LAST ROLL OF THE ICE

As experts start to question the wisdom of all-out electrification, Hilton Holloway makes the economic and environmental case for keeping combustion cars on the road

- Hilton Holloway

As a tumultuous 2022 drew to a close, the move towards mass adoption of EVs in Europe was taking something of a battering.

Instead of falling, battery prices were rising. Analysts suggested there could be a 400% growth in global demand for lithium by 2030, while attempts to open big new lithium mines in Portugal and Nevada, US, were being frustrated by environmental campaigners.

The prices of EVs of the kind that replace a typical combustion-engine car were also being seen as a significant hurdle to uptake.

In the UK, the Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC), a government agency, revised down its estimate for UK EV production in 2025 by around 25%. It now thinks just 280,000 EVs will be made here, down from its previous estimate of 360,000 units. The APC blamed an "uncertain" economy that would push more buyers towards cheaper ICE cars.

Over in the US, investment bank Morgan Stanley also pulled back on its estimates of market penetration for EVS, predicting that 11% of new cars in 2025 would be EVs (down from 13% before) and 26% in 2030 (down from 32%).

But one of the more interesting arguments against the dash to EVs came from the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), which works as a research centre for the European Union Convention, a body that represents all European trade unions at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Released just before Christmas, the 68-page report was entitled 'Heavier, Faster and Less Affordable Cars'.

The ETUI accused EU regulatory policies of pushing car makers towards bigger and more powerful vehicles (dubbed "regulatory upmarket drift") when "the imperative of reducing CO2 emissions should have encouraged lighter, less powerful and more affordable cars".

Between 2001 and 2020, it claimed, the mass of the average new European car increased by 15%, engine power by 43% and price by 60%.