Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why Grant Shapps shouldn’t accelerate the ban on petrol and diesel cars

How fortunate that electric vehicle technology has moved on to the extent that transport secretary Grant Shapps is able to announce he in looking at bringing forward to date on which petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2040 to 2035. Or maybe not. On closer examination, it isn’t battery technology which has advanced – only the political pressure for being seen to act on climate change. It is possible, of course, that some as-yet unknown technology will arrive to make it feasible to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles from 2035. But we are no nearer discovering it yet. Without it, the government is heading for a very big policy failure.

I wrote here about electric cars in August 2017, just after the then environment secretary Michael Gove had announced the 2040 date. At the time it seemed like a leap in the dark, for two reasons: firstly, the very limited range of electric vehicles and secondly their high price. The best-selling electric vehicle in Britain, the Nissan Leaf, was then being quoted by its manufacturers as having a range of 124 miles – although some owners posting on green websites reported their own real-life experiences as being somewhat more disappointing: one reported a range of 45 miles (a vehicle which had covered 52,000 miles, tested at 70 mph) and 30 to 35 miles (in a car which had covered 90,000 miles).

The good news is that Nissan seems to have managed to increase the range of its Leaf. The base model is now quoted as having a range of 168 miles. That is still a long way short of the 800 miles I can do in my nasty Citroen diesel, but at first sight it seems to be going in the right direction.

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