Sensationally, the French government has announced its intention to ban petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and the British government has done the same. So does this mean vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine will disappear from our roads overnight?
Not exactly. In fact, the UK announced its intention to end all conventional car and van sales by 2040 way back in 2011, and for “almost” every car and van on the road to be zero emission by 2050.
But “Diesel and petrol car ban” is the wording used by one leading newspaper, which is not strictly true.
“Britain to ban sales of all petrol and diesel cars and vans,” says another, a little closer to the facts. “New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned,” says the BBC, more accurately.
So what’s being proposed is a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles in 2040. That’s a long way from banning the sale of all such vehicles (new or used) and is not the same as saying petrol and diesel cars already out there can no longer be driven.
Britain and France are not alone. The government in India, a country with major air pollution problems in cities, is talking about stopping the sale of petrol or diesel cars as early as 2030, while in the Netherlands they’re talking about 2025.
The Scottish government has joined in, saying it wants to “phase out the need” for petrol and diesel vehicles by 2032, using some of the most cautious wording you’re likely to see, leaving plenty of wiggle room if this all proves to difficult.
So the headlines are sensational, but they’re written by newspapers, not policy-makers.
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So why is this happening?
There is international agreement that petrol and diesel powered vehicles are causing a level of pollution that’s having a major effect on people’s health.
Figures have been presented to suggest that bad health from pollution cost 2.7 billion in one year alone, that it could be responsible for 40,000 premature deaths each year, of which 9,000 are in London alone.
Motorists might feel that the internal combustion engine is going to be made a scapegoat, but in fact it’s only a distant part of clean air plans that have begun already.
Indeed, 2.7 billion has been set aside for government initiatives for tackling air pollution right now, as part of the government’s “Air quality plan for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in UK (2017)”. This includes:
- £1 billion in ultra low emission vehicles (ULEVs), including £100m for the UK’s charging infrastructure and funding the Plug In Car and Plug In Van grant schemes
- £290 million National Productivity Investment fund for reducing transport emissions, including £60 million for new buses, £40 million for bus retrofits, £50 million for a Plug In Taxi programme and £80 million for a ULEV charging infrastructure.
- £11 million Air Quality grant for local authority improvements.
- £89 million Green Bus fund to help put over 1,200 new low carbon buses on the road.
- £1.2 billion for a Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy between 2016 and 2021.
- £100 million Road Investment Strategy for Highways England to improve air quality on its network.
Other potential measures include charging vehicles to enter a CAZ (Clean Air Zone), altering road layouts, roundabouts and speed humps and reprogramming traffic lights.
Did you know about Transport for London’s Toxicity ‘T-charge’, due to be introduced on October 23 2017? This imposes a £10 daily surcharge on vehicles that do not meet the required emissions standards (you can check if your vehicle is liable for the T-charge here).
The ban on sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is not a single draconian measure designed to hit the ordinary motorist. It’s a late stage of an environmental clean-up process that’s already started.
There’s still 23 years to go
As one researcher has pointed out, when 2040 arrives there may no longer be any petrol or diesel cars left to ban.
It’s likely that only a very small percentage of petrol or diesel vehicles bought today will still be on the road in 2040, and a combination of increasingly demanding emissions regulations, ‘toxicity charges’ and government sponsored scrappage schemes and grants may squeeze petrol and diesel vehicles out of our lives so slowly and progressively that we can’t pinpoint the exact moment when it happened.
Will your four-wheeled friends be electric?
It looks like it. Hybrid vehicles have proved a popular halfway house so far but they too burn fuel and emit pollutants and they look unlikely to be spared the 2040 cut-off either. So does that mean we’re all condemned to driving horrid little electric cars with no performance and even less range?
No. Electric cars have moved on a long, long way in a very short space of time. What we thought we knew last year has changed already, and while electric cars don’t yet have the range of their combustion engine cousins, the gap is closing in just about every other respect.
Volvo has said it will only make hybrid or fully electric vehicles from 2019 and Jaguar Land Rover says it will make only electric or hybrid cars from 2020.
Currently 2 million electric cars are sold globally with Norway claiming the highest penetration of electric cars in the world – nearly a third of new car sales – and a target of 100% electric or plug-in hybrid cars by 2025.
Data from Dutch bank ING indicates that battery costs – once a major stumbling block for electric car uptake – have fallen from around $1,000/£763 per kilowatt-hour of capacity in 2010 to around $300 in 2017, with some approaching $150.
Electric cars are entering the mainstream – cars like the Renault Zoe, a regular small hatchback, albeit without the range of a petrol or diesel equivalent, or the smart BMW i3, the perky VW e-Up!, spacious and comfortable Hyundai Ioniq or the muscular Tesla S and Tesla X.
Electric cars aren’t an invading horde waiting to pounce on the other side of 2040 – they’re friendly fellow eco-citizens already sharing our lives.
For sure, we’re going to miss the thunderous snarl of a big V8, the reassuring vibrations of that strangely alive mechanism under the hood, even the early-morning clatter of a cold turbodiesel.
But that’s progress. Our ancestors were sorry to see the end of the horse and cart, but we got over it.