Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 29th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

Well, that would certainly be my wish. It will be for the Minister to confirm or otherwise whether that is the official position. I no longer speak in official terms, but happily endorse the view of my hon. Friend that we should have a UK-wide design and competition. When Gilbert Scott designed the red telephone box, of course he recognised that it was a functional item, as it remains. But he was also determined to make it something of elegance and style—something that, in the words of my hon. Friend, added to the built environment. And so it should be with these charging points.

The third important element of charging points, as well as their accessibility and recognisability, is their affordability. It is absolutely right that we should have a single means by which people can pay. It is preposterous that people might arrive at a charge point, ready to charge their vehicle—perhaps even desperate to do so, if the remarks of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) hold true—and then find that the means by which they have to pay does not fit their expectation and that they need some card or prepayment system. We need to ensure that all charge points conform to a single means of payment, or at least a number of means of payment that suit every circumstance. What we cannot have is different charge points with different technologies, different modes of payment, and a different look and feel. That would be preposterous and I know that the Government will not want anything preposterous to happen.

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way; he is being very generous with his time. As he got the Bill to its current state, did he consider that perhaps we have started the whole basis of the electrification of cars and batteries at the wrong point? The trouble is we are beyond this point already, as we have a Tesla-style battery, a Lexus-style battery and batteries by other manufacturers. Would it not have been more sensible and better if the current network of petrol stations had been places where we could simply change the battery? That could have been done in an instant, or within a minute or two, rather than waiting for this long charge system. I am concerned that the manufacturers have started us off on the wrong basis. Perhaps it is not too late to get us back on track.

[Mr Hayes]

Innovation and change often initially result in a multiplicity of systems. One thinks of the industry that I was once in—the IT industry. It took some while before MS-DOS, and subsequently Windows, emerged. Of course, there are still Apple computers with a different system altogether, but at the birth of the personal computer, all kinds of technologies co-existed. It was a while before standards became certain, adapted and adopted, widely recognised and used. I suspect that the same applies in this area of innovation and change. As the technology beds down, I expect that there will be greater consistency, but the Government must play their part too.

Although I am sure that the market will normalise around a set of standards, the Government can—by what they do both legislatively and in terms of the kind of incentives I mentioned earlier that might be provided to those who are developing charge points such as local authorities—help that process along the way and that will build consumer confidence. Recognisability, affordability and accessibility are critical if people are going to buy electric cars without the uncertainty that the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland described to us. She was a bold early adopter who entered the marketplace with a degree of optimism and hope. I hope that her hope has not been too tarnished by subsequent experience because the trailblazing spirit that she personifies is important if we are to get the momentum we want for this change in the way we drive and what we drive.

I welcome these amendments. As I said at the outset, they reflect sensible scrutiny of important legislation, although of course there is more to be done. In establishing this national infrastructure, I am confident that the same spirit of conciliation, collaboration and co-operation that has characterised our considerations so far will continue.

I begin the end of my remarks where I started—with Ruskin. Ruskin said:

“The training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.”

Further to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), the change that I recommend will not work unless we have people ready to make it work. That requires skills and training that is serviceable to others. It requires building a human infrastructure fit to do the job to make the physical infrastructure as effective as it can be. I know that there will be more consideration of that during the rest of this debate.

In the short time that I have been on the Back Benches, I have learned that one of the virtues is that one does not have to stay for the whole of a debate. To stay longer, in any case, might attract more plaudits, and even I would begin to become embarrassed. In the interests of the whole House, not just my own, I am now going to end this brief contribution, sit a moment longer and then proceed to my dinner, safe in the knowledge that I pass the baton to others still more capable of continuing the debate in the spirit in which it began.

--- Later in debate ---

[Craig Mackinlay]

It looks as though I am bringing up the last of the Back Benchers, Mr Deputy Speaker, and it is a great pleasure to do so. I shall limit my observations to the part of the Bill that deals with autonomous vehicles. To my mind, what gets discussed in the corridors and the Tea Room should probably stay there, but this is an important Bill so I shall break my own rules of discretion to relate to the House an important discussion that took place with the then Minister of State for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes). The subject turned to the personal private transport of the future. The Bill encompasses that brave new world. The basic automation technology is already with us and it is rapidly evolving.

Among other things, the Bill attempts to resolve issues relating to software and insurance, and it is the software part that I would like, perhaps wryly, to comment on this evening. If other Members’ computers are anything like mine, they will know that the “not responding” message features all too commonly. It is followed by frustration on my part as I press ctrl+alt+delete to try to stop the offending application. Just imagine that at 70 mph in a 1 tonne vehicle of the future. Will software updates be regular, perhaps hourly, via an in-built mobile SIM card? The interpretation of the never-seen-before accident involving perhaps an errant sheep, a drunken cyclist and tin of paint falling from a white Transit van on the Thanet Way would need to be fed into the artificial intelligence algorithm that is doing the clever stuff and running the software.

Two Arnold Schwarzenegger films come to mind: “Total Recall” and the “Terminator” series. “Total Recall” featured the automated JohnnyCab and, while some Members scratch their head and try to remember it, I want to compare it with the current flexibility of Uber and the other similar apps that we live with today. As we take the inherently illogical human being behind the wheel out of the equation, I wonder what the point will be in the future of maintaining one’s own vehicle—a vehicle that spends 95% of its time completely unused. I use a free GPS navigation software called Navmii—Google Maps does the same thing—and people who use it will have noticed the red and amber on the screen telling the driver that there is traffic ahead, information which is based on the shared GPS speeds of the software’s myriad users. As a human, I can probably then make a rather sub-optimal decision as to whether to press on or to find an alternative route, and some navigation systems will already suggest an alternative route.

I ask Members to extrapolate things forward a few years to where the potential use of even more refined and extensive data will get us. Assessment could be made of car usage and times of travel, and hold-ups could be minimised through clever routing. With appropriate computer-generated tweaking of travel times, it could be determined for any particular town that x number of vehicles are required, with a bit to spare. That pool of autonomous vehicles could be available 24/7 either on a pay-as-you-go or fixed-price basis via an app, and personal car ownership could become a quaint memory of a bygone era. The physical number of cars would obviously be massively reduced, leading to implications for the car industry. Might the new JohnnyCab—the autonomous private vehicle of the future—be given a new name? Perhaps it could be called the Hayes or Norman after its ministerial fathers. Will domestic conversations of the future involve something like, “I will just finish the vacuuming, then let’s call our personal autonomous vehicle so we can go out.”? I would rather that they go something like this: “I’ll just finish the Hoovering, then let’s call a Hayes so we can go out.”

I will finish with Arnie’s “Terminator” films. Perhaps the end of the human race will come not at the hands of robots connected to Skynet looking to terminate us all in an orgy of violence, nor from a yet-to-be-mutated bacterium or an asteroid strike, but from future JohnnyCabs or Hayes or Norman vehicles, controlled in the cloud by “Taxinet”, deciding that we do not deserve what they do for us and crashing simultaneously into walls and trees. However, it is more likely—this is the serious part—that the crashes could be caused by an aggressive computer virus from a hostile nation. In future, beware those countries where the people simply prefer to drive themselves.

This is a great Bill, and I fully support it.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.