Electric cars: how soon will we be taking the green road?

Published on 28 August, 2021

Overview

On January 1, 2030 a quiet revolution will take place on Irish roads. From that date, if all goes to plan, the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be outlawed.

By that time, the Government hopes that there will be almost one million electric vehicles on Irish roads.

It will be a quiet revolution because these cars will make hardly any noise as they gently purr around suburbs and along country roads.

When I sat in a new Volkswagen ID.4 this week for a test run, it was hard to know if the engine was actually on when the gleaming white car was stationary. This is a vehicle without audible ignition. There are no gears, no oil and few moving parts.

Moving away from the pavement, the car was noiseless, and it was only when I picked up speed that I could hear the faint sound of wheels beneath me. It is an unusual, eerie sound, comparable to an aircraft taxiing towards a runway.

The Government has put a heavy emphasis on the great 2030 switchover in the battle to tackle climate change and meet our emissions targets.

Plenty of sceptics believe that the target of almost one million electric cars on the roads in less than a decade is overly optimistic.

There is also a belief in environmental circles that simply replacing every petrol and diesel car with an equivalent electric vehicle is not the correct response, and will not tackle age-old transport problems such as congestion.

There are also fears that heavy subsidies of over €10,000 on a new electric are going largely to the affluent middle classes.

But whatever the reservations, there are also signs that the revolution is already happening — and the biggest transformation in motoring technology since the time of Henry Ford may occur faster than most drivers had expected.

Brian Caulfield, associate professor at the Centre for Transport Research at Trinity College Dublin, has doubts about the way electrification is being planned, but he also believes it has to happen fast.

“Going forward, the diesel and gas guzzlers will be gone,” he says. “We will have to electrify and there will be a little bit of inconvenience. The planet is on fire and we have to do it.”

A new book, A Brief History of Motion by the British journalist Tom Standage, sets out the global figures showing how cars contribute to the climate crisis.

Transport accounts for 24pc of fossil fuel emissions. Road vehicles are responsible for 17pc of the global total. Of those emissions, about a third are produced by heavy-duty, mostly diesel-powered vehicles such as trucks and buses and two-thirds by light-duty, mostly petrol-powered vehicles such as cars and vans.

Are sales of electric cars about to follow the sharply rising contours of an S-curve — the pattern of mass consumer goods when they achieve massive growth? In this scenario, the upward slope of sales is slow at first, attracting niche buyers, then things suddenly take off.

Figures from the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (Simi) for July show that we may be reaching a tipping point. Cars with some kind of electric power source will soon overtake diesel vehicles coming out of showrooms.

According to Simi, pure electric, plug-ins and hybrids now account for nearly a third of new car sales. They have a combined market share of just over 30pc, with hybrid sales reaching 16.6pc, electric 6.90pc and plug-ins 7pc. Their combined total is only 4pc below diesel (34.4pc) and 2pc below petrol (32.62pc).

The electric car revolution of the coming decade is likely to happen in a number of stages.

In the first, new EVs are already becoming popular in affluent areas. In the coming years, it is hoped that the cost of producing an electric car will become cheaper than a petrol or diesel.

This would cause a spike in sales. A growth in new cars would have a knock-on effect in the used-car market, helping to reach another critical mass. It is not clear yet when precisely the second-hand gas guzzlers will be extinct, but the Government has indicated that it will stop giving out NCT certificates for fossil-fuel vehicles in 2045.

Waiting to charge the VW ID.4 at the shopping centre in Honeypark in Glenageary, south Co Dublin, I was struck by the number of electric vehicles in the car park. This is the EV heartland. There are four ESB charging points and shoppers plug in for a rapid charge as they go for groceries.

Five years ago, an EV brand was likely to be a relatively niche vehicle such as a Nissan Leaf. Now, the major car brands are producing EVs and there is a much broader range, even though prices are still high. The VW ID.4 I am driving costs €56,000 and the range starts at €45,000.

One motorist waiting to charge his Tesla — made by the electric carmaker led by Elon Musk — at Honeypark proudly tells me: “Once you go electric, there is no going back.”

One of the spurs for growth in electric vehicles has been the increased distance covered on a single charge.

This overcomes one of the great reservations about electric cars. Back in the 1990s, when General Motors launched an electric vehicle, it had a range of 80km. Five years ago, the distance had typically grown to 200km, and now many models, including my borrowed VW, extend to more than 400km.

Subsidies for wealthy

Dr Caulfield says that if we are to get emissions down, there will have to be a wide variety of measures in transport, not just more EVs. He says more people will have to work from home, there will have to be more metro and Luas lines, a quadrupling of expenditure on public transport and limits on the construction of roads.

While the transport researcher says electrification is crucial, he also believes there should be close analysis of the subsidies, which can amount to €13,000 for an electric car, when grants, Vehicle Registration Tax reductions and other concessions are taken into account.

When he appeared at the Oireachtas Climate Action committee recently, he pointed to Trinity College Dublin research showing that the highest concentrations of electric vehicle ownership tend to be in the wealthiest areas.

