Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (First sitting)

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

Q I will move on to the mixed use of roadways in the intervening period. Clearly one of the challenges is the new technology coming on to the roadways while the old technology is still using them. Has anybody done any thinking about the regulatory implications of that?

David Williams: We think it is less complicated than it first appears. The Bill means that somebody involved in a road accident does not need to establish which insurance regime is in place; we are going to have the Road Traffic Act, and insurers are going to be dealing with claims in the first instance. Regardless of the fact that it will take a long time for manual vehicles to be replaced with safer vehicles, we also think, from looking at the modelling we are doing, that statistically the roads will become safer. Some people have expressed concerns that manual vehicle insurance might become incredibly expensive as the prices for autonomous vehicles plummet, but the reality is that if, say, 50% of the vehicles on the road are autonomous and much better at avoiding accidents, that makes driving in a manual vehicle safer. We are confident that the way the Bill sets things out means that establishing the claims process will be relatively straightforward, and that roads will become safer.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mr John Hayes)]

Q A couple of things have arisen from what witnesses have said. If I can call you David 1 and David 2, on insurance, David 1 helpfully used the word “compensation”. Presumably the key is to make sure that any injured party enjoys the same circumstances as they do now, and then anything else that happens does so invisibly to them. The injured party in any circumstance essentially gets what they get now; is that right?

David Williams: Absolutely. We are very pleased with the way that discussions developed and the Bill came out, because initially the conversations were that liability would move from RTA motor to products liability. You can imagine a situation where an individual was involved in a little accident—a small dent or something like that—and then, because people are talking about products liability, you get a motor manufacturer’s high-powered lawyers arguing for two years about a little dent, just because they are concerned about creating a precedent. What will now happen is that an insurer will deal with the claim in the first instance, as is the current state of affairs. Yes, there will be circumstances where the motor manufacturers are held responsible, but that can take three or four years; it does not matter.

The other advantage we have is that it will be based on existing legislation, case law and precedent. The rules of negligence and defences available to motor manufacturers are still there unless the Government choose to amend them at a later stage. I really welcome the Bill, because it focuses on continuing to protect road users.

[Mr Hayes]

Q Quite. So, the delayed dispute disadvantage that you described, which might affect the ordinary motorist, pedestrian or whoever is involved in the incident, will effectively be invisible. My next question is to the other David. We have been talking about charging infrastructure. Should we have included powers for refuelling points for other low-carbon infrastructure? That came up in earlier consideration of the Bill. The technology is still developing and emerging. There are several competing low-emission technologies. What do you think about that?

David Wong: Certainly, there should be a positive mix of technologies taken into consideration, particularly if we are looking at co-location within certain infrastructure environments. For example, last month there was the launch of the first co-location of a petrol forecourt and hydrogen refuelling station in Cobham, on the Shell site. That was very much welcomed by industry. Looking at the provisions in the Bill, we could do the same for electric vehicles, with charging points being installed—or co-located, to use the industry parlance—at large petrol forecourts or motorway service stations. One must not forget, in terms of the wider energy mix, that hydrogen may also come into the picture.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Q I want to ask about that specific point. There are obviously at the moment two competing power vectors for electric vehicles—hydrogen and batteries—and the Government are rightly saying that they are agnostic. Much of the Bill is agnostic, with much of the emphasis on battery-charging points. Is there a danger that industry could be compelled to spend a lot of money plastering the country with battery-charging points only to realise that battery vehicles are the equivalent of the fax machine—a temporary technology—and that fuel cells will overtake them within a fairly short period and the infrastructure will become redundant?

David Wong: I think it is fair for the Bill to take into account the reality, which is basically what is proportionate to the number of fuel-cell electric vehicles on the road. The number of fuel-cell electric vehicles on the road is very small but growing. We certainly need consideration of how the two can be factored in, because hydrogen not only is a fuel for transport but could be a medium of energy storage, particularly for the sort of energy that is being generated during off-peak hours and not used. Rather than wasting energy that is being generated and not used, it could be stored in the form of hydrogen and used for various purposes, including transport.

--- Later in debate ---

[Drew Hendry]

For example, electric vehicles being able to connect with hubs at airports, railways, ports and so forth. Is enough thought being given to how the network will develop?

Quentin Willson: We need some intelligence on where these peak points are likely to be. It needs to be spread as widely as possible. Ultimately, the superordinate goal is wireless charging in the roads and as you park. The Bill needs to be aware of that as well. That is a technology that would revolutionise the whole EV market, but it is still some time away. There needs to be a charger in as many places as possible where there is public access—supermarkets, schools, businesses—especially in rural areas.

Marcus Stewart: The evidence we submitted focused on the impact on the electricity system, in terms of capacity and the role of smart charging, and rapid chargers help in that because they help people charge away from peak times. If you have rapid chargers at motorway service stations or supermarkets, where people can charge during the day, rather than charging in the evening at home, that smooths out the impact of the demand for energy. It makes for much more efficient usage of the energy system that we already have and allows us to accommodate more electrical vehicles.

