Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2017 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who introduced the debate, for the opportunity to talk about something apart from Brexit for once.

When we talk about this subject in Transport questions, I often intervene. I do not know whether the Minister has noticed, but I sound a slightly sceptical note, simply because I am not wholly convinced of the case for electric cars. The roll-out is slow, the product is expensive and there are a lot of long-term uncertainties, including maintenance—when a car is no longer to be seen by the franchise dealer but goes to the local garage—and supply issues. The hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) alluded to the difficulty of getting the grid and supply of electricity right and ensuring that not everyone in London goes home at 6 o’clock and plugs in electric cars at the same time.

There is also the issue of exactly how the electricity is generated. The Chinese are indeed making lots of electric cars, but they are building a lot of coal-fired power stations as well. Furthermore, a degree of optimism bias exists in the business with regard to where battery technology will take us, so the absence of much consumer confidence means that most people prefer a hybrid car to an electric- only one. There is also a lack of clarity about what success would look like when we are all driving electric cars. The vision was partly sketched by the hon. Member for Wells, but I do not think that we are at all clear.

The one point that I want to make is that at one time the Department used to express itself as being technology-neutral, but—probably under the influence of Liberal Democrat Transport Ministers as much as anything else —we started to talk almost exclusively about electric cars. Many other viable alternatives are around, such as hydrogen cars, which are being developed by Honda and Toyota. I believe that the Metropolitan police are thinking of ordering some, and I have driven in one. Hydrogen cars fuel up much more quickly than electric cars, a charging-point structure is not needed and the costs have been coming down. They are a very viable alternative.

Other alternatives are already around, and they are what I might describe as under-supported—for example, liquefied petroleum gas. I do not want to be a spokesman for petrolheads, but the LPG infrastructure is already there. Manufacturing capacity is already in place at Ellesmere Port, where we make LPG for export. We rarely incentivise it appropriately—someone will get £10 off in tax each year, which is a minimal incentive. There is little benefit to drivers from converting, unless they hang on to the car for a very long time. The duty on LPG, as opposed to straightforward petrol, is uncertain.

There is one big problem with electric cars that fuel cells, or even hydrogen fuel cells, will not cut into effectively. At the moment, if we put a battery big enough into a lorry to drive it and let it do what it has to do, that is basically the payload of the lorry. Lorry drivers will not be driving electric vehicles any time soon, so we need to incentivise them to use the cleanest possible fuel—and that is not diesel.