About 22% of the emissions produced in the UK are from surface transport, with 60% of total surface transport emissions coming from cars alone. Moving from vehicles with conventional engines to those based on low-carbon technologies offers a great opportunity to reduce these emissions, with electric vehicles currently looking the most promising way to achieve this.
Meeting our legislated climate-change target for 2050 will require that the UK's cars and vans are low carbon in the second half of the 2040s. Given the turnover of the car stock, this implies that everybody should be buying a low-carbon car by the mid-2030s, with high levels of penetration through the 2020s. Our analysis suggests that by 2030 we should aim to have about 10m low-carbon vehicles on the road.
It is, therefore, vital that support for low-carbon vehicle market development is provided in the next few years. In the spending review, the government announced £400m of funding to promote the takeup of low-carbon vehicle technologies. While this is a useful start, more funding is likely to be required in the period to 2020 to deliver the required penetration of low-carbon vehicles.
Late last year, I attended the Renault Roadshow to test-drive one of their latest models – the Fluence. It is a beautiful vehicle, both from the outside and inside, and is great to drive, if slightly odd in that there is no engine noise. All in all, the driving experience was superior to that of my own car, and I will seriously be considering buying an electric vehicle next time round.
David Kennedy is chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change