Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (First sitting)

Alan Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Baker]

Q I think that you just hit on the nub of the matter. A board director has major capital investments to protect, which means that they are inclined to stay within trammels once a technology is established. That is very much the point that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire has been making: there is a danger that we could end up choosing the wrong technology because a whole system of incentives sets up people to stick with electric.

Quentin Willson: The brutal fact of the matter is that getting hydrogen from point A to point B requires pipework. You can have static hydrogen stations that manufacture it, but they will be the size of shipping containers. If you look down the road, creating infrastructure and points, keeping it cheap and making it not a by-product of refining chlorine are all barriers to entry that are much greater than for electrification, which is simple and understandable; it is a currency that we are familiar with now, and we have the electric network. These are the major barriers to hydrogen uptake.

Robert Evans: To follow up on that point, Innovate UK and the Advanced Propulsion Centre are funding research and development projects involving hydrogen fuel cells, and they have done so throughout the period of the low-carbon vehicle innovation platform. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles recently put forward funding for both hydrogen stations and vehicles in deployment.

I think the challenge at the moment is that you could put a very large amount of money on the table and say, “Here’s the money; will you bring the vehicles?”, but the supply of vehicles is very limited. Quantities are still small, as has been explained, and they are very expensive, so the car industry is not looking to flood the market with these vehicles. What we are doing in the UK is being ready for the time when the vehicles will come in larger volumes. We will have a receptive market, and we have infrastructure here in London. What London has done is really positive progress that is viewed as a beacon for how the rest of the UK could be ready to deploy hydrogen fuel cell vehicles when they are ready and cost-effective, and when the supply comes to the UK.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Q I have a few questions from a pre-selected list. It is probably best to ask about electric charging, to follow on from the discussion. The Government say that electric charging infrastructure makes more sense just now, and that hydrogen is still a wee way off. Can the panel advise what has been learnt today about the required structure of the charging network needed? Will the Bill and the current regime ensure that there will be adequate numbers of charging points in each part of the country?

On Second Reading we heard about the gathering of statistics on the current variance in the number of charging points. Orkney, for example, has many more charging points than some big towns in England. Also, is there a need for a uniform way to access charging points? Is the legislation as proposed sufficient for that? I rolled quite a few questions into one.

[The Chair]

I am sure that our panel will handle it. You do not all have to answer everything.

Robert Evans: I am happy to make a start. The first thing to say is that the UK Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment Association and the industry support the progress of the Bill and believe that it is an appropriate set of powers for the Government to seek. As the industry views it, the Bill effectively says that the deployment of electric vehicle infrastructure into the market is progressing. The market is working, and it is likely to deliver the solutions for motorists to access those charge points easily, and for those charge points to become a sustainable asset on which businesses can be built. What the Bill recognises is that there is a stage by which the Government will step away from some of the seeding activities that they have done, in terms of creating different schemes such as Plugged-in Places, national infrastructure programmes and funding that it has put in, and let the market progress.

The Bill gives the Government an insurance policy, which is that they can act if the market does not deliver in any particular important aspect that starts to stall the uptake of electric vehicles. The view is that the market is progressing well, and these are reserve powers that the Government might wish to take later. Therein will lie the detail about what the particular nub of a problem might be on which the Government will need to intervene. At the moment we have 11,000 charge points in the UK; we have a lot of private sector finance investment interested in investing in the commercial operation of charge point networks and the further deployment of charge points. That is to be commended. At this stage the Government just need to have this insurance policy in the Bill so that they can act should they need to, but they should expect that the market will deliver.

Quentin Willson: The critical thing is the availability of rapid chargers. Rapid chargers are the game changer. You can charge your car within 30 minutes to 80% of its battery life. Therefore, you can do multiple charges in a day, bringing the feasible range from this notional 130 miles for a Nissan LEAF to as much as 300 miles. I did a journey from Birmingham to Milton Keynes and back, charged twice at a rapid charger and arrived at Milton Keynes with 90 miles still on my battery range. So the Bill must make sure that these rapid chargers are rolled out much more and we see many more at motorway service stations and at key points within cities, because they will enable people to believe that their range is much wider than they are led to believe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Tugendhat]

Q What would you change in the Bill to make sure that that level of infrastructure change is more active?

Robert Evans: I do not think it is necessary to change the Bill, in the sense that as the vehicles start to come forward, the charge point infrastructure suppliers will start to bring forward commercially available inductor charging. At the moment, we talk about people having that in their garage for particular vehicles, but at the moment those are not inductive vehicles, other than, say, for some bus operations and the like. It is early pre-commercial.

[Alan Brown]

Q Is the technology used to operate autonomous vehicles safe and reliable at present?

Quentin Willson: That is a difficult question. Where do we begin? There have been some very successful trials of autonomous vehicles in America and Europe, and they have collectively driven many millions of miles with an infinitesimal amount of accidents. Significantly, they have driven in traffic. In Los Angeles, Nissan, Toyota, Lexus and Volvo have had great success in driving autonomous cars in traffic, which have mixed in successfully.

However, it would not be fair of us to say that there is not a great challenge. Ironically, the challenge comes probably not from autonomous cars themselves but other road users, some of whom may just think, “I’m going to have a go here.” All of the insurance legislation needs to be sorted out, but we need to absolutely understand that there will be a period of some pain. More than that I cannot give you.

