The danger is that China will try to acquire some of those brand attributes. After all, China owns MG, does it not?
I accept that point, but Chinese manufacturers are intending to bring to the UK a load of brands that are anonymous and bland and they will not have the same attractiveness to the consumer.
On the incentives to acquire an electric vehicle, in recent years, there has been a cash grant to offset the extra cost of an EV. That now stands, I think, at £1,500 towards a vehicle costing less than £32,000. One way the Government could make a change and provide a reason for many private buyers to buy EVs is to level the playing field between private buyers and company car users. We have already heard that company drivers benefit from favourable benefit-in-kind rates, which means that they can save hundreds of pounds each month if they choose an EV over an internal combustion engine. One reason that employers are keen to encourage that is that they make savings on employers’ national insurance contributions. That is why many of the EVs on our roads are company cars. An increasing number of companies are also offering salary sacrifice schemes as a method of getting staff to switch to an EV. It would be beneficial if the parliamentary authorities were to launch such a programme in Parliament as a way of getting MPs and staff here to consider making the change.
On electrical vehicle charging, in our Select Committee report, we spent a lot of time considering charging infrastructure. We know that, in addition to the higher capital cost, range anxiety is a key reason drivers will not switch. Frankly, I hope the Minister will accept that the picture here is less rosy, with public charging in particular failing to keep pace with increasing numbers of electric vehicles.
I got a sense of the challenges when the most recent motorway services opened at junction 1 of the M6 at Rugby in 2021. At one point, because of the lack of power infrastructure, it looked as though the site would open with only two charge points. It was a real challenge to get enough power but, fortunately, good work by the site operator and the power network enabled 24 charge points to be available at the opening. Thanks to additional provision since 2021, there are now 40 charge points at junction 1 of the M6 at Rugby. It is a great place for people to stop in the middle of a long journey across England.
Too often, chargers are busy or are not working. I happened to notice a letter in The Times today from a driver of an electric vehicle, who recounts that he restricts his round trips to his battery’s limit of 240 miles and takes public transport for longer journeys. In fact, he questions—perhaps with tongue in cheek—whether that is the Government’s intentional strategy. Clearly we will not achieve the transition we need if every electric vehicle has that issue.
I appeal to the Minister to intervene with my local authority. Warwickshire County Council is providing public charge points but is allowing anybody to park in front of them for as long as they like, so someone who has identified a vacant charger via the app may get to a site and find a diesel internal combustion engine-powered vehicle occupying it. That seems absolutely crazy. I ask the Minister to put pressure on local authorities to ensure that parking in front of public EV chargers is available only to electric vehicles, and that they move off once they have finished charging.
A further issue for many EV drivers is that charging at a public site has a higher cost than charging at home. I suspect most EV drivers expect to pay more for using the facility and for charging faster, but I do not know how many realise that they are paying 20% VAT, compared with just 5% at home. That is why I supported the campaign by the motoring journalist Quentin Willson to reform VAT and equalise the charge.
We spend a lot of time talking about battery manufacture; in fact, the Business and Trade Committee is conducting an inquiry into it. The conventional thinking is that because a battery represents 40% of the value and weight of an electric vehicle, assembly will migrate close to where the batteries are manufactured. West midlands MPs, including me, have been calling for the development of a gigafactory at the Coventry airport site, adjacent to the traditional heart of UK automotive manufacture. I very much welcome the investment coming to Somerset from Tata Sons, with 40 GW of capability, but it is well accepted that we need 100 GW to keep business operating at the same level. To achieve that, we will need one more gigafactory, or maybe two. I very much hope that that will happen in the midlands, at the Coventry airport site.
Five years on from our Select Committee report, automotive remains an important sector and a major contributor to the UK economy. The transition to EVs presents real opportunities for manufacturers, the supply chain and the associated sectors. The one thing I know from my business career is that businesses need certainty. Having embarked on change for all the right reasons, the Government must maintain their course and create the climate for further growth in future years.
September 21, 2023
Mark Pawsey underestimates the Chinese. They are very good at technology themselves and as for style all they need is brand names and to hire a few European designers and stylists. Their entry into and domination of the piano industry is a text book example of this strategy. They are doing the same with the car industry with the addition of their serious imperial ambition of creating dependency.
