Engine revolution by 2040: How realistic is it?
Motoring experts said the Government’s clean air strategy that aims to ban fresh petrol and diesel vans and cars by two thousand forty could create “more problems than it solves”.
Car industry experts say infrastructure, loss of fuel duty, affordability of electrified cars, lack of charging points, the petite take-up of ultra-low emission cars and strain on the National grid are among the issues that need to be addressed before the scheme is implemented.
Quentin Willson, former presenter of Top Gear, also questioned the cost of the scheme, telling Good Morning Britain the fresh measures would run into trillions.
He said: “You are going to have to get rid of fifteen million diesel cars, you’ll have to switch car factories, no more petrol stations, just think about what that’s going to do.
“I have no problem with the ideology . the practicality of it is, will we in twenty two years have the infrastructure, the lithium-ion batteries that will give us one charge that supplies three hundred miles?”
Electrified cars make up just 4% of the market share presently and it would be a “tall order” to increase this to 200% in twenty three years, said Jim Holder, editorial director of What Car? magazine.
“The car industry has proved time and again that it can hit requesting targets, but at the moment electrified cars are both more expensive and less usable than traditionally-engined ones,” he said.
“The risk is that this announcement creates more problems than it solves”.
The AA described the strategy as “a step in the right direction” but insisted there were “slew of factors that need to be addressed”.
Significant investment will be required to install charging points across the country, including fast-charge points so cars can be topped up within half an hour, according to the hard’s roads policy spokesman Jack Cousens.
He predicted that the National Grid would be under pressure to “cope with a mass switch-on after the evening rush hour”.
Steve Gooding, director of motoring research charity the RAC Foundation, said there is still “a lot to do” to get the take-up of ultra-low emission cars “on the right trajectory” as there are only 100,000 of them on the road out of a car fleet of more than thirty million, Mr Gooding said.
But Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity, which runs a network of electrical vehicle charging points, said switches in the industry would mean such a ban may not be needed.
He said: “The market will hit both governments (the French and British) to this, there won’t be any fresh petrol or diesel cars available to buy anyway by 2040.”
East London gas fitter Frederick Bremer is credited as the man who built the very first petrol-fuelled car in the UK in 1892.
Two years later, he took his still incomplete four-wheel car out onto the roads of Walthamstow, a decade after German Karl Benz invented the world’s very first car powered by a gas combustion engine, a three-wheeled motor car named “Velociped”.
The very first diesel-powered car, the 260D by Mercedes-Benz, didn’t come into production until 1936.
Figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) from earlier this month demonstrate in the year to date, almost 130,000 petrol cars had been registered – more than 50% of the market – compared with more than 100,000 diesel vehicles, or 42.5%.
But as the Government outlines plans for a ban on fresh diesel and petrol cars from 2040, the era of the combustion engine is drawing to a close.