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Ed Reed

Hello, and welcome to The 10 Point Pod, a special podcast boxset from Energy Voice Out Loud, in which we assess point by point the UK government’s plan for a green industrial revolution. We are drawing this together with expertise from our sponsors for this series, EY, and leaders from across the energy industry. My name is Ed Reed. I’m an editor at Energy Voice where we are leading the global energy conversation and I’m delighted to be joined for this conversation by my co-host Maria Bengttson, EY lead for electric vehicles, and special guest Robert Llewellyn, presenter of Fully Charged and proponent of the stop burning stuff hashtag.

Zero emission vehicles are the fourth point on the UK government’s ten-point plan. The UK plans to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, ramping up to fully zero emission vehicles by 2035. To get there, though, there are going to be some mountains and molehills to climb. In 2020, there were around 32 million cars in the UK and the RAC has said there’s about 300,000 zero emission and hybrid cars, so there’s a bit of a way to go. That said, people are buying Teslas and Leafs with much more enthusiasm than boring, old, internal combustion engines.

Road tax and fuel duties contribute around £34.5 billion to the exchequer every year and the government faces a tough task of finding a way to support this shift to a new generation of vehicles, while not losing too much of its precious spending money. Another group who are struggling to work out how to balance the books in this new world are the car manufacturers, with electric power train stubbornly more expensive than combustion engines and there’s a continuing need for subsidies. Zero emission vehicles are making progress, but what will it take to bring them into the primetime? Is it technology, financing, government support?

Maria Bengttson

I think it’s probably a combination of all of it. One short observation, which I think is really interesting actually, because you mentioned Tesla there, for example. You know that the top ten cars, most sold EVs last year in Germany, actually were all of what we would’ve thought of as traditional car brands. So, I think that is a really, really good example of how other companies are really finding their own space here and how it really is already moving into mainstream.

But, as you say, we have a really long way to go and unless all of those elements that you just mentioned, unless all of them work together, I don’t think we can get to a satisfactory situation for everyone. So, government needs to know what they’re doing, influx needs to be there, the OEMs need to find their business models and obviously, most of all, the consumers need to have really attractive products at really attractive prices.

Ed Reed

Robert, what do you think? Primetime, when will it come?

Robert Llewellyn

I don’t… I would hate to try and predict something like that. It is very obvious the constant increase in sales and more importantly, I think in interest, is very noticeable. I don’t think you can really argue against that. That is against a background where fossil fuel combustion cars are so hugely dominant, you can’t even explain it, so we’re still talking fractional amounts of vehicles don’t burn fuel to move along the road.

I think the critical things are public confidence, which is really, really important and a very difficult thing to communicate to people who’ve never experienced driving an electric car. That’s really in a sense what I realise has become my job, is to try and explain what it’s like to drive an electric car when it’s quite a hard thing to arrange. In fact, yesterday I was in Milton Keynes, where there is an electric vehicle driving experience centre.

You can just walk into it, literally a shop in a shopping mall, reopened again yesterday, and you can say, can I borrow an electric car for a week? They let you have it for an incredibly low rate, it’s a few pounds. It’s not like renting a car. You try it for a week and you live in your house and you go, where do I charge it? All those things you can experience, but we need one of those in every town. There’s one in the whole country, probably one in the whole world. So it’s an enormous mountain to climb, but I still just about hang onto my confidence that it can be climbed, that it is possible and that it is possible for us to transition from combustion vehicles to electric vehicles in some form.

We are seeing the very beginnings of the technology. It’s so not mature. But late last week I drove an electric car that has a realistic, genuine 380 to 400-mile range. Well, ten years ago that would been an impossible dream. You could not possibly create that. So we’re seeing the technology move forward very, very fast and I think that’s… Communicating that things have changed and it isn’t like it was in 2009 is very important, but it’s a very difficult thing to explain.

Ed Reed

Sure. Just picking up on that point, I suppose of range anxiety is what people call it, isn’t it, it’s that nightmare scenario where you’re driving along the motorway and your electric car grinds to a halt. Do you think that that’s something that people should be worried about?

Robert Llewellyn

No, it’s a massive total myth. It was originally created, the term range anxiety was created by General Motors’ PR team when they…

They did it very specifically when they withdrew… It’s historically documented, it’s not a fantasy of electric vehicle fanatics, when they withdrew the EV1, their first electric car, which was hugely popular. They withdrew it, crushed it and introduced the Hummer in the same month. I would call that a corporate brutality of a fairly high level. They’ve since backed down, we have to point that out, and they now make the Chevy Bolt in the United States.

