Readers, a disclaimer: you are about to read an article about vehicles from a man who cannot drive. My qualifications: that I grew up worshipping Top Gear, that I flunked my test aged 18, and that my best excuse for not re-taking it was to swerve five years of designated driver duties.
And anyway: not owning a home doesn’t stop me from criticising housing policy, so why should my vehicular shortcomings be a barrier to my condemning the Government’s commitment to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030? The plan was always virtue-signaling at the expense of practicality. But now it looks like an act of unilateral economic disarmament – and helps Beijing far more than Johnny polar bear.
The ban was first announced in 2017 by Michael Gove as Environment Secretary, after his backbench conversion to all things green. Boris Johnson – never knowingly outdone by his old Union playmate – brought the ban forward in 2020 first to 2035, and then to 2030. He was showing a little environmental ankle ahead of COP26.
As with most policies designed to generate good headlines today at the expense of civil service migraines tomorrow, the plan was based on wildly over-optimistic expectations of how our vehicle market could be transformed in a single decade. It relies on a shift in consumer expectations, convincing (and coercing) companies to play ball, and massively increasing charging supply.
Last year, 16.6 per cent of all new cars registered were electric. Impressive stuff, when you consider it was only 0.4 per cent at the end of 2016. Yet to reach the Government’s net zero targets, that will need to be 50 per cent by 2028, and 80 per cent by 2030, when hybrid vehicles will have five more years on the market before being banned too.
Of course, being a small island, the UK has fewer of the problems of ‘range anxiety’ than in the United States: the worry that your car won’t run out of juice before you get to your destination, leaving you brass-rubbing in Lincoln for a day. Most studies suggest that once drivers go electric, they don’t go back. The Government thus hopes we are approaching a point at which switching hits a critical mass.
This is why ministers have recently switched from subsiding the purchase of electric cars to the charging network itself. The assumption is that electric cars will soon come spiraling down in price. Grant Shapps is also mandating that an ever-larger share of vehicles sold each year must be electric. A similar policy has been in place in California since 1990, with mixed success.
But as Brian Clegg has highlighted, an electric Renault is still over £10,000 more than its petrol equivalent. Electric vehicle enthusiasts would argue that that is offset by annual running costs that are hundreds of pounds lower. Yet that is because electric vehicles are currently under-taxed compared to their fossil fuel ancestors, and rely upon you being able to find a charging point in the first place.
The Competition and Markets Authority has suggested that the UK needs around 250,000 public charges by 2030. The Government keenly highlights that the number stood at 37,055 devices by January this year, up from 24,374 in mid-2021. As of last year, new English workplaces and homes are mandated to install charges, which ministers hope will create up to 145,000 more devices each year.
All healthy progress. But at the end of September last year, there were 33.2 million cars on UK roads. Just one new public charger was built for every 53 electric cars sold last year. 25 per cent of households don’t have access to off-street parking, rising to 56 per cent of Londoners. An awful lot of chargers need building – and public charging is twice as expensive as doing it at home.
Readers, I was not always so cynical. As any good child should be, wee William was obsessed with Apollo missions. If America could hit John F. Kennedy’s target of reaching the Moon by the end of the decade, why can’t Britain do the same with Johnson’s dream of, erm, upping electric car sales? Alas: Kennedy’s mission was a product of Cold War One – and Johnson’s folly will be a victim of Cold War Two.
As Ross Clark has pointed out, car manufacturing has slumped across Europe from a peak of 14 million in 2017 to 9.9 million in 2021. Partly, this was a consequence of rising energy costs (so don’t go blaming Brexit). But the disruption of the pandemic also led to a shortage of microchips – obviously rather important for electric vehicles.
Although the United States and Europe have a growing share of the world’s semiconductor market, over 60 per cent of the world’s supply – and over 90 per cent of its most advanced units – are produced in Taiwan. Most are made by one company: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation.
Vladimir Putin – and Andrew Bailey – have done much to make our lives a misery. But as inflation slowly comes down and as alternative sources of oil and gas are sourced, that crisis can be weathered. Yet that is nothing compared to the shock to the global economy of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Even before that dark day, China processes around 80 per cent of the world’s cobalt, controls around a third of the world’s lithium, and is currently trying to corner the market in nickel. Chinese companies also currently control 80 per cent of the battery-making capacity for electric vehicles.
The response of America and the EU has been to ramp up production through huge subsidies, like the Inflation Reduction Act that haunts Jeremy Hunt’s nightmares. Industrial strategy is no longer the dirty phrase that it was in Tory circles. But we have no way of competing with the financial clout of these rival blocs – especially when Rishi Sunak aims to spend as little as possible, and as Tory MPs babble about growth whilst refusing the policies that would generate it.
The collapse of Britishvolt in January showed the sad future of the Government’s electric dreams. Aiming to build a giant battery factory for the coming surge in demand, the start-up was unviable without government intervention. That leaves only one battery plant in Britain – and it’s owned by China. Other electric vehicle start-ups are following Joe Biden’s siren call across the Atlantic.
All this forms part of the broader death of UK car manufacturing. In 2017, UK plants produced over 1.7 million vehicles. Last year, the total was under 780,000. That’s the lowest since 1956, when car ownership was a tenth of what it is now. From once being the world’s second largest car manufacturer, we now struggle to place in the top 20.
Whilst UK energy costs remain among the world’s highest, energy-intensive industries like car manufacturing will naturally gravitate to where costs are cheapest. Until America and Europe get in gear, that means China – the same country that opens a new coal-fired power station every week. Already in January this year, the best-selling car model in the UK was Chinese.
Johnson’s 2030 deadline for ending non-electric car sales was always hopelessly optimistic. In our darkening international environment, it is an act of ludicrous folly. Sunak should drop it, pump as much cash as he can spare into our car industry, and beg Biden and Xi Jinping to get along.
He won’t, obviously. So when you roll off the forecourt in your new electric car in 2032, remember to thank our new overlords in Beijing as you do.