Government electric car targets 'unrealistic'

THE GOVERNMENT’S target to have 250,000 electrically powered cars on Irish roads by 2020 has been dismissed as “unrealistic” by Ford’s European director of research and development into alternative fuels.

Norwegian Jan Brentebraten, who was in Dublin this week, said that “post recession”, from 2012 at the earliest, Irish motorists would need to buy at least 30,000 cars a year on average for seven or eight years to even come close to the target.

But he said there were twin difficulties with this project. The first is that electrically powered vehicles were still significantly more expensive than conventional vehicles, and convincing motorists to switch without major supports in terms of subsidies and tax concessions was unlikely.

Secondly, he said new developments in next-generation internal combustion engines had already seen emission rates as low as 98g/km – lower than the early Toyota Prius – and further developments in stop/start technology, which allows engines to cease using fuel while stopped in traffic, coupled with improvements in engine design, improvements to tyre and car design and driver behaviour, had the potential to offer “nearly as good” emissions reductions at a fraction of the cost of electric-car incentives.

He said he envisaged a different “flight path” in the move to electric cars, and he believed the Government would see the economics of the argument in the short term. “Wouldn’t you,” he asked, “when you see improvements of 50 to 60 per cent could be made on 10 per cent of the cost, especially in these economic times?”

But he said he believed the future of cars was “absolutely electric vehicles” because of the ongoing difficulties with oil security. Electricity as a power source was almost everywhere, he said, and the infrastructure was relatively simple.