Dr Caulfield says: “I live in Goatstown [in south Dublin] next to a Luas line and a bus route, and I can get into my work in Trinity any time I want. If I buy an electric car, I get the same grant as someone who lives in rural Ireland, who has no public transport. That needs to be considered.”

Despite concerns that EV owners are largely middle class, optimists believe that the electric buyers will soon extend to a much broader base as consumers look at costs and also consider the environment.

Declan Meally, head of transport at the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), says: “People are asking themselves: is my petrol or diesel car going to be worth much in the future if their popularity is going down?”

While the upfront cost of an electric car may still be expensive, Meally argues buyers need to calculate the long-term cost of a petrol or diesel car when compared to an EV.

He has calculated that over 10 years, an electric car with upfront cost of €45,000 will end up costing less than an equivalent petrol or diesel car priced at €28,000. This takes into account the €5,000 purchase grant, Vehicle Registration Tax relief and other subsidies.

A motorist driving 18,000km a year over 10 years would spend over €10,000 on petrol, according to Meally. The cost of electricity to power a car that is charged at home overnight would be €2,270.

“If you do the maths, it’s a no-brainer,” he says. “The running costs of an electric car are 80pc less. There are already second-hand models available for €5,000.”

One of the next milestones on the path to electrification is when the cars achieve parity in price with conventional vehicles.

Research by BloombergNEF has concluded that the falling cost of producing batteries for electric vehicles, combined with dedicated production lines in carmarkers’ plants, will make them cheaper to buy, on average, within the next six years than conventional cars, even before any subsidies.

Meally believes that current trends suggest that electric and internal combustion engine cars will achieve price parity in 2023 or 2024.

Big car companies have announced their plans to withdraw from or limit production of petrol and diesel cars. Jaguar plans to sell only electric cars from 2025, Volvo from 2030 and General Motors from 2035.

Ford has announced that all of its cars sold in Europe will be electric by 2030 and VW says 70pc of its sales will be electric by 2030.

Another key condition for Ireland meeting its targets for electric vehicles by 2030 is the ready availability of affordable second-hand cars.

Simon Acton, chairman of the Irish EV Owners Association, does not believe that the target of close to a million cars by 2030 will be achieved by selling new cars and simply waiting for the market to turn over.

Acton, who also deals in electric vehicles, says: “One of the problems is the perception — and it is somewhat true — that if you are better off, you have a better chance of getting into an EV. A lot of people don’t have the luxury of buying a new car. If we are to have a fair transition to electric mobility, we need to help people who are less well off.”

He says the market in second-hand electric vehicles, often imported from Britain, has been hit by Brexit, but he hopes that the surge in new car sales will eventually boost used-car numbers.

Acton, who usually drives a Nissan Leaf or Renault Zoe, says the savings are enormous.

“You can charge the car for €3 or €4 overnight at home, or have fast charge at one of the public charging points for €5 or €6. If you were filling up a car with a tank of petrol it would be €40 or €50.”

Although the vast majority of cars will be charged at home, there will also be a need for a much more extensive network of charging points across the country by 2030. Charging hubs will be needed for many who live in apartments or have no access to off-street parking.

There is a consensus that electrification of the car fleet will be vital to cut emissions, but that does not mean it will be a panacea for our transport problems.

Tom Standage’s book tells that when petrol cars replaced horse-drawn carriages at the start of the 20th century, it was hoped that the new vehicles would clean up cities, ridding the streets of manure. But they created their own types of pollution.

While EVs would drastically cut emissions, Standage suggests that it would not address other problems associated with cars, such as traffic jams, road deaths or the inherent inefficiency of using a one-tonne vehicle to move one person to the shops. Dr Caulfield says: “Every so often, something comes along and people think it is a silver bullet. It happened when we took up the tram lines to make way for cars, it happened with diesel, and it is happening with electric cars.”

The academic believes the most important change in the coming years may not necessarily be the move to electric cars, but a change to the ownership model.

Owning your own car may seem like a necessity in the countryside, but will it be considered crucial in cities and towns with good public transport links and services where you can borrow or share a car for short periods using a mobile phone app?

Dr Caulfield predicts that younger age groups may start to regard car ownership in the same way as they do Netflix or Spotify. They will see no point in having a car if is parked 23 hours a day. “A generation is coming up behind me that is used to a shared model. They don’t have a room full of CDs or vinyl records,” he says. “They may look at cars in the same way as you would if you went to a relative’s house and saw rows of VHS videos.”

We cannot be certain if the new generations of motorists will tend to own their cars, but we can be pretty sure now that they are likely to be electric. And by 2030, the exhaust-spluttering internal combustion engine that has taken us from A to B for over a century will be well on the way to becoming be an endangered species.

A beginner’s guide to electric vehicles

There are three types of electric vehicle: two come with plugs and one type does not. A pure battery electric car is powered solely by an electric motor and a rechargeable battery. You charge by plugging in at home or using the national charging network.

A plug-in hybrid (PHEV) has a petrol or diesel engine as well as an electric motor. The battery can be plugged in and charged like a fully electric car.

A hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) has a petrol or diesel engine and an electric motor but the battery can only be charged by the petrol or diesel engine.