But the term, range anxiety, 2,500 people a day run out of diesel and petrol on our roads in the UK. That’s just normal. That just happens every day. If you ask the AA, what’s the prime reason you have to go out to a call, it’s people have run out of fuel. Particularly on motorways, where they actually say check your fuel levels before you go on a motorway. So that is not unknown and when you run out of fuel, I’ve run out of fuel, and if you haven’t got a fuel… I don't know even know what you call it. I haven’t used petrol for so long. A cannister, thank you.

If you haven’t got a cannister of fuel in the trunk of your car, the boot of your car, you’re stuffed. You’re on the side of the road, you can’t move. That would give me range anxiety. So here’s a very quick anecdote. When we used to have petrol cars and we live in a remote area, our nearest filling station is nine miles away. My wife has an incredible skill at driving a petrol car till it’s literally running on fumes. She would drive home late at night and I’d get up really early in the morning to go to work and I’d get in a petrol car at home and there was nothing in it.

It would just about start, the fuel needle didn’t even wobble, and I had to get it down the hill to the fuel station, which is the wrong way to the way I was going. That’s range anxiety. I used to have it every other day. Now she comes home in an electric car. She is a genius. She can get it back here with 1% and she’s not even casual about it. God, the battery’s so low. Is it? That’s her level of interest, but the following morning it’s full. That’s one of those silly stories, but that is possible.

Maria Bengttson

I think the thing that I would… Obviously that’s absolutely… I fully agree with that. The thing that I would add to that is that I think what some people… There’s all these urban myths around and I can see people commenting on LinkedIn and other social media around charging points not working, so I think that is a problem that maybe we should be slightly worried about. But actually, that’s in the hands of the infrastructure owners and they need to sort out their infrastructure and get the public confidence that it’s working when you need it.

There are all these really cool apps nowadays obviously, that you can use as an EV driver to see where the nearest charger is. So in a way you could actually say that you shouldn’t have range anxiety with EVs because actually you’re much better off than an ICE driver to know where the nearest chargers are and all the technical abilities, etc. So actually you’re better equipped, but people do get a little bit worried perhaps when they see them being out of service.

Robert Llewellyn

Yes, I absolutely… That is I think the most critically important thing and it has been an enormous let down and struggle and pain and frustration.

To arrive at a rapid charger that doesn’t work is just a bad thing. It’s just a really, really bad thing and it certainly was the case… I think to be fair to the charging infrastructure companies, it’s getting better. It’s hugely improved to how it was. In fact, again, yesterday there was a BP… I’ve forgotten what their new name is. It used to be BP Chargemaster.

Maria Bengttson

Pulse.

Robert Llewellyn

BP Pulse, thank you. Their latest chargers statistically are so much more reliable and it’s just the technology in the actual box that is really interesting and including… I thought that was a very interesting thing. I saw there was a charger which can deliver 120 kilowatts, but it can do it from a 30 kilowatt feed, like a three-phase industrial feed that you might have at a filling station and that’s powering a battery that’s in the box. A 60, no, 140 kilowatt battery in the box and that’s what you charge the car from, and that battery is charging all the time. That means you can put rapid charges in far more places, thousands of more locations that don’t have the heavy duty feed that you would need for a powerful charger.

So, the technology is developing and it’s just going to take a while for it to come out, but even now there are closer to half a million cars with plugs on the roads of the UK. Even now the uptake of rapid charges is very low, it’s 10% of the time they’re being used and that’s in a good location, because you don’t need them as much as people think. Everyone thinks you’re going to be constantly waiting by a rapid charger in the rain with a screaming kid crying, wishing that you’d stayed with your diesel, and I just don’t think that is the case. I really don’t.

Ed Reed

Sure.

Robert Llewellyn

I used a rapid charger yesterday, because it was free. I really didn’t need it. They let me plug into theirs and I filled my car up, but I could’ve got home without it easily. But when you’re offered, it’s like being offered free petrol, you’re not going to say no. 

Ed Reed

Sure. I suppose obviously we’ve been talking about batteries and I think one of the other things that people obviously also get interested about is hydrogen. Hydrogen is one of those things that always seems to be offered as a solution to every energy transition challenge. Robert, I have a feeling I know what your answer is going to be.

