The gap between the ambition of the prime minister and his government to put Britain in the lead of the global electric vehicle revolution, and actual policy implementation to produce a net-zero transport sector is widening, according to an industry report.
The report, Plugging the Gap, published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), found that the amount of publicly available recharging infrastructure per electric car on the road is declining not growing.
It found that the financial incentives for private motorists to invest in new zero-emission cars is falling behind our European competitors.
The report also noted that the amount of investment in new gigafactories to produce batteries in Britain to sustain the transition of factories producing internal combustion engine cars to assembling zero-emission vehicles is way behind the level needed if the UK is to have an automotive manufacturing industry in ten years’ time.
The report said that despite the government binding Britain to some of the most aggressive net-zero targets in the world, including the ban of the sale of cars with internal combustion engines from 2030, policy implementation drift is making the UK’s journey looking increasingly uphill.
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While sales of electric cars are booming, the provision of re-charging infrastructure is not. It found that a year ago there was one public charging point for every 16 plug-in cars on the road. That figure is now one for every 32. There are also large regional disparities. The figure is one charger for every ten plug-in cars in London. In the northwest and southwest, the ratios are more than 60 electrified cars for every public chargepoint.
The report also stated that fiscal incentives are behind the boom in zero-emission electric company cars — and why there are so many Teslas around.
Yet only a third of electric car acquisitions are made by private buyers.
That, the report argues, is because government cuts have put Britain behind its European competitors meaning that new plug-in cars are more expensive here than abroad.
Britons get only £1,500 off a new electric car under the price of £32,000. In Germany, motorists get €7,500 (£6,250) off any new electric car rising to €9,000 for cars under €40,000. In France, buyers get €7,000 off electric cars as well as scrappage incentives. Italians get €6,000 off cars under €50,000.
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But nowhere is the gap between Britain and the rest of Europe starker than in industrial manufacturing. While the continent has attracted investment for 25 gigafactories over the next two decades capable of producing enough batteries to power 20 million vehicles a year, investment commitments in Britain stand at enough to produce only 600,000 electric cars a year.
Demanding that the government intervenes to enhance and co-ordinate investment, Mike Hawes, chief executive of the industry trade body, said: “The government has set targets which are amongst the most ambitious in the world. If you are going to achieve them this decade then you are going to need every possible lever.”
Co-launching the report, Andy Palmer, the former boss of Aston Martin Lagonda who heads the Yorkshire-based electric busmaker Switch Mobility, formerly known as Optare, said: “The government’s intentions are right. It is the deployment that is sporadic.”
Analysis: Build the battery factories and carmakers will come
In the past ten years, more than £10 billion has been spent on moving towards an electric vehicle industry in the UK, according to the SMMT. For context, that spending in Britain’s “first electric decade” is less than the total capital expenditure in the past two years by Tesla (Robert Lea writes)..
The Elon Musk-led US company has become the world’s leading electric carmaker but it makes only as many vehicles a year — one million — as all Britain’s auto plants.
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This apparent mismatch between what it takes to be a global zero-emission automotive leader and a country trying to find its way toward a post-combustion engine world is no more acute than the need to have the basic element of an electric car industry: the gigafactories that make the batteries, the single heaviest and most expensive component in an electric vehicle.
According to the SMMT report Plugging the Gap, a manifesto that urges the government to coherently get behind an emerging British electric vehicle industry, the UK thus far has commitments for 41GWh of capacity by 2027 — facilities capable of turning out batteries for 600,000 electric cars a year. That includes the Britishvolt gigafactory facility under construction in Northumberland, but not an apparently stalled project to attract investment to a putative plant at Coventry airport.
In comparison, Europe has commitments for 25 gigafactories with capacity to produce for 1.5TWh (1,500GWh) by 2040, enough to sustain the production of more than 20 million vehicles a year.
According to Andy Palmer, the lack of gigafactories in the UK and few commitments to build them put the industry at a “point of no return” in the zero-emission revolution.
Palmer is a pioneer in the UK electric vehicle industry: the man who brought the Nissan Leaf zero-emission model to production at Sunderland a decade ago and who leads Switch Mobility, the Yorkshire-based electric busmaker formerly known as Optare. Despite a hiccup — his leadership of the ill-starred flotation of Aston Martin Lagonda — Palmer is one of the clearest voices in the industry.
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Citing the need for heavy and expensive batteries to be made close to where cars are assembled, he says the industry is experiencing an inversion from where the car factory was the centre of the supply chain.
“We are going through a change where the tail is wagging the dog — in which the assembly of vehicles is moving towards the battery factories [because] the battery factory is the heaviest point of investment,” he said. “That is why it is important we build gigafactories in the UK.”
