Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (First sitting)

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Q I want to recognise the progress that we have made in this country, but could I press you on the 2050 date, which is 33 years away? A quarter of all of Norway’s vehicles are either electric or hybrid. China has, I think, 517,000 new energy vehicles, as they call them, on the road, and last year there were 800,000 charging points, notwithstanding the fact that it is a larger country. Thirty-three years is quite a long way off. I would like to press both Mr Wong and Mr Naberezhnykh on how we might turbo-charge this, perhaps adding a bit more to the three As that Mr Wong has told us about.

Denis Naberezhnykh: It is important to consider vehicles more broadly in the separate categories of vehicle types and vehicle users. When we think about the 2050 target for almost decarbonising the transport sector, we have to not treat private car owners in the same way as fleet and commercial vehicles. That is missing a little from the Bill at the moment. It focuses on overcoming short-term barriers—the problems and challenges that private car owners experience when attempting to use electric vehicles, such as clarity of data available on charging points, accessibility and the availability across the motorway network. However, what needs to happen to achieve the 2050 target is consideration of a broader picture, and recognition that there are other vehicle types—not just cars, but vans, trucks and buses—so what do we need to do to encourage those? They could create a growing proportion of the vehicle population as vehicle trends change over time anyway.

There is also a danger in comparing the UK situation to that of Norway and China, because the two have taken very different approaches in reaching their success. In Norway they have employed subsidy schemes and taxation schemes that I do not think we would find appropriate in the UK. In China they have taken the approach of simply saying, “You must buy these vehicles under any conditions,” and “You must install these charging points.” Unless we are willing to take steps like that, we have to be much more aware of what the market needs, or what the users need, and then tailor the products to suit those needs. That is where the transport sector needs to pay more attention: to focusing this Bill and future activities not only on targeting the near-term shortcomings, but on what we think might be the challenges in 10, 15 or 20 years from now, and preparing for those.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Burden]

Q Perhaps you could answer a question about the idea of Government action on consumer incentives. Is there more that could be done? What should be the targets?

Quentin Willson: There are simple things like free on-street parking everywhere in the UK for electric vehicles, use of bus lanes and some form of priority. The Americans have had huge success with priority lanes for electric vehicles. We need to think about the stuff that you cannot buy, the things that give people an advantage in city centres if they drive an ultra low emission or electric vehicle.

Robert Evans: The other alternative is low emission zones, and we could do that. London’s low emission zone, followed by an ultra low emission zone, is the direction of travel that a lot of cities would like to take. They want to do it in a staged format, working to national guidance as to what constitutes the standards you would set for access, so that a motorist travelling in the UK can know whether they can gain access to the low emission zone and the ultra low emission zone as they move from city to city. That is a particularly important activity. It is not covered in the scope of this Bill as such, but low and ultra low emission zones are one of the key ways of incentivising the right kind of behaviour. The second-hand market is incredibly important, and it makes those vehicles more accessible.

Company car taxation is a particular favourite that helps to drive electric vehicles into a market where others would not. The lightbulb has gone on with fleets. Previously, they would operate a diesel-only policy. “You never got sacked for buying IBM,” was the traditional term, then, “You never got sacked for buying diesel,” and that has now switched. They can see that the motor industry is not going to support that in the long term and that they need to make a change. They are now embracing what they can see is the future that they need to have in their fleet.

Quentin Willson: Any benefits in kind that the Treasury can keep going must be kept going if possible. The plug-in grant has been really significant.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Q Forgive me; in relation to the cycles that we are talking about in introducing new technology, as you correctly identified, Quentin, the way we are going is towards transport as a service rather than as an item. If that is so, then presumably automatic vehicles will, rather like those vacuum cleaners you get in homes, be able to drive themselves to a car park somewhere, charge themselves up during the downtime and come back out again, at which point we are talking about investing an enormous amount of public money into an infrastructure system that will, within 20 years—you were referring to 2040—be redundant. That is quite a short timescale for large-scale infrastructure investment to be redundant.