Robert Llewellyn

It might not be. I might be more subtle, but I’ll be quiet.

Ed Reed

Okay, I’ll tell you what, we’ll start with Maria and see how you feel about hydrogen’s prospects in passenger cars.

Maria Bengttson

Do you know, I used to be slightly more hesitant. But actually, if you can make it work, it does definitely have some advantages, doesn’t it, in terms of the raw material that you need from batteries, the production capacity that you need for batteries, and also the fact that actually you can use hubs and similar infrastructure that you use for petrol stations. So in that scenario, actually, I can see how it could coexist with EV infrastructure charging out in the community.

Personally, I think where it will develop first is probably more around contracted situations, where you might have, for example, busses and heavy transport where you have almost like a captive system, captive infrastructure for that transport. But once you’ve built that out or in parallel to that, because you’ve got the infrastructure, I definitely can see where it could have a role for passenger vehicles as well.

Ed Reed

Robert, do you want to…?

Robert Llewellyn

I absolutely agree 100% regarding heavy transport, buses, trucks, delivery vans and certainly fleet vehicles, installing the infrastructure to support them. A big company that runs 100 trucks, it makes absolute sense for them to do that. I think a really critical argument is when people are maybe sceptical or critical of hydrogen fuel cell private cars. If I’m given the choice of cycling or walking along a street where there’s 1,000 diesel cars or 1,000 hydrogen ones, I’m going to be very pleased about the hydrogen ones.

So, I’m definitely not anti-hydrogen, I think it has a critically important role to play. The key things that I am constantly having explained to me by really quite clever people, and not tree hugging, liberal elitists, or I can’t remember the list of expletives that I get given occasionally. But extremely conservative, very intelligent people in the energy community are extremely dubious about hydrogen fuel cell cars, very specifically private cars, and I think what we’ve seen…

I will be so happy if there is a change in the technology and development in the technology that makes them cheaper and more affordable because at the moment they are… If you want to talk about expensive vehicles, try and buy a hydrogen fuel cell car. They are very expensive at the moment. That will change. I’m not doubting that at all. All those things always do change. My real worry about it is the energy usage and where the hydrogen comes from, that’s the critical thing.

If we’re going to use hydrogen from natural gas, which some people think is disgusting and I go, no, it’s better than burning the gas if you’re using hydrogen that’s from natural gas in a fuel cell. You then drive that in a city, what’s coming out the back? We all know it’s water, that’s fine. I’d still much rather have that, but that is the economic way. That’s 95% of the hydrogen that’s commercially available today is steam from natural gas, that’s where it comes from.

So 5% is being taken from excess wind, you can always do that and that’s perfectly legitimate and then it’s split, but we are looking at a four to one energy cost. So, you put four kilowatt hours into splitting the water, you get open kilowatt hour of energy in terms of hydrogen out. You can’t help going, well, if you put that four kilowatt hours in a battery, you’re losing some, because you always have energy losses. You’re losing some in the wires and in the inverters and everything, but you’re not losing that much.

I’m just wondering, what are the advantages of a hydrogen fuel cell car which anyone with a petrol car… It means you can fill it in two minutes. It’s actually about 12 minutes. I’ve driven hydrogen fuel cell cars, it’s not two minutes. It takes quite a long time. The infrastructure needed to pressurise hydrogen to the level that you need it, which is 3,000 pounds per square inch, between three and 5,000 PSI, so it’s chunky and you can see the…

I just love watching the hose that comes out of the pump and goes into the car because it’s limp until you press the on button and it goes… It just looks like it’s very, very high pressure and you can hear it going into the tank, which is all fine and I’ve got no worries about it not being safe. It’s perfectly safe. All those vehicles are crash tested. You’re not going to get Hindenburg’s, that’s nonsense. But it’s just the complexity of the vehicles, one. It’s, two, the batteries.

It’s perfectly legitimate to say, if you’ve got a 100-kilowatt hour battery, it’s an enormous amount of stuff. Every hydrogen fuel cell car I’ve driven has a battery, quite a big one, 12 kilowatt hours, because you need a battery to be able to drive off when you put your foot down, because a hydrogen fuel cell takes a few seconds to kick in. So if everyone just had hydrogen fuel cells, the lights would change, they’d all put their foot down and nothing would move for about 12 seconds. So you need a battery as a back-up, so they are hybrid vehicles.

