Delusional Britain will soon be even more at odds with the EU
Ben Marlow
5 min read
New petrol and diesel cars face the scrapheap by 2030 under net zero rules
It was the moment that the entire car industry – and the large majority of drivers – had been dreading: confirmation that a proposed ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030 would go ahead as planned.
Last October’s announcement, from the then transport secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan, is a central plank of the Government’s ambitions of hitting net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Less than six months later, however, and the policy is in danger of coming apart at the seams after Brussels heavily watered down its restrictions amid growing opposition from Germany’s big carmakers.
With the European Union left fiercely backpedaling, there is little hope of the UK’s position holding.
It probably won’t be this Government that bites the bullet, but ultimately the deadline will have to be moved, probably back to 2035 so it is in line with other Western countries.
This is something that should be welcomed, and not because electrification is a terrible idea. On the contrary, the shift to electric cars has to happen, and indeed is already occurring at pace.
Broadly speaking, that is a good thing. Despite legitimate concerns about the carbon intensity of manufacturing an electric car, multiple studies show that they are considerably cleaner than a petrol or diesel equivalent over the typical lifetime of the car.
In countries such as Norway, which generates almost all its electricity from renewable hydropower, the break-even point would come after just 8,400 miles, according to a Reuters study from 2021.
But even where the power comes from a coal-fired grid as with China or Poland, an electric car still trumps the more traditional alternatives – it just takes considerably longer.
Yet the simple truth is that the UK is not even close to being ready to switch over in the desperately short time it has been given because not enough has been done to prepare.
It is pure fantasy to think that in just seven years, Britain will have phased out new petrol and diesel models and be in a position to support a largely electrified fleet.
As senior car figures have pointed out, seven years is nothing in carmaking terms – it takes roughly that long to bring a new model to market.
Ministers have completely under-estimated the scale of the challenge facing society and the car industry, imposing a strict target without any thought to whether it can realistically be met.
As a consequence, on every single key measure – whether it is charging points, battery factories or the energy grid itself – we are way behind.
The site in Blyth, Northumberland where Britishvolt had plans to build a gigafactory to make batteries - Owen Humphreys/PA Wire
On chargers, the Government’s favourite retort is that a driver on a UK A-road or motorway is never more than 25 miles from a rapid charging point.
The ratio of chargers to cars has worsened from one per 16 cars in 2020 to one per 30 cars in 2022, while faster chargers account for just a fifth of the network and are being rolled out more slowly.
Meanwhile, in some major cities, a third of all chargers are broken. The network simply hasn’t kept pace with sales growth.
The same can be said for batteries.
Last month the boss of Vauxhall parent Stellantis, which has major manufacturing sites in Ellesmere Port and Luton, warned that unless the UK urgently builds the battery factories required to feed the major car plants, “the market will be in trouble”.
His comments echoed that of a top Nissan executive, who said: “The UK is becoming more challenging as a manufacturing footprint.” While Britain has just one operational gigafactory, China has built more than 100.
There are parts of London where it is impossible to build new homes because there simply isn’t the capacity to support them.
The grid needs new connections, more pylons, underground copper cables, and interconnectors, or the threat of outages will become a reality once it is overloaded with electric cars.
Unless all of this catches up, then the cost to the economy doesn’t bear thinking about.
The UK risks being left with a vast fleet of electric cars rusting on driveways and residential streets up and down the country – that’s if anyone can afford them in the first place of course.
There are other costs in failing to narrow the gap too.
Manufacturers can hardly escape blame – they were desperately late to the party and are now scrambling to catch up with regulation, but unless the infrastructure and supply chains are put in place, the big carmakers will decide it is more economical to be elsewhere, undermining the quest for electrification even further.
This is already happening – BMW-owned Mini has already chosen to produce electric models in China, where batteries are easier to come by, rather than at its Oxford factory, and there are fears that Tata Motors, which owns Jaguar Land Rover, will choose Spain over the UK as a base for its first European battery plant.
The year 2030 was always an arbitrary deadline anyway – dreamt up with seemingly little thought for the consequences by Boris Johnson in a bid to burnish his green credentials.
As a result, Britain risks being left at an increasing disadvantage to the rest of the developed world. Ministers need to rethink this needless act of self-sabotage before it is too late.
