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Jump-starting electric car sales, UK-style

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The UK Government’s decision to provide £250M ($360M) of funding, in the form of £5000 grants for customers to buy electric cars looks like big news at first glance. So, is it a really smart move from the UK Government, committed to incentivising change and driving consumer behaviour?

On the face of it, yes, but scratch below the surface and the scheme has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese. First up, there are currently around 33 Million vehicles on the UK’s roads. If you do the maths, then at £5000 per car, £250M of grants gives you 50,000 cars. To me, that looks like a bit of a drop in the ocean. Hardly world-changing is it?

From a wider transportation futures perspective, what’s more worrying is that the Government has decided to delay the introduction of this scheme until 2011. It’s not clear why, but we aren’t the only ones wondering if it’s got something to do with the fact that none of the mainstream manufacturers will sell you an EV now, but by 2011 many of them will.

The problem with this approach is that it could crush a fledgling market, which in the UK has grown slowly but surely with a mix of small city EVs and some clever, quick marketing thinking from the likes of GoinGreen who import the Reva from India and rebadge it Gwiz. Worse than that, these vehicles – which are classed as quadricycles – won’t be eligible for the £5000 incentives. That’s some way to go about building and opening up new markets, Mr Mandelson.

Equally frustrating is that commercial vehicles – like the Smith Edison and Modec trucks, aren’t included. ‘So what?’ you might argue; they’ll be bought by fleets who can afford the extra cost of EVs, or incorporate the savings into a longer-term business plan. But what about the thousands of sole traders and companies with just a couple of vans who make up the lionshare of the delivery vehicles running around cities? They are one of the critical, potentially most beneficial vehicle groups and users to be moving towards EV platforms.

Even the existing vehicle guys are asking questions. We’re currently in Dearborn, Michigan, looking at Ford’s design and sustainability work. Yesterday I asked the company’s director of Hybrid Platforms and Sustainable Mobility Technologies, Nancy Gioia, about the scheme and the affordability of EVs. You can see what she said in the video below, but let’s just say that she didn’t seem to think the £5000 incentive was a particularly sensible long term measure. She’s arguing for upfront investment in R&D. EVs are expensive to develop and build, and car companies are short of cash. There is another angle, of course – vast sums have been poured into car companies for advanced research, especially in hydrogen fuel cells. And we're still talking about that technology being 10, 20, 30 years away from primetime.

Governments have a key role to play in driving mass market adoption of EVs. Incentivising purchase is one thing, but that’s a fairly blunt, token-like stick in helping to cultivate a new market. The big auto guys have never run fast on this stuff, and they don’t really see a world beyond the car as we recognise it today.  Getting electrified versions of the types of vehicles we know and drive now is going to be expensive in the foreseeable future years. The first EVs from recognised manufacturers will be expensive enough to make many still think twice about them, even if there’s a £5000 sweetener on the table.

So if it wants to encourage a sustainable system of mobility, the best role the Government could play is in opening up the data it has on how people move around to allow the innovators to really use it, and by smoothing a path for start-ups, councils, designers and blue-chips to work together, and actually co-create something new. Dare we mention it – providing greater tax breaks and grants for those who are really pushing the boundaries of advanced mobility research and development might be one of the best ways to do this.

The pioneers deserve a break. They were right to invest what they could in EVs and they should not be hung out to dry while the big automakers get breathing space to catch up. The government should be rewarding risk takers who, when others sat on their hands, helped shape a fledgling market. Let the mainstream car companies catch up, but help the small guys find a role in this exciting future.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 21st April 2009.

Disclosure: Ford Motor Company is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's Research work in 2009. We have an independent brief, looking at sustainability and design activities in the company. Ford has no control over what we publish - let us know if you don't see it that way.

April 21, 2009 in Analysis, Auto, Cities, Current Affairs, EVs, Ford, London, Politics, Sustainability, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Ford and Sustainability - the view from the top

On Thursday, Joe and I spent an hour talking with Ford's Sue Cischke. She's basically Ford's chief sustainability officer - right up at the top of the company's uber 60s World Headquarters building in Dearborn, Michigan.

We filmed the whole thing, and you can see it below.

I'm asking our network to share their views on the content - those we've met over the years who stand out as visionary thinkers on the changes going on in the economics and nature of how we move. The first of these is Dan Sturges, and you can see what he has to say shortly.

But we meet new thinkers every day and I'd love to hear from you - and share your comments - if you've got something to add. Feel free to feature this on your own sites and embed our interview (click the 2 prong button in the blip control bar). Email me if you want access to the video file. It's Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0.

If you want to join in, comment below, or get in touch via Twitter @charmermark or @joesimpson.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Disclosure: Ford's sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's research in 2009. But our brief is to be critical and independent. We take that seriously. If you think we're not, I want to know.

