Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (First sitting)

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Drew Hendry]

Q Very briefly, in terms of public confidence and liability issues, you mentioned safety. Do you feel the Bill should address public confidence in the maintenance of vehicles? How will that be conducted across the different standards?

Steve Gooding: We need the construction of new standards for whether a vehicle is judged road-worthy in the first place, to the subsequent—as we call it—MOT system, which continues to verify over time that that road-worthiness is being maintained. We need both systems to cope with the new technology.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Q I am conscious that cars can be converted to use LPG if they are petrol. It seems to me that potentially they could be converted to use hydrogen, as well. Mr Wong, is that something that the industry has considered?

David Wong: It is certainly in the mix. Cars today are being retrofitted as dual fuel vehicles, so, hydrogen in an internal combustion engine. For example, a company in the north-west called ULEMCo is doing that with a good degree of success. It is important to look at the outcome from such a conversion. Will it help to achieve the targets? Will it be below 75 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre? The jury is still out on that, to be honest. We need to see whether technologies can help over a period of time to decarbonise road transport, not simply the conversion of any sort of technologies or even the hybridisation of any of these fuels.

[Mr Baker]

Q To be clear, can you explain why we cannot get carbon below 75 grams when we are burning hydrogen? If we burn hydrogen, we get water. Where does the carbon come in?

David Wong: For a fuel cell electric vehicle, you get zero tail pipe emission, but for a dual fuel vehicle, it depends on the dual fuel.

[Mr Baker]

Q Okay, I see the point you are making. What if one were to convert a car to run exclusively on hydrogen? Would that achieve zero emissions?

David Wong: Yes, if it is a fuel cell electric vehicle, basically you just get water vapour.

[Mr Baker]

Q I did not mean fuel cell, but an internal combustion engine running exclusively on hydrogen. Why could you not do that?

David Wong: You can probably use the fuel cell as a range extender for electric vehicles, but to have an internal combustion engine that basically burns fossil fuels and then you have hydrogen—

[Mr Baker]

Q I don’t want to labour this too much because I have other questions. The point I am making—

[The Chair]

Please don’t labour the point too much, Mr Baker. We have five minutes left.

[Mr Baker]

Q The point I am making is that a car with an internal combustion engine could be converted to run on hydrogen as an internal combustion engine, could it not?

David Wong: In principle, yes, but I hesitate to give a straightforward answer because we do not describe a hydrogen vehicle as an internal combustion engine. That is the parlance we use for combustion, which, at the moment, is petrol or diesel. We like to frame hydrogen in the context of clean energy.

[Mr Baker]

Q Okay. I’ll move on from hydrogen in the interests of time. My other point is security. I am a former software engineer. I have got two points about software. First, have you considered cybersecurity and the risks of cars being hacked and people finding themselves driving to destinations they did not intend to go to?

David Williams: Absolutely. In the Flourish consortium there is a specific focus on cyber. Also, in the Venturer consortium, BAE Systems is involved and does military-grade cybersecurity. We should be worried about cyber risks, but we should be worried about those generally, not just with regard to vehicles. There are ways to make things safer. It will be a key element of the communication programme and the technological development of these vehicles in making sure that they are as safe as they can be.

[Mr Baker]

Q So is there a provision missing from the Bill in relation to cybersecurity?

David Williams: The only area that we think needs further debate is whether insurers will pay for claims in the first instance where there is an incident, but what if there was a massive terrorist incident that caused a problem with a huge number of vehicles globally? That may need separate consideration. The problem is, even in saying that, it is almost scaremongering about that risk. Clearly, we would rather focus on protecting vehicles. You are used to virus protection and those sorts of things. We are talking about new technology. We need to get to the same state where people have confidence.

Steve Gooding: The Bill recognises the risk of tampering, which is a version of cyber-hacking. The construction and use regime, which says a vehicle is roadworthy, must take into account that it is roadworthy and protected from the risk of cybercrime.