So, I don't know. The most impressive hydrogen fuel cell vehicle I ever went in was a big bus, a luxury coach that went up the mountains to the Winter Olympics in Korea a few years ago. It was a Hyundai, amazing luxury coach and clearly the driver had been told, whatever you do, overtake all the diesel busses going up the mountain, which he did with aplomb. This thing just flew, it was amazing. It was so quiet, so smooth.

We actually came down in a diesel bus and you were reminded then as it was coming down the thing, instead of regenning and putting all the energy into battery. But that was a hydrogen fuel cell bus, which is brilliant use of the technology, that is where it… I just think I’m… Trucks and buses makes such a lot of sense. Sorry, that’s my rant, but I’d still be really happy to be proved wrong. I’d be very happy to be proved wrong.

Ed Reed

Sure. I suppose obviously when the government set out this ten-point plan. Obviously part of that drive was around creating new economic benefits, employment, things like that. To what extent do you think there is this opportunity to have a new golden age of British manufacturing?

Maria Bengttson

Automotive fundamentally is a big scale type industry, most of the time at least, and also, what it comes with is they like to keep the supply chain fairly close to where the manufacturing plants for the final product is. So, I don’t want to sound negative, but I do feel a little bit like it’s probably more a defensive play for me for the UK than it is a huge positive opportunity. I think there’s loads and loads of really cool innovative small-scale companies, but for them to be able to flourish and really develop into large-scale they need the larger companies or we need the larger companies here.

I also think that you can’t have part of the supply chain in a country, especially a country outside of the EU. So, for me, it’s around, from a UK Plc perspective definitely have to be in the race, so to speak, and also definitely need to cater for all of the parts of the supply chain and including infrastructure and end customers and everything.

I heard today that there’ll be rules around origins and tariffs and stuff from 2027 where batteries, and if we talk EVs specifically, batteries and cars need to be both manufactured within the UK or the EU to avoid tariffs. Obviously that’s a huge incentive for us to just keep going and develop the entire supply chain in the UK.

Robert Llewellyn

It is a devastating challenge. I think that’s the most gentle way I could describe it. I think that even in my lifetime… When I was a young child, there was an enormous automotive manufacturing industrial base in this country and the steelmaking that went on with that and the components and the parts factories and all that stuff. It was one of the early school trips I did, was around the Vauxhall plant in Luton and it made a huge impression on me to see that, the scale that that was operating at.

Then since then you then go round the Tesla factory, Wolfsburg, I went around Wolfsburg a few years ago, the Renault factory. There isn’t really anything in the UK anymore that’s on that scale and yet… But then you look at Formula One, for some bizarre reason my, which is really unexpected for me, my wife was obsessed with Drive to Survive, the Netflix series about Formula One, which she has never shown the slightest bit of interest in, but she is obsessed with that.

We’ve watched the whole thing and she kept saying, why is the Ferrari made in Milton Keynes? Why is the Red Bull made in Milton Keynes? Why is everything in Formula One made in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire? It is. It’s an extraordinary skill base we have in this country, absolutely world level. We’re building Formula One cars by the dozen and they’re from companies all over the world and they make them here. Why does that…? Why is McLaren what it is, and Aston Martin?

In a sense, that’s… I think we’re stuffed. We’ve got to make super expensive, high end, elitist, ultra-luxury, ridiculous sportscars in this country and we should hang onto that. Rolls Royce, Bentley, they’re all going to be owned by China, okay, but we should make those cars, because I don’t think we can mass produce the Renault ZOE, a new version of Renault ZOE and a new electric car that we make a million of a year, which is the kind of scale that you need to be able to produce. I can’t see that happening in the UK with all the complexities of…

I don’t even want to mention the B word, but every time I hear people outside the EU talking, outside the UK talking about working with the UK, the conversation stops quite quickly, because it’s just like, what are we going to do? I don't know. I can’t send you a bottle of wine, somebody said in Germany the other day. I can’t send you a bottle of wine to thank you for doing this, we’ll have to buy it in… I don’t even… I actually genuinely don’t know what’s going on with the B word and I think it’s a psychological defence reaction. I don’t want to know.

