Electric cars – or electric vehicles?

Expensive electric cars have become a cover for nationalist carbonistas. Bigger electric vehicles should be our priority

There’s a new dogma around in British transport today: we’ve got to be against a third runway at Heathrow and against HS2; but, after cycle lanes, electric cars (ECs) deserve everyone’s support. They’re dear but will get cheaper, it’s said, and the charging infrastructure for them still needs to be built; but to reach Net Zero by 2050, ECs are vital.

It’s a beguiling spin on a technology that spiked has long supported, and which Tesla has made an expensive reality, but a reality nonetheless. However, while the world’s first EC (1884) came out in an era during which technological progress commanded wide assent, the modern EC in Britain has a very different political dynamic about it.

Take, if you must, failed Labour leadership hopeful Emily Thornberry. Apart from a proper plea for tidal power, she insists that, under her, Labour ‘will never vote for a third runway at Heathrow, because it will never meet our environmental tests’. She would press the government ‘relentlessly’ that HS2 must not be built at the expense of other ‘good, green train services’. On the other hand, she is adamant that Labour local authorities should be delivering a ‘massive increase’ in charging points for electric vehicles. And with these policies, Britain should lead the world in what she describes as ‘the globalisation of the green new deal’.

So: we must be against people flying more, and broadly hostile to high-speed rail. But we can be ‘relentlessly’ modern through our advocacy of ECs. And, while relentlessly pursuing those politicians we dislike as virulent nationalists, we can just as relentlessly insist that Britain has a unique responsibility – to show the world how to fix climate change.

Thornberry’s chauvinist hubris is quite something. For her, Britain’s top global priority should be using its diplomatic network and its role in big multilateral bodies to persuade every other nation ‘to cut emissions and create jobs’, and to share with those nations the technology and expertise Britain deploys in this exercise – its world-leading green new deal. Yet the delusion that America and China are dying to be inspired to greenness by British example is today shared by everyone from Boris Johnson to Friends of the Earth.  

British eco-imperialism has quite a history by now. But when it is coupled with policy on ECs, we’re reminded of a special feature of bourgeois debates on transport – their weakness for utopian visions in place of practical innovations.

As Rob Lyons has pointed out, with just 2.3m new cars sold annually, it would take a whole 14 years to restock the entire fleet of cars on UK roads. But even that kind of lengthy overhaul begs two questions. First, wouldn’t new car sales slow in any recession? Second, to get the UK fleet to go all-electric, the eight million used internal combustion engine cars sold every year in Britain would also have to be banned – a draconian measure.

There’s more. In 2018, UK electricity generation was about 333 terawatt hours (TWh), almost none of which went to power ECs. But if we convert the 11.6m tonnes of petrol and 17.1m tonnes of diesel sold to cars, light goods vehicles and motorbikes in 2018, that amounts to 343 TWh. So to electrify Britain’s whole fleet of cars, vans and motorbikes by 2050 means building enough power stations, and enough of a grid, to double, within 30 years, the capacity built up ever since Holborn Viaduct power station, the world’s first, opened in 1882.

That’s a tall order. But for sheer madness on ECs, one can always rely on Extinction Rebellion. Speaking last year about what the greener-than-thou New Scientist is pleased to call ‘the science’ behind this cult, XR political strategist Rupert Read didn’t just want Net Zero advanced from 2050 to 2025. He also murmured that, by the latter date, ‘old cars would have to be permanently taken off the road, and not be replaced by electric models’ (my emphasis).

In the face of today’s War on the Car, then, what realistic policies should we pursue on ECs? First, only way to speed take-up of ECs will be dramatic innovations in the cost of powering and making and running them. That underlines the pre-eminence of solving supply-side problems in technology – especially batteries – over demand-side subsidies and sweeteners for motorists to go electric, or, more recently, coercing them after 2035.

Second, the obsession with electric cars reduces climate to individual lifestyles: in the new, purifying austerity chic, it demands that each driver pay more for moving around in a ‘clean’ manner. But wait! The electrification of UK heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches would eliminate a hefty 7.6m tonnes of diesel. And that would require building just 90 TWh of power generation, plus a nationwide but relatively simple business-to-business charging system to match, in 30 years. Still a stretch, but doable.

Electric HGVs won’t be simple: one must be careful in assessing the Tesla Semi, or John Lewis backing the erection of Siemens overhead power lines from which to send down volts to electric lorries in dedicated special lanes. But Volvo, DAF, Daimler, Hyundai, BYD and Toyota are all making progress in the field and 16,000 electric buses in Shenzhen can’t be all wrong.

Concentrating our energies on electrifying lorries and buses would do much for CO2 emissions, air pollution and road noise. More importantly, focusing innovation in electric vehicles on freight and commuting would make a much more direct improvement to the urgent task of addressing Britain’s productivity malaise than electrifying the multipurpose passenger car will ever do.   

ECs? Bring them on, cheap and fast. But we can’t afford to allow Labour, Boris and the greens to degrade them politically – as a utopian fig-leaf to cover up their backward, authoritarian ‘solutions’ to climate change.