Renewable energy holds key to CO2 battle, says BMW chief
The UK Government needs to speed up investment in renewables so the push for electric vehicles does not simply shift CO2 emissions from cars to power stations, according to a senior BMW boss.
Ian Robertson, also chairman of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and a former managing director of Land Rover Vehicles, said there were a number of pressing issues for national governments to resolve before electric cars could become a mass-market way of reducing CO2 from transport.
Speaking ahead of his appearance at Aston University’s Green Growth conference on Wednesday (July 21), the Shropshire-born BMW sales and marketing director said governments needed to make sure electric cars lived up to their green credentials by running on renewably generated power.
Mr Robertson, who started his career as a Rover Group graduate trainee, was the first Briton to join BMW’s board when he was appointed in 2008.
He urged more action in greening the UK power supply. “The UK is making good strides in renewables but it’s not enough. It needs to have more if we are to resolve the CO2 question in the long term. The majority of European power stations – and there are plenty in the UK – are coal-fired and coal-fired produces a lot of CO2.
“Clearly the challenge for industry and for society is that we want to reduce CO2 and that has to be CO2 in general, rather than just the car industry.
“If we shift it from one form of CO2, be it the exhaust fumes from cars to the exhaust fumes from power stations, not much changes.”
European governments also need to address other basic issues, such as developing a common plug across the continent and standardising voltage requirements, he said.
“We would like one common plug across the world but let’s try and make it a bit easier – one in Asia, one in America and one in Europe.
“No governments are actually getting their heads round this yet. At the same time the voltage requirements are not common either.’’
Like other car firms, BMW is investing in a broad approach to bringing down CO2 emissions from its cars, including work on conventional combustion engines as well as on hybrid, electric and hydrogen drive systems. Over the past 18 months it has been conducting trials with its electric Mini test car to understand how consumers use the cars, feeding into the development of future electric vehicles.
It plans to launch its own fully electric car – the Megacity Vehicle – in 2013.Mr Robertson said bringing down emissions from its fleet of conventional cars was also a key part of its strategy.
“We believe that even in the next 10 years, fully electric vehicles will be a relatively small part of any market – not just in the UK but anywhere in the world.
“They will be subject to some form of government motivation, whether it be taxation policy or some sort of allowances which could stimulate one way or the other.
“But the majority of cars are still going to be petrol or diesel and we as a company believe we need to continue to drive down the CO2, move up the fuel economy and preserve the power characteristics of our vehicles, which is why people buy BMWs or Minis or Rolls-Royces.”
Recognising that electric vehicles need some kind of push to build up the market, the previous Labour government had promised a £5,000 subsidy for buyers of plugin cars from next year.
But the new Government has been non-committal on whether it will maintain this incentive, leading some big car firms working on electric cars to voice concerns about the attractiveness of the UK market.
Mr Robertson said: “Uncertainty on an agenda is something obviously that is a concern.
“The one thing that we would also say is that the electric vehicles that are now in development are relatively expensive compared to conventional petrol and diesel cars.
“A consumer needs to have some motivation. There are other ways of providing that in some form of tax relief, but that type of stimulant is required particularly at the early stages of a new technology.”