Robert Evans: It is a tremendous opportunity for the UK motor industry. The industry has sought to progress and be competitive around new technologies, with low-carbon vehicles being one and connecting and autonomous vehicles being another. We have a series of projects in the UK—with both technology development and now with funding set aside in the Budget for demonstration locations—to be able to work through, understand the issues, and test and understand the state of development of the technology. There is something like 1 million lines of software involved in making a vehicle have the artificial intelligence to be able to progress. It is one thing to go down the motorway at high speed with clear lines; it is completely different to go down Fulham Road at 7 o’clock in the evening on a very busy day. There is a lot of work still to be done.

The good thing about the Bill is that it is the first time that automated vehicles have figured in UK legislation. This is the beginning of a process that makes the UK a potential lead market for the deployment of this technology. It will be hugely beneficial for our motor industry if we are able to be receptive and responsive to what we can all see will deliver huge value societally, in terms of reduced accidents or the ability of people to move when they are older or infirm, or younger people who cannot drive vehicles. There could be huge benefits to society, and this at least starts the process of making the UK ecosystem autonomous vehicle-friendly.

Quentin Willson: And to create literally tens of thousands of jobs, bring billions—that is not an exaggeration—of investment to the UK, and a new product cycle and a new consumption and production. We should be the world leader in this stuff.

[Alan Brown]

Q On roll-out and testing, is further testing suggested? One of the suggestions made on Second Reading was that the vehicles have not been tested in snow conditions yet, and there was a suggestion that different weather variables may need to be looked at. Robert gave the example of a busy Fulham Road at 7 o’clock at night. One example I gave on Second Reading was the single-track roads in Scotland, on which, if two vehicles drive head-on, somebody has to make the decision to back up to the nearest layby. Are there things like that that still need to be robustly looked at?

Quentin Willson: I am afraid I am not an expert in this autonomous technology, but there will have to be algorithms that can solve that and there will certainly have to be a testing regime.

Robert Evans: For connected and autonomous vehicles, there is now funding set aside for a series of demonstrations of different types. Those will reflect the real world as well as the virtual world in which the technology will be speedily developed before being put out into controlled demonstration environments and, ultimately, on to the open road. The UK is well placed, with activities and the announcements in the Budget, to do the preparatory work and the learning to make the UK a receptive environment for these vehicles to be deployed in and to deal with exactly the type of use cases you referenced.

Quentin Willson: However, it is possible to say that with autonomous vehicles you might even reduce the amount of accidents in the UK, because it is 90% human error. The 2,000 fatalities we have in the UK on our roads a year have plateaued and are due entirely to people making mistakes. If we put this technology in, that death toll could conceivably come down significantly.

[Mr Hayes]

Q It is good to hear you make the case for us being pre-eminent in this field. The Government are certainly determined to make this country a world leader. Returning to the issue of infrastructure, what are your views on on-street charging infrastructure? We spoke a bit about petrol stations, service stations, supermarkets and so on. Other places—Paris is a good example—have done quite a lot of work on spreading on-street charging infrastructure quite evenly across the city. What more could Government do on that?

In that spirit, what about the design of these charging points? Governments have not been entirely hopeless in past decades on that—one thinks of the Gilbert Scott telephone box, the Belisha beacon or the post box. In recent years it has perhaps been not so good, but we can do good things. Should we think more about the design of the charging points and what they look like, to make them instantly recognisable, iconic and widely respected and admired as such?

Quentin Willson: There is a powerful argument for making them iconic as part of this new and very important cycle of change that will make our lives better. In Bordeaux, they have a proliferation of on-street charges because they have a fleet of little electric cars that you can just go up and hire for the day, the hour or the quarter of an hour and then return to a little charging pod. It is a huge investment, but it works extremely well, and of course it limits the amount of traffic coming into cities because those cars are available. It would benefit us hugely if we started to think about urban car club schemes that are just electric cars and the proliferation, as with the Boris bikes, of a recognisable charging pole on the street. It would also help all those people who do not have parking to charge their cars.

Robert Evans: Members of the association take the view that they can produce an iconic charge point that is recognisable as their own brand. They have been in that business and have tried to make the best use of their equipment and make it as attractive as it can be. In the UK, we have quite a dynamic market for the supply of infrastructure. We now are learning that the major US supplier, ChargePoint, is looking to bring its technology into the UK market. We have had BluePoint, which is the Bolloré scheme, and others. They will bring what they view as the norm in their markets into our markets.

Quentin Willson: We could have a competition, could we not?

Robert Evans: We could, but I think there would be a resistance among the industry to effectively move to one standard shape of pole. You have a post and you plug into it, but the innovation is occurring in the way you access it. That is more about people using smartphones to input information and say, for example, “I want to charge for this period. I’m prepared to pay this. I might be prepared, if you incentivise me, to allow my vehicle to have managed charging, as long as it has so many kilowatt-hours in it by the time I come back.” That type of interface is where there will be a lot of innovation. The poles themselves work to pretty standard methodologies, and motorists are used to using them. The clever bit in the design will be about the user interface on the smartphone app that enables smart and managed charging.