I read from our own Nick Gibbs the other day that a dramatic swerve of UK public transport policy may be in the offing. What a staggering turn of events that would be.
Having done its own research on the real-world emissions of plug-in hybrid cars, as well as reading fairly critical reports from third parties, apparently the DfT is all set to change its line on exactly how long PHEVs will be allowed to remain on sale in the UK, as well as other kinds of hybrid cars, before the total ban of all combustion-engined new cars comes into force in 2035.
And so, having given a struggling car industry the bare bones of a working schedule by which to switch its models away from the combustion engine and towards wholesale electrification – on the strength of which hundreds of millions of pounds will have been spent, balanced against amortisation very likely well beyond 2030 in some cases, let’s not forget – it’s about to uproot the goalposts. Or just take a flamethrower to them, actually. Cue all sorts of quite understandable gesturing and loud, creative swearing, in many European languages, in car-industry boardrooms continent-wide.
The mandarins will seek to justify their thinking in all the right ways. There have been independent reports claiming that PHEVs emit, in general, between three- and five times more CO2 in the real world than the lab tests suggest they should. That’s only what every Autocar Road Test on a PHEV has reported for the last decade, by the way. God forbid someone consider that it might actually be the lab test that’s the problem.
So what will they finally conclude? That the industry has conned everyone – yet again? That PHEVs simply don’t work, and need to be removed from our ‘net-zero’ roadmap as soon as possible? Will a thought be spared for how they’ve been tested or incentivised? Or how much charging infrastructure there is to support them, and whether it’s easy enough to use them as their designers intend? Well, what do you think?