spiked | Who’s afraid of electric vehicles?
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Tuesday 21 July 2009
Who’s afraid of electric vehicles?
Green opposition even to eco-friendly electric cars shows that what environmentalists really
dislike is travel itself.
James Woudhuysen
The latest news on electric vehicles (EVs) looks good.
Toyota has just confirmed that it may build a hybrid variant of its Auris hatchback in Burnaston,
Derbyshire - the first such plant for making petrol-electric vehicles in the EU (1). And at a Frankfurt
conference of FISITA, the International Federation of Automotive Engineering Societies, which I
attended last week, Tsinghua University professor Ouyang Minggao, chief scientist at China’s New
Energy Vehicle Programme, came from China’s top science university in Beijing to give a widely
acclaimed paper outlining China’s ambitious plans for EVs.
In line with this, America’s most famous investor, Warren Buffett, has taken a $230million, 10 per
cent stake in BYD, China’s only integrated batteries-through-to-full-scale-cars manufacturer (2).
Meanwhile, even that old jalopy, New Labour, has promised, in Low Carbon Transport: A Greener
Future, a document newly issued by the Department for Transport (DfT), to publish the tentative
safety, reliability and emissions criteria under which, from 2011, it hopes to allow people to gain
‘help worth in the region of £2,000 to £5,000 per vehicle’ for buying electric and plug-in hybrid cars
(3).
Reasons for sobriety
Worldwide, however, Toyota made a lot fewer than half a million hybrids last year, compared with
an overall addition to the planet’s fleet of passenger and commercial vehicles of more than
70million. Moreover, EV designs stripped of the last vestiges of fossil fuels have only just begun to hit
the road. So there’s a long way to go before hybrids, let alone all-electric vehicles, become the
majority purchase of choice; and still longer to wait before they displace hydrocarbon-powered
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