Robert Evans: Charging at train stations is a very good idea, because the vehicle is parked there and they can start to be used for managed charging applications—vehicle to grid and the like. That is a very positive trend. There has been national infrastructure funding for railway stations, and that is an appropriate use. With airports, it depends. For long duration, if you are parked for two weeks while away on holiday, it is less of an issue. The rapid charger becomes a more useful item when you pick up your car, quickly fill with electricity and then move on. So more charge points in motorway service areas is definitely a good thing, and more dwell points that aid intermodal transport, so you take your electric vehicle and get on the train, for example, rather than adding to congestion in a city centre.

[Mr Hayes]

Q I want to ask about the effect of demand on the grid. You dealt with it after I signalled my intention to ask the question, but further to that, does the industry need to think a bit about how it could incentivise people charging at different points? There is a history of this, with Economy 7 and all kinds of other things. Are there ways in which the industry could respond by encouraging people to charge in the way you describe? On the point about the distribution of infrastructure, what about rural areas? The Bill provides powers for the Government to do more. Have we done enough or could we do more to ensure the spread of infrastructure? It is fine to have these things in supermarkets and at motorway service stations, but that does not really help my constituents in Surfleet Seas End or Gedney Drove End, who are a very long way from either. What do you think?

Quentin Willson: Rural charging is an issue that we should look at very hard, because otherwise we will have a disconnected electric community and there will be the connected and the unconnected. Scotland has been extremely good at this—Scottish Enterprise has financed quite a bit of it. We need to look at these rural areas, decide what the best place is and give a concerted route through rural areas where you have rapid chargers so that those communities can run electric cars with the same benefits as people in conurbations.

Marcus Stewart: Going back to the point about how the energy industry can respond, the industry has experience. I am a system operator, but the supply side can offer different tariffs for charging at different times. That is quite a popular approach. You mentioned Economy 7. I know people who have electric vehicles who use the Economy 7 meter to get a cheaper charge by charging their vehicle at a time when the system is under less stress. There are options like that.

Looking further into the future, when you have many more people using electric vehicles, there will be an opportunity for electric vehicles themselves, through some sort of consolidation, to provide services back to the system to enable balancing—“vehicle to grid” is a term that is used. There could be opportunities for suppliers to offer different tariffs to allow people to participate. There are lots of options there. We would say that the technology in the chargers needs to be smart enough to be able to do that. That allows you to optimise the value of the charging system and the car to the consumer, and also the overall cost to the total energy system. If you can optimise that, the total cost will be lower than it would be if you had effectively unabated charging.

Robert Evans: You raised two points. The first was about rural areas. At this stage, infrastructure follows the deployment of vehicles. The more vehicles there are, the more there is a case to deploy electric vehicle infrastructure to support them. In rural areas, we have a situation where you often have to travel a long distance to get to a petrol station, because there are fewer and fewer in those areas. That is an example of how charging your electric vehicle at home and occasionally using public charging makes an electric vehicle quite a virtuous vehicle to drive.

On your point about incentivisation on the grid management side—smart charging—we have a progression: the benefit of smart and managed charging is that it mitigates investments that the distribution network operator has to make in copper in the ground, for example. We need to work out how the incentives travel from the beneficiary—the reduced investment on the part of the DNO—through tariffs to the EV driver so that the EV driver is effectively part of the smart charging proposition and we do not have a situation where the smart charging proposition occurs without them being involved in the loop.

[Mr Hayes]

Q The essence of your point is that the Bill and the debate that it stimulates will encourage innovation and catalyse the demand management tools that you describe.

Robert Evans: The Bill gives the Office for Low Emission Vehicles and other parts of the Government the ability to keep pushing forward discussion and dialogue between the motor industry and the energy sector to ensure that smart charging is part of our future, because it explicitly expresses a desire to regulate should smart charging not proceed. There is a desire to explore this, but the Bill gives the Government powers to help set an agenda that brings the groups together and moves forward the smart charging agenda.

Quentin Willson: Work is being done in America, notably by Tesla, where consumers charge their cars at smart times and then, when the grid is out of balance, that electricity is sold back to the power companies. These millions of electric cars become energy storage devices. This is another very important cycle of change that we need to look at. Any imbalance would be negated. Also, a lot of electricity is produced by renewables—wind and solar. In the UK, 41% of the electricity dragged from the grid on Christmas day was from renewables.

[Rob Marris]

Q If, over the next five years, 10% of new vehicles were electric and each of them, on average, did 10,000 km a year, 10,000,000 km per year would be driven in electric vehicles. This is a question for Mr Stewart. What is that as a percentage of UK electricity generation at the moment? You may not be able to reply today, but perhaps you will tell us. I am a bit worried that you will encourage all these electric vehicles and then the grid falls over, so I need to get some idea of proportionality.

Marcus Stewart: I will give you an example. If you have 1 million electric vehicles—you don’t need to worry too much about how many miles they are doing; when they are charging is what is really important, because that is what impacts on the supply and demand balance—and you charge them on a 7 kW charger, in theory that could give you 7 GW of demand, and 7 GW is two and a bit very large nuclear power stations.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[The Chair]

Mr Baker, I fear we are now running out of time and so cannot get you in. May I thank our three witnesses for their extremely useful and interesting evidence? I am sure it will help to inform Committee members better in their consideration of the Bill later this week.