2021-01-16 New Scientist

16 January 2021 | New Scientist | 23

F

OSSIL-fuel-powered cars
aren’t yet consigned to the
scrapheap, but they are fast
travelling down a one-way road
towards it.
The pandemic triggered dire
new car sales in the UK, which fell
by 29 per cent back to levels seen
in 1992, figures published last
week show. Yet sales of new, fully
electric cars bucked the trend,
rocketing by almost 186 per cent
to more than 108,000. That may
seem insignificant when you
consider more than 900,000
petrol ones were sold over the
same period, but look at the rate of
change. In the UK, more electric
cars were sold last year than in the
previous decade.
Motorists, like progressive
leaders and car makers, have
woken up to the fact that petrol
and diesel cars are on the way out,
destined to follow incandescent
light bulbs into history. It isn’t just
the UK: the boom is happening
across Europe. In Norway, long
a pioneer of carrots and sticks
to wean people off petrol and
diesel, electric models overtook
fossil fuels ones in 2020 for the
first time.
These tipping points matter.
Transport has eclipsed energy
to become the biggest carbon
emitter in the UK and many other
countries. We need this electric
boom if we are to stand any chance
of avoiding climate change’s
most devastating effects. Vehicle
emissions also harm and kill us
in the short term: witness the
MIinquest last month that found air
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Comment

Adam Vaughan is

New Scientist’s chief reporter.

@adamvaughan_uk

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pollution played a role in a 9-year-

old girl’s death.

Why are the changes coming

now? Some of it is down to specific

policies. The UK’s numbers were

turbocharged by the government

allowing firms to pay no company

car tax on electric cars from April

2020 to April 2021, compared

with the 20 to 37 per cent charged

on petrol and diesel cars. Most of

the plug-in cars sold last year

were company ones.

It is also about growing choice.

More new electrified models are

due in the UK this year than new

petrol or diesel ones, although

that does include plug-in hybrid

electric vehicles, which run a short

distance on a battery before

a combustion engine kicks in.

Strikingly, the UK’s bestselling

car last December wasn’t a

Volkswagen Golf or a Ford Fiesta,

but the electric Tesla Model 3,

which starts at £40,490.

Dieselgate – the revelation in

2015 that many Volkswagen cars

had been equipped with devices

that let them cheat exhaust

emissions tests – and fears over

diesel cars being charged to enter

towns and cities have already

hastened their demise. Recent

government pledges to ban new

petrol and diesel car sales, by 2030

in the UK’s case, signal to buyers

that petrol is heading downhill

too. New air pollution charging

zones, such as London’s expanded

Ultra Low Emission Zone

introduced in October, will

speed things up further.

All this is with electric cars

that use conventional lithium-ion

batteries, before any of the

advances in charging speed and

driving range promised by

breakthroughs from technologies,

such as solid-state batteries.

Yes, there are still bumps

in the road to overcome. The

number and speed of public

chargers need to increase.

Cars need to be charged at smart

times of day to avoid unnecessary

costs for energy networks (and

ultimately the consumers who pay

for them). However, none of the

challenges are insurmountable.

Of course, as cycling and

walking advocates will point

out, electric versions don’t solve

all of the problems that cars bring.

They still generate air pollution

from the tyre particles and road

dust that they throw up, and

we have no techno-fix for that.

So we need to get out of our cars

too, though – as my colleague

Graham Lawton has written –

that isn’t always easy. Yet given

last year’s torrent of bad news,

2020 marking the beginning

of the end for fossil fuel cars is

a moment worth celebrating.  ❚

Rise of the electric cars

2020 was the best ever year for electric cars. The days of fossil

fuel-powered vehicles are numbered, says Adam Vaughan