Ed Reed

I suppose just on that idea of supply chains and things like that, obviously talking about batteries, one of the things that people always bring up is the rare earths and materials that go into batteries and obviously, there is an extent to which that will rely on, I think it’s particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Obviously with that demand increasing, and I suppose there is pressure, isn’t there, there are things like concerns around blood cobalt and how do we do this in an ethical way, particularly when we’re all thinking more and more about ESG and those concerns. It’s a hard question to ask but, Maria, should we be concerned about blood cobalt and I suppose what could we do?

Maria Bengttson

Yes, I definitely think we should be concerned and I actually, I do feel more positive now than what I did perhaps last year, because I think the supply chain was something that was somewhat overlooked. Everyone was… There’s been so much talk about the infrastructure and so much talk about available products and Tesla and Nissan and the rest of them are now following. But there was less talk about, one, how do we make the production of the cars themselves, but obviously more importantly, the batteries, how do we make that sustainable and fair on a global scale?

Because it’s not just the point of view of the environment, but it’s also the fact that these, as you say, minerals are mined in very poor countries with very bad working conditions and human conditions. So it’s really, really positive that the debate has moved over to the supply chain a lot more and I think companies like Polestar, for example, have announced that they’re going to really look at the whole supply chain when they look at the sustainability of the cars. I know there’s loads of really interesting companies looking at tracing materials, really using Blockchain and other technologies to really…

Because you can’t really put pressure on anyone until you realise or you have that visibility on, what does the entire chain actually look like, and then you can go back and make demands or put demands on those people or manufacturers. So I think we’re heading in the right direction, but certainly it’s not easy. But alternative technologies, more transparency around the supply chain, more pledges around being overall sustainable, rather than just emissions or whatever it might be, I think those are all good developments.

Robert Llewellyn

I entirely agree with you. I think you’re absolutely right and I do think it is changing because of the level of interest and of focus. Particularly in the DRC, it is a particularly shocking thing. The couple additional things I would like to say is I think it’s a really good aspect of the development of electric vehicles that this is becoming part of our conversation. There were children digging up cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo before anyone drove a lithium ion electric car, because we all use cobalt in our electronics to an enormous extent, to a higher degree per kilogram than we do in an electric car battery, so it is a really interesting aspect of it.

The other thing we use, I didn’t know this until last year and I have spent two days filming in an oil refinery, but we use cobalt to remove sulphur from diesel and petrol, particularly diesel. We have done for decades and that cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But I think those are important things and I think you have to know the whole picture. And this is not to counter any potential fossil fuel lobbying, which exists, it does happen. They are not stupid. They’re going to lobby to protect their businesses and I fully defend their right to do so, and it’s not to deny that or to say it’s a con job or fake news or anything, but we need to see the entire picture.

I think the other aspect is, I know Tesla are doing this now, we’re about to go and finally be able to film in a laboratory in Birmingham where they have functioning, completely cobalt-free batteries and this is the aspect of this technology we can’t really predict because that may never become commercially viable. I have no idea, but there are certainly such a wide array of new battery technologies. Carbon on carbon batteries exist now and they can take a charge and they can discharge electricity.

I don’t even know what carbon on carbon batteries could possibly be. I have no idea, but that’s what we’re going to go and see. So if in five years’ time you can buy a Renault Ford with a carbon battery… One of the questions I asked the people who are developing that, I’d say, can it be recycled? And he just laughed. He said, you don’t, why would you bother to recycle carbon? You just grind it up, it’s just carbon. There’s loads of it, we’re never going to run out of it.

So that, there could be some transitionary technology like that that we can’t really picture yet and we couldn’t have pictured it five years ago, because there was no pressure to do it. There’s now vast pressure to do it and a huge amount of resources going into that research that I just think one of them is going to work. I don't know, aluminium air, there’s all these weird technologies. There was a man five years ago, we wanted to go and film his Renault Twizy that he could drive 1,000 miles in in one charge and you go…

He never did, because it doesn’t work, so filtering out the ones that really do work from the ones that don’t. There’s so much attention on that. But I absolutely agree that the shocking reality of that came to us but, again, we’ve got to remember the oil industry’s history has not been exactly benign around the world in countries with poor people in terms of pollution of where they’re extracting oil, in terms of pollution where they transport it, where it’s refined, where the… There’s a horrible, messy history that we’re…

This is not accusatory because we’re all culpable. If we use anything that has fossil fuel in it, which we all do, then we’re as culpable as the oil companies. It’s just when they really blow it, it tends to get in the news. I just want to say, if anyone’s in doubt, Google Niger Delta and you’ll see a history of really fairly unpleasant political manipulation, human rights issues beyond the pale, a lot of heavy, heavy ground pollution that will not go away in less than a few lifetimes.

