Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (First sitting)

Matt Western Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 31st October 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Iain Stewart]

Q So that is something you would like this Bill, or another piece of legislation, to do.

Robert Llewellyn: That would be an amazing change, and I think it would ease in a lot of people who have not adopted electric cars: “How do I charge it?” “You just walk up there and it charges.” That would be a big change.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q It is great to be in the company of someone so evangelical about EVs. You have probably seen the ambition for the introduction of electric vehicles and the replacement of petrol and diesel by 2040, and an outright ban by 2050. Do you think we are being ambitious enough compared with other nations, and what it is that other nations are doing that perhaps we could learn from?

Robert Llewellyn: I was very pleased when I heard that announcement. Technology might overtake it. There is a strong argument for that among the evangelical electric vehicle users, from whom I try to stand one step back and be a little more objective. But it is such a hard thing to do. I have seen so many graphs to describe the uptake of new technologies and how this will be what happens with electric vehicles—the S-curve of adoption.

Our emotional relationship with cars is really complicated. It is deeper than our emotional relationship was with landline telephones or how television is viewed—all those things. It is more complex than that; I do not think it is quite as simple. I think you could be more ambitious. You could go with 2030, the technology is advancing so much.

The simple fact is that the car I have had the longest—a Nissan Leaf—has a 24kWh battery. There is now the new Nissan Leaf and the battery pack is exactly the same size and it is a 40kWh battery. That more than doubles the range of my very battered dirty old Nissan Leaf that I drove to the train station today. Sorry, no more piffle.

[Scott Mann]

Q I just wanted to ask briefly about your experience of driving in very rural areas. We have a lot of energy generation around the country happening in rural areas, through solar and wind. I just wanted to know whether there are enough charging points in rural areas and whether we could do something to decouple the national grid in some of those areas, so that some of the farmers producing that energy could effectively provide charging points.

Robert Llewellyn: There is a whole other area of fascinating stuff going on with micro-grids and local community-owned generation. That is something that I am involved with in my village. I think it is actually in many ways easier to have an electric vehicle in a rural area—I live in one—because you have generally got, even if it is a muddy drive or field entrance, somewhere you can park the car off the road. Far more people in a rural area have that ability.

You also generally have a bit more space to install solar panels or wind turbines. There is certainly a lot of that activity happening on a community level, of people generating their own power—they own the assets that do that—and they also install electric car chargers. A farmer local to me who is putting 20kW of solar on his barn roof wants to open a café with car chargers. You would have to drive miles to go there—I do not know why anyone would—though he has some nice cows.