BRIAN CLEGG: Electric cars ARE the future, but the 2030 deadline to ban petrol and diesel cars is near impossible and we could all suffer the pain
There is a site in Cornwall that could one day help to transform Britain’s car industry. But at the moment, that dream is a long way off.
Last week, French minerals giant Imerys announced plans to build Britain’s first lithium mine at a granite site in St Austell.
Chief executive Alessandro Dazza showed himself to be a master of British understatement when he remarked that the UK lags ‘a bit behind’ America and Europe in battery production.
I would go further. We are miles behind – and it’s becoming a serious problem.
Britain has pledged to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and switch to electric vehicles as soon as 2030.
BRIAN CLEGG: Generations of motorists have been accustomed to refuelling in less than five minutes. With today’s EVs, it’s more like 45 minutes on rapid-charge – and up to eight hours on a home charger
Lithium is one of the crucial components in electric-car batteries, along with copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt and graphite.
We need huge quantities of it to meet the 2030 deadline. Currently, most battery production is controlled by China, although the world’s largest known lithium deposits are in Australia and Chile.
If Imerys, in partnership with the start-up British Lithium, can perfect the process of extracting the metal from mica found in Cornish granite, the UK could produce 20,000 tons of lithium a year by the end of the decade – enough for half a million car batteries, as well as the promise of 300 new jobs at the plant.
Yes, it’s a boost for the Government’s plans. But it’s also a stark reminder of how far Britain has to go, and time is fast running out.
I’d love to own an electric vehicle (EV), and not only because their phenomenal acceleration and performance appeal to the boy-racer in me.
There is an urgent need to address climate change, and as a science writer I want to do all I can to reduce my carbon footprint – the carbon dioxide I pump into the atmosphere by daily activities such as driving.
My motor is nine years old with 120,000 miles on the clock, and I’m viewing its next MOT test with trepidation. The vehicle needs replacing. Nothing would please me more than to treat myself to an EV – but it’s not going to happen yet.
First, there’s the question of price. On average, an electric car costs £10,000 more than its petrol equivalent.
At the budget end of the scale, it’s even more than that. For example, I could buy a small MG3 for under £14,000, but the cheapest EV they produce, the MG ZS, is double that.
I regularly make trips of 300 miles or more, which means these electric cars aren’t suitable as their batteries are designed for short journeys and city driving.
A new EV capable of longer distances would set me back about £40,000.
That’s not feasible, both for me and for the great majority of the motoring public. It’s all very well for the Government to insist that after 2030 all new cars will be EVs, with hybrids phased out by 2035. But how are people going to afford it?
There are currently 30 million petrol and diesel vehicles on British roads. If the cost of replacing each one leaps up by an average £10,000, that’s a nationwide increase in spending of £300 billion.
You don’t have to be an economist to realise it’s impossible.
The second big problem is the lack of charging stations. As of April 1 this year, drivers could plug in their vehicles to recharge at just over 40,000 points around the country.
That is an increase of nearly 10,000 on the previous year – but only a little over 7,600 of the total number are rapid chargers. To cope with the predicted surge in new EVs, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders estimates that we will need 2.3 million charging points – many multiples of the number we have now.
Without enough chargers, drivers will spend hours in queues. The threat to productivity is incalculable.
The Department of Transport claimed last year that more than £1.3 billion was allocated to supporting the ‘continued rollout of charge points at homes, businesses and on residential streets’.
All well and good – but there appears to be no coordinated plan. The onus is on individual councils and private businesses.
Some districts are installing chargers in lamp posts, which is an innovative solution. But once all new cars are electric, there will be far more EVs than lamp posts.
Owners with off-street parking will be at an advantage, of course, and many people are already able to charge their cars overnight using equipment connected to their home electricity supply. But about a third of people nationally, and more in the inner cities, don’t have off-street parking, or any designated parking space.
This would be less of a barrier to the great electric switch-over if it were not for the third massive problem – the time it takes to recharge a battery. There will need to be colossal investment into research on more advanced batteries and super-capacitors to enable rapid charging.
Generations of motorists have been accustomed to refuelling in less than five minutes. With today’s EVs, it’s more like 45 minutes on rapid-charge – and up to eight hours on a home charger.
And while many petrol vehicles can comfortably go 500 miles before refuelling, even the best EV batteries can’t come close to that. Worse still, battery performance is affected by cold weather.
Car batteries do not degrade as quickly as the ones in our smartphones, which often lose efficiency within a couple of years.
But they don’t last for ever: current life expectancy is between 100,000 and 200,000 miles. They can be replaced, but that’s a major expense and it’s bound to affect the resale value of EVs.
How robust the second-hand market for electric cars will be, we don’t yet know. Whereas a well-maintained petrol car will still be saleable after ten or even 15 years, EVs haven’t been around long enough for any meaningful comparisons to be made.
That is another factor holding potential buyers back: is it too risky to invest that extra £10,000 in an EV, when it might lose its value as fast as it loses its charge? Little wonder there’s so much scepticism around electric cars.
As the Mail reports today, only a quarter of the British public believe the ban on petrol cars by 2030 is a good idea. Almost half of those polled are concerned about the economic consequences of the ban.
Still others raised my fourth and final worry – that the national grid simply doesn’t have the capacity yet to charge millions of vehicles every day.
We will need to massively increase the output of our power stations, at a time when they are so hard-pressed that the Government recently had to draw up winter contingency plans for nationwide power cuts.
BRIAN CLEGG: Is it too risky to invest that extra £10,000 in an EV, when it might lose its value as fast as it loses its charge?
The EV revolution has to happen. But it cannot be done by plucking a date out of the air. EVs are the future of motoring.
Currently, the UK is not ready for that future, and we’re making no serious effort to prepare.
The cut-off date of 2030 appears to have been set almost at random. It’s wishful thinking.
The Government has to stop pretending, and recognise that it will take a mammoth, concerted effort to overcome the many obstacles – or we will all suffer the cost in a few short years.
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