So we’ve got a long legacy of making a real mess with the technology we use and let us try not to do that now. That’s the whole point of really what I’m interested in, is let’s make sure we can use the materials again. Let’s make sure we do the least damage when we extract them. Let’s make sure we use them for the best reasons, for the longest possible time, and with the least amount of damage. That’s what we should be aiming to do.

Ed Reed

Sure. I think that’s certainly… Trying to make tomorrow a little bit better sounds like a great idea, probably for every industry thinking about that idea. I think we’re going to take a short break now and we’ll be back in just a moment.

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Ed Reed

So, welcome back. I think, I suppose one of those questions that you brought up is that question about traffic I suppose, isn’t it? Robert, you were saying about 1,000 diesel cars versus 1,000 hydrogen cars going past you and obviously one seems more attractive than the other. But I suppose the alternative way of looking at it is maybe those 1,000 people should be on a bus or on a train or some other option. I suppose, is there a concern that this focus on tackling emissions through zero emission vehicles is just going to create a new problem of congestion?

Robert Llewellyn

I absolutely think that if we just replace whatever it is, the 32 million combustion vehicles in this country with 32 million electric ones, we’ve missed the point of the whole thing and I think that’s in a way… I know this is a huge generational challenge. I think it will be. I don’t think it’s going to be easy for people to adjust, certainly my generation where we were brought up that you owned a car. Your whole aim as a young, for me as a young man was to have my own car, because it gave me independence and it meant I could go and do things and all that stuff.

Then I lived in London for a few years and I went, I just don’t want a car, it’s completely pointless. So I got rid of it and didn’t have one for 14 years, which was a great relief because I didn’t need it. I used my bike or the bus or the tube. So I think the notion that we… If we could achieve a place where we could share vehicles in a fairly sophisticated way so you had access, the same access that you would have today to a car, and I’ve seen models for that and I’ve been to conferences in the olden days where people really showed how this could be done.

What would be amazing is the lower number of vehicles you would need to achieve that and it is about 10% of what we’ve got now. It is those stark statistics, which I’ve never thought about in all the years I’ve owned cars, is that you don’t use them for about 90% of the time you own them. So it’s the most ridiculous asset, if you like, and a very expensive one as well. One in a way, in a sense you could argue keeps people in poverty because if you’re reliant on having access to that vehicle and that becomes a major part of your income, then that is a really punishing thing.

That’s why I didn’t buy a new car until I was in my 50s. I always had second, third, fourth, fifth-hand cars. They’re expensive things and I had to maintain them and then insure them and get the MOT done and get the tax… All those responsibilities used to weigh heavy on me as a younger man and I’d go, why have I got this damn thing and I don’t use it. I think that is… There wasn’t an alternative at that time and now and since I’ve spent some time in Berlin and in Paris where there’s really universal car sharing systems, I can absolutely see the advantage of that.

They were very popular, but I’ve since followed up with the people that run Car2go in Berlin, is a very good example, there’s 6,000 or 8,000 shareable cars within greater Berlin, which is a smaller city than London, but still, everywhere you go there’s a car you can use about 100 metres from where you are. I never found a gap. They’re very universal. But what I heard happened was they were enormously enthusiastically uptaken by young people in Berlin. They were all cool and they’d ride a bike or they’d use a car when it suited them and they had tattoos and they were really cool.

Then some of them started breeding and had children and then they’d carry the baby seats out on the street 100 metres through the rain to find a car and then they bought a Volvo. Suddenly private car ownership in central Berlin, which had actually statistically dropped so there was less congestion and easier to park, there were less cars on the street, and then it went right like that as the generations changed. I never even thought of it when I was using that.

Having had children and had child seats, when I was trying out those cars, I never thought for a minute, it’d be a bit of a pain if you had a baby. It didn’t occur to me and I had babies. You should think, I should’ve remembered. I feel bad. So how we do it, I don't know. How we do it, I do not know, but it just is a crazy notion that the majority of adults in the UK, let’s not even think about the rest of the world, in the UK will own a car. It’s bonkers. It’s just crazy. It’s unsustainable. There isn’t enough anything, steel, there isn’t enough rubber for tires. Just we can’t…

It’s an unsustainable system, so we have to find alternative ways of doing it and that’s… The only interest I have in autonomous cars is, which I’ve seen in fact in Las Vegas, you stand outside, in this case a hotel, you press a button on your phone and a car drives up to you. No one’s in it. The wing mirrors are folded in. It’s completely autonomous. You get in it and then you drive it. Instantly you’re responsible for that car. The insurance covers you. Your insurance covers you for driving that car.

