Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (First sitting)

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[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.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q As the owner and driver of a semi-autonomous plug-in hybrid, I get incredibly frustrated at the lack of a battery-charging network. It strikes me that the hydrogen fuel cell requires the minimum of behavioural change from the consumer. I would fill up my fuel-cell car the same as I would fill up my current car. A hydrogen nozzle would just be another nozzle on the fuel dispenser. Is the development of that technology accelerating? Some countries are way ahead of us, right? On that basis, is your view that the slow uptake of fuel cell vehicles in this country is because of the lack of technology or because of the lack of fuel? If there was a fuelling infrastructure across the UK, would it be the natural uptake for the consumer, given the lack of behavioural change required?

David Wong: As with most technologies, it is a chicken and egg issue. In economic parlance, you would call it a network effect. Should you have hydrogen refuelling stations or vehicles first? Obviously, the gas companies that are building hydrogen refuelling stations will need to be confident that there are cars on the road, but vehicle manufacturers will want to be confident that there are hydrogen refuelling stations so customers can refuel. We are seeing a collaboration between industry and the Government in that regard. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, our vehicle manufacturer members, the British Compressed Gases Association and its gas company members are working hand in hand with the Office for Low Emission Vehicles through the UK H2Mobility consortium to chart a road map. We need to accelerate that collaboration, and the Government need to provide continued support for the building of more hydrogen refuelling stations.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I get that chicken and egg point. For the Committee’s information, I used to be the chairman of the London Hydrogen Partnership, preparing the capital for this economy in the future. The same assumption does not seem to apply to battery electric vehicles. The Government are willing to put in the recharging network for battery electric vehicles, but not, seemingly, for hydrogen.

Denis Naberezhnykh: We should not think of them as competing technologies, because they are not. They are both technologies that electrify decarbonised transport. I do not think it helps to think about the solution from a technology point of view. We should think about what we are trying to achieve, which is reducing CO₂ emissions, and then look at the facts. The fact is that, right now, battery electric vehicle technology is far more market-ready than fuel cell technology, in terms of cost, availability and production capacity. If we are trying to identify measures for accelerating our progress to the 2050 target, we need to pick technologies that we are already confident can achieve the result.

The other point is about infrastructure and fuel. From a fuel and energy perspective, a fuel cell vehicle is far less energy efficient than an electric vehicle because you have to take it through more conversion steps from generating hydrogen to converting the hydrogen to electricity. Very few pathways exist in the world right now for producing a low-emission fuel cell electric vehicle that is anywhere near comparable, in energy efficiency terms, to an electric vehicle.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q I understand that viewpoint. There are obviously large original equipment manufacturers that have made a decision about batteries and are therefore lobbying heavily on that, but some large ones—Toyota and Hyundai—have made a decision to go down the route of fuel cells. Given that the Government should be agnostic on these issues, should they also be agnostic about the regulations in the Bill for taking the power to compel providers of charging points, for instance at motorway service stations? In other words, when they compel someone to provide a fast charging point for a battery, should they at the same time compel them to provide hydrogen refuelling? If they just compel a battery recharging network, it will be a VHS or Betamax situation.

Denis Naberezhnykh: That goes back to my earlier point. We need to take the end use into consideration, and we need to think about which types of vehicles and users are likely to be using electric vehicles and where the infrastructure is required to support them.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q So you think the Government should predict and provide, rather than be agnostic about technology.

Denis Naberezhnykh: Yes. I do not think being agnostic, in the sense of saying, “We don’t care which technology it is. We just need to invest in putting all of it up” is particularly helpful to the industry and the users. We need to recognise that some technology can achieve things that other bits of technology cannot. Some have strengths and weaknesses, and we need to pick out those strengths and weaknesses and emphasise them for implementation in infrastructure appropriately.

[Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

Q I cannot see anything in the Bill that would change who is licenced to drive a vehicle. In terms of future-proofing, one can envisage that people under the age of 17 or people with significant visual impairment could be, to use the current verb, “driving” automated vehicles. Should that future-proofing be provided for in the Bill, Mr Williams, and if so, what insurance issues would there be, say, for a seven-year-old alone in an automated vehicle?

David Williams: A major benefit of autonomous vehicles will be bringing mobility to people who currently do not have that benefit. We are very much looking forward to that. In Flourish—one of the Government-backed consortiums—we have Age UK as one of the critical partners to make sure that we understand the implications. I am not sure whether it needs to be in the Bill, because that establishes the insurance regime among other things. It will be complex for some vehicles. With the pods that UK Autodrive is going to put in Milton Keynes, there will be no way that you can intervene, so I see no reason why somebody in one of those vehicles would need to comply with any test or have any form of licence.

The majority of vehicles in the early stages of market development will probably be ones—for example, a level 4 vehicle—that you can switch from manual to automatic. You then get to the situation where people think, “An autonomous vehicle can bring me home when I’m drunk from a party, so I won’t need a taxi.” My thought is that you will not be able to do that if you have a vehicle that you can switch between the two modes, because you would still be in charge of a vehicle that could be driven manually.

