Here’s a misleading statistic: UK electric car sales doubled in 2019. According to market insights firm LMC Automotive, battery electric vehicles made up 1.6 per cent of UK sales in 2019, about double the year before. But this doesn’t mean the UK’s automotive emissions are heading in the right direction. The reality is far more murky.
Last year, the average carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of cars sold in the UK rose for the third year in a row. And for every electric car purchased in 2019, we bought 37 SUVs. Our growing interest in bigger, heavier vehicles, plus the sudden decline in diesel car sales, has pulled the UK further away from its looming transport emissions targets.
It’s a big step backwards, at exactly the wrong moment. The average CO2 emissions per kilometre for UK cars now stands at 127.9 grams – well past the EU’s new target of 95g of CO2 per kilometre for new cars. If auto manufacturers don’t hit the target, they’ll be hit with big fines.
“It’s going to be a tough couple of years,” says Al Bedwell, head of powertrain forecast at LMC. “At the moment the gap between where CO2 is now and where it needs to be at the end of next year, for some car makers, is pretty big. So there’s a real dilemma.” Car brands may need to start selling electric vehicles at a loss in order to meet the goals, he says. “There is definitely a risk that some of them will miss the target and will end up paying quite big fines to the commission.”
This wasn’t supposed to happen. When the EU drew up plans for new CO2 targets in 2012, sales of diesel cars were strong and the UK SUV market was still in its relatively early stages. “The target could have been achieved with a relatively low share of electric vehicles, but now it has become a lot tougher,” Bedwell says.
Since then, things in the automotive industry have gotten messier. The drop in diesel sales can easily be traced to the 2015 diesel emissions scandal, when VW deliberately used software that underestimated emission readings during tests. Trust in diesel vehicles plummeted. And now, even though new diesel vehicles are far more efficient than their petrol counterparts, no one wants to buy them. Even though real world testing found new diesel vehicles emit 18 per cent less carbon than petrol equivalents, diesel cars now barely make up a quarter of sales, compared to almost a third in 2018.
And while diesel cars have been dropping out of favour, SUVs have been ascending. Brits bought 12 per cent more SUVs last year than they did in 2018. “It’s a tough one for the carmakers,” says Bedwell, “because they have to produce what people want to buy.” Christian Brand, associate professor at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and Transport Studies Unit, doesn’t share in Bedwell’s sympathies. “Consumers can only buy what manufacturers offer them,” he says. “Car makers say they offer a whole range of things, but the fact that they offer SUVs in the first place is a problem.”
At this point in the climate emergency, should car makers even be allowed to sell vehicles that are environmentally irresponsible? Brand thinks stronger regulations must be brought in. “If we’re serious about getting to net zero, this growth in the size of vehicles needs to be prevented,” he says. “We’re wasting 20-25 per cent of carbon emissions just through that.”
Our net zero transport by 2050 goal isn’t going to achieve itself, especially if we keep chucking extra carbon into the atmosphere in exchange for a more stylish ride. The 2021 EU targets are the UK car industry’s first real test in the run up to our 2050 goals. “We’ve really only got 10 years to make significant change,” says Jillian Anable, co-director of the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC). “If we wait then it becomes physically impossible to do it in time.”
Read more: The 10 facts that prove we're in a climate emergency
Bedwell believes electric cars are on the cusp of mass adoption. “We will shift to electric in the end, I don’t have any doubts about that,” he says. “It’s going to take the rest of the decade to happen in the UK, but by 2030 I don’t expect any diesel or petrol cars to be sold.” Petrol and diesel cars are set to be outlawed by 2040 currently, though the government is considering moving the ban forward to 2035.
It’s in the car industry’s best interest to push for this, according to Bedwell. “The investment in electrification is mind bogglingly-big, and if it doesn’t work for them, then we’re going to see casualties,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, they’re in trouble, so they are taking this very seriously.”
He predicts that electric cars will reach price parity with their petrol counterparts by 2026. Then, he says, assuming charging infrastructure is more publicly accessibly across the country, the fleet will begin to transition from carbon-heavy to electric.
For Anable, that’s just wishful thinking. She doesn’t believe electric cars are the silver bullet they’ve been pitched as. Even if mass adoption is on the cards, it’s not going to happen quickly enough. “It’s absolutely impossible to reach our zero carbon targets with electric vehicles alone,” she says, explaining that the millions of SUVs bought in 2019 won’t disappear overnight. “Even if everybody from tomorrow only bought electric vehicles, then it would take 15 years for all cars on the road to be electric.” If we have to wait until 2026 for this whole process to begin, the earliest an electric fleet could exist is 2041 – one year after the current deadline for phasing out internal combustion engines.
Even then, the majority of the cars sold would be hybrid vehicles. Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) are more popular and accessible than battery EVs, but “they are still essentially fossil fuelled vehicles,” says Anable, just a little cleaner. The predicted efficiency of PHEVs often doesn’t match up to what happens in the real world. One analysis from The Miles Consultancy in 2017 found PHEV emissions were not only higher than advertised, but also greater than those from similar-sized diesel vehicles. The PHEVs in the study were expected to emit 55g/km of CO2, but in real-world driving conditions they hit an average of 168g/km, compared to a diesel vehicles’ average of 159g/km. This is why UKERC believe hybrids should be banned along with other internal combustion engine vehicles.
Electric cars alone realistically won’t be enough, says Anable. To make radical change, and reach target zero in transport by 2050, we’ll need to rethink the transport system as a whole. “There has to be a massive investment in public transport, along the lines of nothing we’ve ever seen before,” she says. The UKERC has a digital model of the UK transport system, built using detailed datasets from all travel sectors, on which Anable has run various scenarios. If we maintain our current electric vehicle adoption rate, she says, we’d need to cut our overall car use by 60 per cent by 2030 in order to stick to the emissions goals laid out by the Paris climate agreement. To do that, we’d need next-level public transport links.
This overhaul would mean devolving control over the transport infrastructure from parliament to regional authorities. They could set fares, integrate bus and train tickets, figure out a system that works fluidly, so that driving is no longer the default option. Alongside that, she says, we’d need to restructure pricing across the transport sector.
“There’s been talk since the 1960s of road user charging, because the cost of motoring has basically stayed flat whilst train fares and bus fares have gone up above inflation for years,” says Anable. “Buses are being decimated in terms of their popularity because the services and the fares are dire.” If prices were reevaluated and allocated based on time of day and carbon intensity, then that might help nudge people away from using their cars.
And then there are e-bikes. Electric bikes have recently surged in popularity in Europe, where many governments provide grants to make them more accessible. “There are a lot of countries where more e-bikes are sold than cars, definitely more than electric cars,” says Anable. “And the trips done on electric bikes are substituting for what would otherwise have been car trips.” For the UK specifically, if you look at what kind of journeys are done in the car (length and terrain), e-bikes could substitute for half of them. “Obviously that’s a huge figure and would never happen,” says Anable, “but even so you have a technology that’s actually ready and affordable now.”
If all the elements Anable laid out came together: electric car and e-bike adoption, a public transportation revamp, and a decline in car use overall, we could still feasibly get to net zero in transport by 2050 - but our current trajectory is nowhere near good enough.
“I know I’m being doom and gloom, but I’m just trying to stress the fact that it’s more about taming the use of the car than it is about changing the technology,” says Anable. “We’ve got the emphasis completely the wrong way around.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