There’s another insurance that covers it while it’s being driven with no one in it. It will never drive with any human being inside it because that reduces the two-trolley system, the problem, all the problems about the ethics of autonomous cars. If you don’t have anyone in it and it’s in the impossible situation, a child running across the road, granny here with pushchair with small child, crowd of children here and a tree falls down in front of it and it’s got to steer to avoid it.

No, it goes into the tree. It smashes itself to bits and it doesn’t kill people and that’s a lot easier to solve the problem. If I could do that here, press a button, a car turns up outside my door. I get in it and drive it to where I’ve got to go. I get out, I don’t have to park it, insure it, MOT it, make sure it’s all right, do anything. It goes off and does someone else. It goes off and charges, I don’t have to do that. Then I do my shopping or whatever I’m doing and then I press another button, another car comes. I get in that and drive home and then it goes away. I don’t have a car at home. I don’t think I’m going to live long enough to see that, but I hope I do.

Maria Bengttson

What I would add to that was I think it’s really interesting and it’s one of those things where I don’t think necessarily electric vehicles have got anything to do with this really, because a lot of what’s happening now could’ve happened with internal combustion engine vehicles as well. But you look at the technological advancements as a result of COVID, for example, where we’re all perfectly able to work from home most of the time now.

For example, you see people, especially where I live, a lot of people are very happy to move further away from the big cities. Also, I know that some city planners are looking at actually, maybe one of the future scenarios is that we stop dividing cities into office areas and residential areas. Maybe it’ll be a lot more mixed than it is now. So, all of what you were referring to, Robert, in terms of what are the traditional uses of cars, actually a lot of people, as you say, won’t be using cars for that purpose in the future. 

That really lends itself really well to having car sharing or other models where when you do need a car, it’s there. But actually, because of your lifestyle, where you are, where you work, you don’t need one. Like I said, I don’t think that’s necessarily 100% linked to the fact that they’re electric vehicles. It’s just a symbiosis of technological advancements in all areas, which is really cool and really interesting.

Robert Llewellyn

I think one of the most exciting mobility offerings I’ve started to hear is from a company that you lease, I don't know what, a small, limited range, electric vehicle from them. As part of that lease you’ve got a certain amount of time a year where you can just say, can you bring me a Tesla model x, a Mercedes EQS, which I just drove the other day, which is stunning, because you’re going on holiday or you’re going to see grandma who lives up… You’re doing a 400-mile drive and you don’t want to muck about with charges with your little electric car and you’ve got the kids in the back and the dog and all that.

That, you just go, I’d love that because that would be then a treat car. You’d get a treat car. You’ve got your normal car that you’re not interested in, that’s dirty and you just use to go to the shops and take the kids around. Then you go, next weekend we’ve got the treat car, we’re going to go and see granny. You get this fabulous, hugely expensive, ridiculous car like the EQS. You sit in it and it’s like, brilliant, wow, and then you take it home and you don’t have to worry about it. It’s not your car. Someone takes it away.

That’s already existing where people are renting sensible cars for 90% of the time and that might be a step towards that. I think that’s the biggest problem. I think electric, yes, whatever, the battery, the materials, yes, the range, that’s all going to be solved. What isn’t solved is the ownership model, I think is the really critical thing, and it’s how we make owning a private car not normal, because at the moment it’s normal. That’s how we do it.

Ed Reed

I suppose it seems to me it looks like all part of an infrastructure problem around this shift, isn’t it? I think there’s a question about ride sharing apps. There’s a question about charging points. There’s a question about new models of owning cars and I think, I guess that’s the whole thing about…

What makes this particular move from ICE cars to EVs or ZEVs really interesting is just how it all fits together and how it all seems to try and be delivered by the 2030, 2035 targets that the government have set out. I suppose just on that note, how do you think we solve that problem? Is that a market problem? Is that a government problem? Who picks how things should move forward?

