Why I’ll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban – Matt Ridley
Guest Post by Derek Spence
This is a precis of an article written by Matt Ridley for the Daily Mail earlier this month:
Most electric car batteries are made in China, and it has made a huge investment around the world in lithium and other minerals. It also has a low labour cost and a cheap coal fired grid. (Their EV manufacturer BYD has just produced its millionth EV, outperforming Tesla.)
Electric cars still cost almost double their petrol equivalent and consumers need subsidies to buy them. Our energy infrastructure cannot be adapted easily or quickly to cope with the extra demand implied by the transition. That needs further subsidies. You then have to distribute the energy. That needs more money to upgrade the distribution grid. There is added demand from heat pumps. The upgrade on current timescales is impossible.
Cars and vans generate 70% transport emissions and transport 25% of all emissions. The emissions saving of electric cars over petrol or diesel is 25% per vehicle and the UK generates 1% of worldwide emissions. The end result is that we will have reduced global emissions of CO2 by 0.044% (less than one half of one tenth of one percent).
The other side of the equation is not considered in the overall picture. To produce an EV requires a lot of extractive industries to make an electric vehicle. The battery is key. A typical half ton EV battery requires mining and processing about 250 tons of materials. This requires a lot of diesel and electricity.
Professor Gautum Kalghatgi at Oxford University calculates an electric car with a 60 KWh battery will start with a deficit of 7.5 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, before it has driven at all. Our electric grid is powered by gas (which emits CO2 and wind turbines which require a lot of coal in their manufacture and have to be replaced every 20-30 years. VW has done a study which shows that EV has to be driven 80k before its emissions are lower than a diesel car. In Germany where the grid is driven by more coal, this comes to 125k. In China you would never reach breakeven due to their coal dependency. The breakeven is bigger for larger batteries in larger cars.
Batteries last about 100k miles. Just when you will be approaching emissions savings you will be scrapping the car or paying huge amount to replace the battery. The refining costs of refining ores is going up, not down. Batteries will increase in cost. An electric car approaching the end of its battery life will be worth nothing. This is reflected in the prices of second hand EVs already.
Internal combustion engines are continuing to get cleaner at a rapid rate while electric cars, with their extra weight will be producing more particulate waste from the wear of their tyres, than comes out of the engines of petrol cars, says Prof K. (The EVs are already having an impact on the roads and multi-story car parks due to their extra weight.)
Matt Ridley’s full article is here.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“Internal combustion engines are continuing to get cleaner at a rapid rate…”
And those vehicles are doing all of the transportation involved in making the transition to renewables. While EV transportation is not.
However the ICE cars bought in 2029 can be subject to exhaust tax at a ridiculous rate, and the MOT regulations tweaked to make it very expensive or impossible to pass.
Sounds like a good idea, but a crusading government could make it very costly.
Which is why nothing really works except repealing the CC Act.
80k, is that kilometres? That’s not very far, or did you mean 80,000 miles?? Please correct the typo.
Bristol city council has been caught out using diesel generators for its fleet of electric dust carts . Because their plug in chargers will not work on those loads .
Might have been wrong , just saw one that said Cardiff city council .
But a high probability that no councils have a high enough supply rating at their depots to charge up more than 1 or 2 large vehicles at any one time .
See:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1796237/Cardiff-Labour-council-electric-bin-lorries
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/27/labour-cardiff-council-diesel-generators-electric-lorries/
It does look like several Labour run councils have got fleets of EVs and then found that they cannot charge them .
From memory , a sub station transformer has a max of 250 KW at end user voltage .
So most of these councils will need a much larger supply , at about £250,000 for each extra substation , or over £1 million each for special large transformers .
Which is probably why most of the media have not really got into this yet .
Most councils (especially Labour and green councils) do not understand anything technological, hence they will have been sold the vehicles without knowing what they need to do to be able to charge them. Having declared a climate emergency (without any evidence that an emergency exists) they will do anything that they think will reduce “carbon” emissions, without any understanding of the consequences of their actions.
ICE cars are practical. EVs are not. It is a nobrainer that normal people do not voluntarily choose EVs.
Don’t forget EVs existed before ICE and are _still_ nowhere near the same level of practicality. It is irrelevant how many charging points there are. EVs need recharging more often for the same actual use and each EV recharge takes much longer than ten minutes.
Don’t forget all of those charging stations are being built using conventional vehicles and fossil fuels. There is no replacement for those fuels when it comes to transportation.
Manufacturers will be right across the numbers leading into the 2030 deadline.
If customers are moving to EV’s that’s what they’ll be making.
If not expect thousands of ICE cars to be pre-registered and hoarded as ‘used’, so they can be sold after any deadline.
There’s also the issue of Northern Ireland, with one foot in the UK and one in the EU. Will that be a back door route into the UK market?