April 20, 2009 in Analysis, Auto, Cities, Design, Designers, Energy, EVs, Ford, Lincoln, London, markets, Nano, Politics, Sustainability, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

White-van man to jump start Ford’s EV programme?

Transit connect on the high street Above: a uk Transit Connect in the pedestrianised zone in the centre of Kingston-Upon-Thames

I’ve spent much of the week chasing round after blokes wearing high-vis vests in South-West London. Why? It’s the attire of choice for what we colloquially term in Britain ‘white van man’ – the guys who drive delivery trucks and vans around our cities, day-in, day-out. I wanted to understand and film the life of a van driver, and his van, because earlier this week Ford announced the first of its four electric vehicles was going to be a small delivery van. And while this left some surprised (obviously, they were going to make an electric car, right?) I think it’s a smart move (see the video below) – and wanted to know if the guys who drive vans agreed.


The plan is to bring a new version of the Transit Connect we already have in Europe, to the US market for 2010, and offer a purely electric battery-powered version too. While it looks like the US will be first to receive the electric van, we think that the topic of delivery vans is truly relevant to cities all over the world. The boom in online shopping has seen their number increase dramatically in recent years, and the way vans are typically used is an ideal fit for the characteristics of an electric vehicle. Much more so than the typical family car, I’d venture.

Most vans live in cities. This means they’re subject to lots of stop-start traffic, and short journeys between drop-off points just a few miles apart (see the video below for more footage of vans in the city). This environment’s where an electric vehicle will tend to provide the greatest gains over a regular combustion engine - which is at its least efficient on short, cold, stop-start cycles. As mentioned, we’re conducting more in-depth research on this (more in a minute) but our, and Ford’s, hunch is the typical Transit Connect-type delivery van covers less than 100 miles each day. Most people’s concern about electric vehicles is to do with ‘range anxiety’ – or the “but what about when I need to drive 400 miles across the country in one go?” question. This is relevant for many car drivers, but a city delivery van makes huge sense as the market point at which to introduce an electric vehicle, because the nature of van-based deliveries in urban areas doesn’t require the infinitely extendable, on-the-go fill up capabilities (and range) that the current internal combustion engine, gasoline and fuel station combo offer.



Environmentally, electric vehicle in cities are advantageous because they eliminate tail-pipe pollution. The big deal here isn’t really carbon emissions and the climate change story, but the elimination of soot, particulate matter and NOx that the diesel vans emit, because these pollutants are thought to be one of the main causes of local respiratory diseases. And with city mayors around the globe taking the lead on cutting carbon emissions and getting tough with legislation, we’re already starting to see (and can envision much wider implementation of) central inner-city core areas becoming blanket emissions-free vehicle only zones. Are big-city shop owners going to need an electric, or hydrogen powered van to get deliveries to their stores in the not-too-distant future? We wouldn’t bet against it…

With many vans bought by fleet organisations (in London we reckon Virgin Media, Majestic Wine Warehouse, BT and Securicor run fleets of Transit Connects) – Ford gets the (useful) opportunity to closely monitor large numbers of these vehicles, getting real-world feed back easily and readily – much harder to do with individual car customers.

And we’re pleased to see that it’s Smith Electric Vehicles – a UK based firm - who’ll be doing the conversions for Ford. We mentioned them in our piece a couple of years back, about the opportunity we saw in a further electric delivery truck advantage – their (almost) silent running. Today, in cities like London, organisations like the big supermarkets – who want to make deliveries at night, can’t. Councils have to grant them special permits, and limit the number of night deliveries, because the noise disturbance to (sleeping) city residents caused by diesel tractor units, is too great. Eliminate this, and get a little inventive with the way goods are taken on and off the truck and into the store, and EVs could form the backbone of an entirely new nighttime delivery network. The benefit? Reducing congestion. Deliveries in the daytime, combined with the way our city centres have evolved, actually creates vast amounts of traffic congestion, because vans have to park in (and therefore) block traffic lanes to make drop offs.

So could electric vans underpin an entire new delivery network? It was an idea Florian Seidl - now a designer at Fiat, and I, explored last year, in a concept which you can see the results of below. We’ll revisit it as part of our ongoing research into the subject of electric vans, in the near future. For now, it looks like our hunch might have been right - electric vans are set to silently win the battle of the streets.

Delivery system1 Delivery system Delivery system2

Above - Florian Seidl and Joseph Simpson's design for a new electric van-based delivery system - click for larger images... Below - Our vans photoset on flickr. We'll be adding to this over the coming weeks:
Vans photoset Posted by Joseph Simpson on 13th February 2009

All images - Joseph Simpson. "Forky" electric delivery vehicle image - joint authorship with Florian Seidl - used with kind permission.
Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring The Movement Deisgn Bureau's design research work in 2009.

February 13, 2009 in Analysis, Auto, delivery vehicles, EVs, Ford, London, Observations, Sustainability, Technology, vans, Video | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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