At some point work needs to be done on licensing and testing, but for fully autonomous level 5 vehicles, the insurance aspects are covered in the Bill and we have no concerns there. We want to see the adoption of these vehicles because we think that they will make the roads generally safer and we therefore want them to be available appropriately, as widely as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

As we discovered in the last session, time disappears very quickly. I ask my colleagues on the Committee, and yourselves, the witnesses, to be brief, to the point, sharp and all those things, to try to get through the quite large number of questions we want to ask you in the hour. I apologise: whoever is speaking at 11.25 am will be told to shut up mid-sentence, if necessary, because we have to stop at 11.25 am sharp. [Interruption.] It is unlikely to be me because I can’t tell myself to shut up.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Good morning. Do you think there is too much emphasis in the Bill on the battery as a vector for powering electric cars, as opposed to the hydrogen fuel cell? Should there be equivalence in the Bill from the Government, so that every time they compel, for instance, a motorway service station provider to provide a plug-in charge point, they should also compel them to provide hydrogen?

Quentin Willson: I believe hydrogen is too far away yet to get consumers interested in or excited about it. The costs are always going to be higher as a fuel—it would probably have parity with petrol. I believe for consumers to be interested and to take up wider EV adoption, there has to be a fiscal advantage for them. At the moment, you are asking them for too much concentration. If you put hydrogen as a parallel technology now, I think we might disrupt the really good emphasis we have got on EVs at the moment.

Robert Evans: Our view is that the UK has not been very successful in introducing alternative fuels into the transport sector; we need to be extremely successful with electricity and that will pave the way for the introduction of hydrogen. We need to make this transition phase work successfully. My own organisation is involved in hydrogen fuel cell trial activities. It is a pre-commercial phase. It is a strategic insurance option for the motor industry and the energy sector, where we are looking at the decarbonisation pathway. We need to have hydrogen, but it is going to proceed through strategic niche markets, and that is going to take a short while yet. The Bill does at least outline the same basis for the treatment of hydrogen as it does for electricity in terms of reserving the right to take powers, should that be necessary.

Marcus Stewart: Where technology is today, electric vehicles are progressing rapidly, and the focus should be on electric vehicles at this time, including the impact they have on the system and how people get access. We can take advantage of that. The technology in some respects is leading the legislation, so we should tackle it from that point of view. As an organisation, we are fuel-agnostic, so hydrogen, compressed natural gas and other sources of renewable fuels should be part of the long-term mix, but electric vehicles are happening now and there is more choice for consumers in that area, so we should be dealing with that at this point.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q So all three of you believe that the Government should pick a winner at this stage and put their muscle behind that. Does that not run the risk that in time—as you say, this is a pathway to a fuel cell—we will end up with tonnes of useless copper in the ground within a relatively short space of time as people switch to hydrogen refuelling?

Quentin Willson: I think you can have parallel technologies. The developments that the OEMs—the car manufacturers—are doing on hydrogen and fuel cells, particularly Mercedes, are good, but everyone in the industry concurs that it is possibly 10 years before we get anything like mass production. The speed of electricity is so fast now. The Government should be aware of developments and track them, and they need to understand that there is a parallel technology, but if I was asked to bet on the two horses, I would say that electric is likely to be the mainstream propulsion force over the next 20 years.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q Hydrogen cars are of course electric—it is about the storage of the electricity.

Quentin Willson: Yes.

Robert Evans: That is a very good point. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are electric vehicles—they just have a different, alternative powertrain as part of the configuration—so progress with electric vehicles is an aid to progress with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I do not believe that the Government are picking winners per se. I think that the industry is taking a view that electric vehicles are the future. You see that in all of their announcements. They are bringing these vehicles to market, so the job of the Government is to help facilitate the introduction of that technology for the benefit of motorists.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q It is not the entire industry. Toyota are not doing that.

Robert Evans: Toyota are involved in electric vehicles such as hybrid electric vehicles. They are just not necessarily bringing pure battery electric to the market at the moment.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q The Mirai is a fuel cell car.

Marcus Stewart: Hydrogen has its place. From our point of view, when we look at hydrogen, we see that as a very long-term play. We are talking about it being 20 years, 30 years and beyond when hydrogen can have any impact on the whole energy mix. Also, you have got to get your hydrogen from somewhere.

[Kit Malthouse]

Q This is my final question. There are some countries who disagree with that. The Dutch are spending a lot of money on a hydrogen fuel network across their whole country, as are the Germans.

Robert Evans: The Dutch are not spending as much on hydrogen as they are on electric vehicle infrastructure.

[The Chair]

Can I ask you to speak up just a shade? I am having trouble hearing you.

Robert Evans: The Dutch are spending considerably more on battery electric vehicles than they are on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Governments are spending money on hydrogen fuel cells, but they view it really as a strategic option play. In order to have it available for you in the system, you cannot just start from a standing start. You have to have a level of activity, a level of supply chain development and a level of familiarisation, but that is not to be confused with it being something that will make a significant impact within the next five years, for example. We should track international trends and watch what is going on in projects. We should be supportive, but right now there are some bigger issues to be addressed with electric vehicles. I think we are in good health with hydrogen.