It’s clearly in everyone’s interest for government to extend the deadline back to 2035 at the earliest.
What is the situation with car ferries? Do they allow electrics? Seems that the risk to passengers is too great if a fire breaks out on the high seas.
Norwegian shipping company bans electric cars on board classic ferry route
https://ctif.org/news/norwegian-shipping-company-bans-electric-cars-board-classic-ferry-route
This is the Norway – nation hits record EV share in 2022 on its way to ending gas car sales
You couldn’t make it up!
BEVs will become white elephants in the next few years, particularly as they are being forced on us ahead of a normal development curve. Unforeseen problems that have yet to come out such as the hurricane flooding in Florida last year and BEVs that were submerged, spontaneously combusting. The extra weight causing increased particulates from tyres and brakes, together with road damage and structural problems with bridges and multi storey car parks, the danger of a crash damaged car catching fire leading to repairers having to build large bunkers, not to mention the danger to the technician.
Just what else is going to come out?
Then there is the lack of charging points for times when home charging is not available, coupled with the fact that the electricity distribution system is just inadequate to provide power at point of use. Then the big one, there is not enough generation capacity to charge the BEVs and all the heat pumps. This is going to be a disaster
Excellent article. He ought also to have mentioned that mining in African countries for rare earth minerals uses alot of child labour. Moreover the Chinese economy relies alot on Uyghur slave labour:
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-83-major-brands-implicated-in-report-on-forced-labour-of-ethnic-minorities-from-xinjiang-assigned-to-factories-across-provinces-includes-company-responses/
I’m not convinced of the ‘slave labour’ claims made of China.
They usually emerge from MSM articles quoting human rights organisations which have a financial interest in sensationalising any alleged human rights abuses, which they judge against western standards of human rights. Having lived in Hong Kong I know the Chinese don’t worry about human or animal rights much and accept their own fate in life. They are also incredibly generous and kind people.
Just read the article carefully. It’s littered with the usual terms like – “implicated”, “allegedly”, “potentially”, “estimates” etc.
And at the foot of the page: Disclaimer: Business & Human Rights Resource Centre and its collaborative partners take no position on the diverse views presented in linked material within the database, nor can we guarantee the factual accuracy of all the articles and reports we make available.
What’s never in the media is that Uyghur Muslims have committed acts of terrorism across China. That shouldn’t surprise anyone in the UK.
Perhaps the Chinese government figure that it’s better to have threats to their society put to work as punishment for their crimes rather than allowing them to languish in a prison on three squares a day whilst playing on their X-Boxes.
I thought it was just Russia you supported?
@I don’t believe it!
I support one country only, my own.
Unlike you, I’m awake to what’s going on in the rest of the world.
I currently I drive a 2 litre Jaguar XF automatic
I have been encouraged, by my environmental friends, to change to an electric car. What is the best decision for the environment?
I was surprised to find the battery in an electric car accounts for almost half of the Embodied Carbon. To appease my environmental friends I chose a Nissan Leaf as a replacement for my Jaguar XF. The embodied carbon in an electric Nisan Leaf is 9.8 tonnes of carbon equivalent.
My Jaguar is 8 years old with 20,000 miles on the clock (i.e. I drive 2500 miles per year) Specified emissions are 129 gm/Km. Lets say reality is 150 gm/Km.
Annual emissions =2500 x 1.61 x 150 / 1,000,000 = 0.60375 tonnes/year
This means I can continue to run my Jaguar for 9.8 / 0.604 = 16 years before my Jaguar emissions exceed the embodied carbon of a Nissan Leaf.
I am 80 years old so I have decided I can continue to enjoy driving my Jaguar.
A wise decision Sir. May you continue to enjoy your ICE motoring beyond the life of your Jaguar.
Good luck competing with VW…
Volkswagen is developing its smallest, most affordable ID 1 EV starting around $20K
Mar 16 2023
That’s dollars not pounds of course.
The problem is that the actual market is much more than only city runabouts.
People and businesses need normal size vehicles without range problems.
>>smallest EV
George Bridger…thanks for that. It is miles and that point is made in the full Matt Ridley article.
At the moment, the second-hand car market is booming. If the van on new ICE cars is delayed – which I hope it us – the second-hand car market could take a dive.
Problem is that if the ridiculous ICE ban actually happens, used cars will become unaffordable for many. Good news if you are actually emigrating and can find a buyer, but not for anyone else.
>>At the moment, the second-hand car market is booming
Not gonna happen.
Bet the farm on it.
‘Van’ = ‘ban’.
Ridley assumes stability til 2030. Not gonna happen.
I am of the opinion that the 2030 deadline will be quietly extended or fogotten about.
Why? Your government expects you to die.
We are driving to Switzerland on Wednesday to see our daughter, then on to Italy. Don’t think we could do that in an EV as we need to be back by September for school pick-ups!