You would have thought with the sudden surge in EV ownership that green campaigners would be celebrating with bunting and locally-sourced pies.
EVs are after all much more recyclable, better for the environment over the long-term and don’t dirty the air we breathe.
Alas, a new report this week by the Think Tank IPPR has revealed that they are not happy. In fact, they are quite annoyed with the great shift to electric motors.
But why?
Well, they argue the push to EVs, helped by government policies and spurred on by mad investor interest, will mean that literally everyone driving a normal car today will get an EV in the future.
This consistent car ownership alongside the growing population of the UK will, they believe, lead to 28% more cars on the road by 2050. That in turn could create 11% more traffic.
The think tank has argued that there could be serious health and environmental knock-on effects from this vehicle growth. And maybe they have a point.
Nobody gets fit sitting comfortably in a car, electric vehicles do use a lot of vital resources, big vehicles, such as popular SUV models, take up a huge amount of street space, and the think tank is right that congestion is awful now and more cars will certainly not make it better.
However…
This doesn’t mean we should stop people getting a car. Yet this is what the academics and politicians who wrote IPPR’s paper seem to desire.
They believe more funding should go to e-scooters and e-bikes. That way we can build local communities around micromobility. Or, as they put it, only transport that is ‘socially necessary’.
“The needs of people and nature must be prioritised over cars” says the IPPR.
But they’ve got it wrong on two fronts.
Firstly, people need cars in our country. When you’re in London walking to your office with a cappa-macca-frappa-mocha in hand, it’s hard to remember that there is a world outside the M25 where ‘artisan’ means carpenter and not a barista.
Public transport in our cities is probably better than it has ever been. There are a multitude of options now from trams, buses, bike sharing, e-scooters and trains. But outside, in the towns and villages where most people live, it does not make sense.
Whereas in London a bus comes along every five minutes, elsewhere it can be every hour or less. This is why government figures from 2019 show that just 7% of people travelled to work by bus, whereas 68% commute by car. Meanwhile, going to work by bike is a hobby of well under a million.
And another thing
The second reason the IPPR is misguided is that the cars of the future are prioritising nature. We are at the cusp of an explosion in electric vehicle enthusiasm and invention. It’s surely inevitable that by 2050 EVs will be made even more efficiently than today, making them even cheaper and more recyclable.
Likewise, new technologies like autonomous driving and shared cars will surely mean less people will need to own a vehicle anyway. So, what’s the worry about?
Campaigners should be chuffed that suddenly the Earth is embracing clean technology and mobility. They cannot now decide to cancel cars completely. It’s ignorant of how the UK gets around and risks alienating would-be EV adopters.
