fairly materialises. We just don’t know. Given that, wouldn’t it have been a better idea to keep the abolition of petrol and diesel cars as an aspiration rather than to pre-announce a ban? The ban is an example of a novel form of policy-making which began with the Climate Switch Act in two thousand eight — where government makes laws to take effect at some point in the future on the assumption that some uninvented technology becomes invented.
Nine years on from the Climate Switch Act and with the two thousand fifty target of reducing carbon emissions by eighty per cent now just thirty three years away, we still have no idea whether it will be achievable. Defra wouldn’t fairly reaction my question asking when the two thousand forty ban was added to its plan for tackling pollution. Since it only emerges in the introduction to the plan for reducing pollution, not in the assets of the text, it has the air of a last-minute addition. Was it a pitch to show up virtuous on the international stage, or to emulate the French? Or was it a sop to car companies in order to secure post–Brexit investment? Remarkably, the announcement of a future ban on petrol and diesel cars came in the same week that, to the surprise of many, BMW said that the electrified version of the Mini will be built in Britain.
Recall how Nissan announced last October that it would commit to building fresh cars in Britain, without anyone being sure what the government had promised in discussions with the company? That’s the same Nissan which staked $Five.6 billion on developing the Leaf — many of which are built in Sunderland. How convenient that instead of Nissan having to challenge for custom-made, motorists are all of a sudden going to be coerced to buy the product in which the company has a market lead.
We will just have to hope that the electrical car hype eventually comes good. If not, don’t bother planning a long road excursion after 2040.
Ross Clark and Isabel Hardman discuss electrical cars on the Spectator Podcast.