Quentin Willson: But that infrastructure investment will also be used for this new breed of autonomous cars, because they will all be plug-in. They will all be electric.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Q But presumably they will be plugging themselves in, rather than the current vehicles that require somebody to get up, pick up a wire and stick it into a vehicle.

Quentin Willson: I do not think that is a given at all. You will still have to have manual interference in that process, unless we can get to the stage where we have automatic wireless charging in the roads. To wait for that to come—

[Tom Tugendhat]

Q I am not sure that is necessarily to come. It is not beyond the wit of man to imagine that a car pulls up into a dock, and a little arm goes out. That is not the structure that we are intending to build right now.

Quentin Willson: That is further away than you think. We would have to have a commonality of autonomous cars, and somebody will own these autonomous cars and there will be charging stations. They will broadly resemble the ones that we are lobbying for now. This vision of the arm that comes out and charges your pod, if you like, is still some way away.

Robert Evans: Inductive charging has been referenced today: charging along the motorway as a form of dynamic inductive charging. Static inductive charging is when you drive over a pad and that pad is then able to charge your vehicle. The groundworks for all the current charge points can potentially be adapted to deploy inductive charging, as that starts to come through into the market. I do not think that is so much of an issue. We do not assume that what we deploy as charge points now will be as is in a 20 or 30-year timeframe; they are going to be updated over time as suits the vehicles coming to market.

Quentin Willson: As we are doing now, in effect.

Robert Evans: As we are doing now, yes.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Q What would you change in the Bill to make sure that that level of infrastructure change is more active?

Robert Evans: I do not think it is necessary to change the Bill, in the sense that as the vehicles start to come forward, the charge point infrastructure suppliers will start to bring forward commercially available inductor charging. At the moment, we talk about people having that in their garage for particular vehicles, but at the moment those are not inductive vehicles, other than, say, for some bus operations and the like. It is early pre-commercial.

[Alan Brown]

Q Is the technology used to operate autonomous vehicles safe and reliable at present?

Quentin Willson: That is a difficult question. Where do we begin? There have been some very successful trials of autonomous vehicles in America and Europe, and they have collectively driven many millions of miles with an infinitesimal amount of accidents. Significantly, they have driven in traffic. In Los Angeles, Nissan, Toyota, Lexus and Volvo have had great success in driving autonomous cars in traffic, which have mixed in successfully.

However, it would not be fair of us to say that there is not a great challenge. Ironically, the challenge comes probably not from autonomous cars themselves but other road users, some of whom may just think, “I’m going to have a go here.” All of the insurance legislation needs to be sorted out, but we need to absolutely understand that there will be a period of some pain. More than that I cannot give you.

Robert Evans: It is a tremendous opportunity for the UK motor industry. The industry has sought to progress and be competitive around new technologies, with low-carbon vehicles being one and connecting and autonomous vehicles being another. We have a series of projects in the UK—with both technology development and now with funding set aside in the Budget for demonstration locations—to be able to work through, understand the issues, and test and understand the state of development of the technology. There is something like 1 million lines of software involved in making a vehicle have the artificial intelligence to be able to progress. It is one thing to go down the motorway at high speed with clear lines; it is completely different to go down Fulham Road at 7 o’clock in the evening on a very busy day. There is a lot of work still to be done.

The good thing about the Bill is that it is the first time that automated vehicles have figured in UK legislation. This is the beginning of a process that makes the UK a potential lead market for the deployment of this technology. It will be hugely beneficial for our motor industry if we are able to be receptive and responsive to what we can all see will deliver huge value societally, in terms of reduced accidents or the ability of people to move when they are older or infirm, or younger people who cannot drive vehicles. There could be huge benefits to society, and this at least starts the process of making the UK ecosystem autonomous vehicle-friendly.

Quentin Willson: And to create literally tens of thousands of jobs, bring billions—that is not an exaggeration—of investment to the UK, and a new product cycle and a new consumption and production. We should be the world leader in this stuff.