Mark Pawsey also overlooks the weakness created and deepened by converting the entire economy to electricity and thus to enhanced almost total dependency on China. From where does he suppose the essential critical minerals will come from and where is the processing capacity to produce battery ready intermediate compounds and material.? Where is the nationally independent supply chain?
The EU, by contrast is taking advantage of Ukraine richness in minerals, of which lithium and rare earth’s alone are valued at up to US$12 trillion. That is Germany’s main reason for reversing its previous policy of not supplying weapons to Ukraine. Zelensky was blackmailed into signing over sovereignty of Ukraine to the EU in exchange on 27 Feb 2022 in order for Germany and the EU to gain autonomous control of those resources.
VDL has already announced that post war reconstruction of Ukraine will be directed towards EU green energy.
What is the Uk’s strategy?
September 21, 2023
Finger in the air and upset no one even if that costs our country taxpayers a fortune!
China is a threat and the UK needs to be weened off its goods. It is a murderous totalitarian regime which has acted against our national interest, we saw that over Hong Kong. When will govt and MPs wake up?
September 21, 2023
Mark Pawsey states:
“The conventional thinking is that because a battery represents 40% of the value and weight of an electric vehicle, assembly will migrate close to where the batteries are manufactured.”
Options include:
Make battery components for DIY home assembly. (Risky & impractical)
Extend the charger cables to the full journey distance! (Definitely not)
Turn batteries into trailers for towing, exchanging with recharged ones. (Somewhat clumsy)
Create lighter cheaper batteries. (Well worth trying as a comprehensive solution!
September 21, 2023
So per Mr. Pawsey ” Chinese manufacturers are intending to bring to the UK a load of brands that are anonymous and bland and they will not have the same attractiveness to the consumer” – hazardously treading the same path as Elon Musk’s Tesla then! Should we not alert them to take care?
September 21, 2023
Isn’t the 20% vat on recharging electricity to pay for more public fuel points? Ring fence it for that purpose, then how can anyone argue about it?
September 21, 2023
People take on bland cars all the time. That’s how Kia got such a jump on the flashier German models. Tesla has, for an expensive car, a very bland look, the inside is sparse and cheap-looking, doesn’t stop people from buying them! We should be encouraging Kia to open factories here in the UK.
September 21, 2023
Re “to bring to the UK a load of brands that are anonymous and bland and they will not have the same attractiveness to the consumer” that’s what they said about the first Japanese car imports, and look how the only way we controlled that was import quotas.
Indeed it I was Japan I would be very upset that China is being allowed to do car importing in ways which Japan was forced to stop.
September 21, 2023
‘The conventional thinking is that because a battery represents 40% of the value and weight of an electric vehicle, assembly will migrate close to where the batteries are manufactured.’
Manufacturers want to cut the cost of shipping these heavy car batteries during production. But the cars are then sold to the public that have to ship them for ever more. The inter-factory journey is seen to be a problem because the batteries are moved en masse but the in-car journey is the same physical effort for far longer: the lifetime of the battery. It’s Bastiat’s unseen.
September 21, 2023
Not long ago, Tesla had no brand awareness – the same could be said of brands such as Kia not many years ago.
People read reviews, hear others discussing their purchases, see adverts etc, then they make a cost-benefit decision as to what to purchase.
The Chinese did the same with phones – when it was all Apple, Nokia etc, suddenly you have brands such as Oppo, Lenovo, Motorola etc becoming household names.
September 21, 2023
Pawsey seems to believe that we can afford the necessary subsidies. He should take some basic arithmetic classes. The BIK subsidy is worth around ÂŁ4,000 a year on a typical family car. Times 30 million cars is ÂŁ120bn in annual subsidy. Where is that coming from?
September 21, 2023
The government has embarked on change for all the wrong reasons. They wanted the zeal lane for climate policy. As Kemi Badenoch has pointed out, Zac Goldsmith can afford his smug attitudes. We are undermining security of supply, our own manufacturing, the viability of transport underpinning the economy, the mobility of people including for work. We should be pressing for things that improve lives and strengthen the economy.
Killing research that improves the fuel economy of ICE vehicles probably fails to save more fuel than is achieved by our underwhelming adoption of EVs, especially since such improvements would have a global impact. EVs are not going to be adopted in much of the world – especially those parts that have limited electricity already.