[Mr Baker]

Q Finally, on tampering, the point I made on Second Reading was that that section of the Bill that can exclude or limit an insurance liability after alterations to the vehicle’s operating system, or a failure to install software updates to the vehicle’s operating system, is a drafting point. The provision should simply state “software” rather than “operating system”, because there is firmware and there will be application software. You are nodding, Mr Naberezhnykh. Can I ask you to put on the record whether that is correct and the Bill should be drafted in terms of software and not only the operating system?

Denis Naberezhnykh: My concern is that, were it to be tested in court, the Bill would not achieve its intended aim if, for example, application software had been tampered with or firmware had not been updated. I appreciate it is a technical point.

Steve Gooding: I think you need to ensure that the breadth that you are describing is covered. I suspect that is a question you need to put to the drafting counsel rather than us.

[Mr Baker]

Q You were nodding, Mr Naberezhnykh.

[The Chair]

Steve, we had better move on, as we have only three or four minutes left.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Thank you, Chair. If the Government were to pick a winner at this stage, do we not run the risk of skewing future research and development investment by saying to developers, “The traditional battery is the route we are going down”? If hydrogen is 10 years away, we run the risk of it becoming further away because we are not putting the investment into it now to ensure that technology is comparable in the future.

Quentin Willson: That is a hard question to answer. If you look at the price of the Toyota Mirai, which is a hydrogen car, it is £60,000. Volume and economies of scale make it an enormously difficult task to get that to a consumer level of £15,000. I think the OEMs will find it very tough to find this fuel technology at a cheap enough price point to make it viable. In terms of commercial vehicles and buses, I think it has a greater resonance, but in terms of consumers, if I were sitting at the board table of BMW, Mercedes, Audi or VW, I would be looking at electrification rather than putting all my eggs on hydrogen.

[Mr Baker]

Q I think that you just hit on the nub of the matter. A board director has major capital investments to protect, which means that they are inclined to stay within trammels once a technology is established. That is very much the point that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire has been making: there is a danger that we could end up choosing the wrong technology because a whole system of incentives sets up people to stick with electric.

Quentin Willson: The brutal fact of the matter is that getting hydrogen from point A to point B requires pipework. You can have static hydrogen stations that manufacture it, but they will be the size of shipping containers. If you look down the road, creating infrastructure and points, keeping it cheap and making it not a by-product of refining chlorine are all barriers to entry that are much greater than for electrification, which is simple and understandable; it is a currency that we are familiar with now, and we have the electric network. These are the major barriers to hydrogen uptake.

Robert Evans: To follow up on that point, Innovate UK and the Advanced Propulsion Centre are funding research and development projects involving hydrogen fuel cells, and they have done so throughout the period of the low-carbon vehicle innovation platform. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles recently put forward funding for both hydrogen stations and vehicles in deployment.

I think the challenge at the moment is that you could put a very large amount of money on the table and say, “Here’s the money; will you bring the vehicles?”, but the supply of vehicles is very limited. Quantities are still small, as has been explained, and they are very expensive, so the car industry is not looking to flood the market with these vehicles. What we are doing in the UK is being ready for the time when the vehicles will come in larger volumes. We will have a receptive market, and we have infrastructure here in London. What London has done is really positive progress that is viewed as a beacon for how the rest of the UK could be ready to deploy hydrogen fuel cell vehicles when they are ready and cost-effective, and when the supply comes to the UK.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Q I have a few questions from a pre-selected list. It is probably best to ask about electric charging, to follow on from the discussion. The Government say that electric charging infrastructure makes more sense just now, and that hydrogen is still a wee way off. Can the panel advise what has been learnt today about the required structure of the charging network needed? Will the Bill and the current regime ensure that there will be adequate numbers of charging points in each part of the country?

On Second Reading we heard about the gathering of statistics on the current variance in the number of charging points. Orkney, for example, has many more charging points than some big towns in England. Also, is there a need for a uniform way to access charging points? Is the legislation as proposed sufficient for that? I rolled quite a few questions into one.