Maria Bengttson

Who should pick? I think there’s a few things. So just by the sheer carrot and stick, I think there’s a lot of stick at the moment in terms of emission rules and other things. But then there’s clearly carrot as well around, there’s lots of market opportunity there for innovators, whether it’s the traditional OEMs or others.

So I think there’s a market opportunity and I do think a lot of it, because of the new emission rules and because of how expensive it is to actually develop new engines and new vehicles with the reducing importance of ICE, there’s going to be a snowball effect in terms of how much money is going to be spent in innovation, in new solutions and new ideas.

Robert mentioned a few, which we haven’t even seen being commercialised yet, which if we have this conversation in ten years’ time there’s just going to be things that we aren’t even aware of now going to be, I think, mainstream then. So I think it’s just that enormous shift to new technologies, which is being really, I suppose if we’re looking at it, really probably incentivised by penalties on emissions and things like that which necessitated that capital spend.

Robert Llewellyn

I think one of the big things that we have yet to really see, and it’s starting, it is definitely starting, is that people realise it’s actually a better technology. It’s as simple as that, that an electric motor is a better piece of technology than an internal combustion engine. Forget the batteries for a moment. The actual way that you move a box along that can have people sitting in it, it’s… From every way you look at it, it is just…

It’s more efficient. It’s quieter. It lasts longer. It requires less maintenance. It costs less. Everything about it is a step in the right direction in that sense. But I think the other aspect which we haven’t discussed, and I’ve recently been party to the early discussions about the technology behind this, but it is a thing we haven’t mentioned, which is vehicle to home, vehicle to grid, vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to shopping centre. That stuff would really change the picture.

So if you had… Let’s just jump forward a moment. You’ve got 30 million electric cars with an average battery size of 50 kilowatt hours, just say. That is more potential energy you could take from all of them if they were all plugged in at once than we currently can generate. All the generating in the whole country, that is more than we can possibly produce and that is a huge potential change. Now, that’s never going to happen. There’s never going to be 30 million electric vehicles, I don’t think, and they’re certainly never all going to be plugged in at once.

But when you look at those figures, and that is getting into petawatt storage capacity and that stuff is still… I’ve seen it. I’ve seen an office in Tokyo that runs off eight Nissan Leafs that were parked outside using at that time huge boxes that were vehicle to grid systems and this is probably eight years ago. But the whole office, air-conditioning, lighting, computers, everything in that office was running off those Nissan Leafs and at the end of each day all the people who drove those cars were guaranteed they’d have enough to get them home.

So it was taking some power out and it was putting some in, and they had solar on the roof, all that stuff, so they were… It was an experiment to show how that could work and that was just eight cars. There’s now more and more big distribution companies, like Amazon are really investing a lot in it, where they’ve got 1,000 electric vans. If they can sell electricity from 200 of them, they can make money while those vans aren’t running. They might only sell a kilowatt hour from each one, but you sell 2,000 kilowatt hours, you’re making some dosh.

That stuff is really hard to really know the full extent to how that could change. But, as you were saying, in ten years’ time we could be here and we would go, well, last night the country was running on cars and nothing else. Everything else was turned off. It was a still, cold night in the winter and we ran the whole country off a load of bloody cars that were plugged in and not doing anything. That stuff I find very interesting and challenging, and it might not work. I’m not totally convinced that it will work, but the signs are that we’re going to get something along those lines in the next five years or so, which will become more and more common.

Ed Reed

Fantastic. I think this is one of those conversations that clearly could run and run, but I think we’re going to have to stop it now. I’m sure everyone’s got other things to go to. But, listen, I’d like to thank you both so much, Maria and Robert. You’ve been really great guests and I’ve been really appreciative. There have been so many interesting things that you’ve raised there and I think those questions around infrastructure and just the way in which the country and how we create energy and where it goes and that circularity I think is a really interesting idea. I think it’s obviously one that we’re going to have to watch really closely.

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You may already know that every week the Energy Voice team get together to highlight important stories from the world of energy in our regular podcast episodes, so if you’re not already, please do subscribe free to Energy Voice Out Loud in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get this essential briefing every Friday.

We’ll be digging into the rest of the 10 point plan over the rest of the year leading up to COP26, so do please look out for those. Picking up on some of the points raised today, we’ll be talking about green public transport next month. But for this fourth episode of The 10 Point Pod, I’ve been Ed Reed. Thank you for listening.

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