Articles
TransportEnergy debate: "a sustainable clean transport market"
Author: Toby Proctor
Publication Date: 25th June 2004
TransportEnergy round table debates "The Way Forward for a Sustainable Clean Transport Market";
The TransportEnergy division of the Energy Saving Trust held a round table discussion with key figures from the automotive industry and fleet operators on 22 June 2004 to sound their views on the priorities for future sustainable transport initiatives.
Round table Chairman Richard Tarboton, head of the EST’s TransportEnergy division and his colleague Alex Veitch, TransportEnergy’s Senior Transport Policy Analyst, invited contributions from:
- Stewart Whyte and Chris Chandler of consultancy Fleet Audits
- Trevor Fletcher, MD of the Hardstaff Group
- Michael Hawes, Head of Corporate and Government Affairs of Toyota Motors Europe
- Ian Blinder, Manager, Special Vehicles of Vauxhall Motors
- John Webb, National Fleet Manager of HM Customs & Excise
- Philip Dillon, Head of Engineering of the Suffolk Fire & Rescue Service
- Nigel Trotman, Business Relationship Manager of Whitbread Group,
- Malcolm Watson, Technican Director of the UK Petroleum Industry Association.
Fleet and haulage sector media were also invited, including www.autoindustry.co.uk’s representative.
Each invited representative of the vehicle manufacturer, fleet operator and industry sectors spoke in turn on issues relating to carbon emissions reduction, air quality, and alternative fuels:
CO2 reduction
John Webb, National Fleet Manager at HM Customs & Excise, responsible for 10,000 official drivers and a fleet comprising 8% alternative fuel vehicles, is a member of TransportEnergy’s Motorvate scheme which seeks to improve fuel economy performance among fleet drivers.
He stressed the cultural issues that fleet managers must reckon with in pursuing environmental objectives when business car users are allowed a choice of vehicle; a point echoed by Whitbread Group’s Nigel Trotman, who said his company’s user-chooser company car drivers were "almost like retail customers". Whitbread had, however, increased the diesel proportion of its company car fleet to 80% from 20% in five years, aided by the attraction of some ‘green’ cars to user-choosers – two Honda Civic IMA petrol-electric hybrids on the Whitbread fleet had been selected by their drivers.
Ian Blinder of Vauxhall noted General Motors’ commitment to putting fuel cell vehicles on the market by 2010 – and while numbers were still uncertain, he hoped they would be at least in the 100s. Meanwhile, Vauxhall and GM as a whole had to market vehicles that used whatever the best fuel might be in specific markets – there was no global regulatory regime to support clean vehicle technology.
Trevor Fletcher, Managing Director of Hardstaff Group, emphasised the achievements of fleets deploying dual fuel vehicles in reducing LCV and car CO2 output by 22%, and mentioned trials of a 44-tonne truck at Millbrook Proving Ground showing a capability of reducing CO2 output per vehicle by 50 tonnes pa – an impressive but little-publicised achievement, given that heavy trucks could run for 90,000 miles a year at around 8 mpg.
Stewart Whyte, the managing director of consultancy Fleet Audits, urged the need for fiscal stability and cohesive action in respect of sustainable tax incentives to adopt environmentally sound procurement policies mentioning, and mentioned the forthcoming reductions in the duty reduction for LPG as a significant disincentive. Fiscal policies governing fuel, said Whyte, should be planned in terms of decades rather than single years, given that average fleet replacement cycles were now four years, and decisions on vehicle purchase affected fleet composition for seven-eight years ahead.
In particular, he said the recent freeze on PowerShift grants had "destroyed 50% of whatever trust there was out there" in the consistency of government policy on environmental transport incentives. Ian Blinder added that companies needed anything up to nine months to make fuel-based vehicle procurement decisions.
Blinder contrasted the UK fiscal regime unfavourably with some other countries’ longer-term initiatives, including German fiscal policies and an Australian fuel tax regime due to expire only in 2012. Germany had also shown a greater awareness of the need for alternative fuel vehicles to be supported by an infrastructure that did not penalise operators, from day one – it had plans in place to grow the number of German natural gas refuelling stations from 450 in 2004 to 1,000 by 2007.
Several speakers claimed a need for greater public awareness of the advantages of alternative fuels, and Hardstaff Group’s Trevor Fletcher asked for firm policy statements from government that could provide better guidance on the direction of the fuels market.
The danger of picking winners
While Toyota had had to develop different powertrains to meet specific markets’ clean transport specifications, Michael Hawes warned against the Government seeking to pick winners among competing technologies – it should, he believed, reward emissions reduction performance rather than single out a particular fuel for preferential treatment.
Public education
Suffolk Fire & Rescue’s head of engineering Philip Dillon lamented the fact that "young people were blind to new fuel technologies" – as the shortage of skilled technicians indicated, environmental transport issues were not part of the educational mainstream. Indeed, Suffolk Fire & Rescue had no maintenance staff capable of fixing any failures that might occur if it ran Toyota Prius hybrid cars. "In the long term,", he believed, "the best way of influencing us fleet managers will be through our children."
Air quality
Most contributors considered the control of air quality at vehicle level – the original objective behind PowerShift and CleanUp grant aid for alternative fuel vehicles – largely a job completed. Successive ‘Euro’ standards had already had a huge impact on air quality. Suffolk Fire Service’s Philip Dillon suggested further solutions to urban air quality problems in Britain’s 26 designated air quality management areas should be simple, and based on infrastructure control, including vehicle access restrictions and perhaps congestion charging. But more than one speaker noted that low emissions zones would no longer be effective, since legislation had already reduced most vehicles’ noxious emissions to a minimum.
The scale of the CO2 problem
Assessing future road transport carbon-related policy issues, round table speakers agreed there was a near-insuperable problem in reconciling the legacy of a fossil-fuelled, private car-based infrastructure with the problems inherent in developing a hydrogen-based transport economy. One speaker recalled an estimated cost of $1 million per hydrogen refuelling station.
Stewart Whyte of Fleet Audits said "the genie could not be put back in the bottle", and queried the sense of a system that preserved individuals’ inalienable right to travel – "what kind of sense does long distance commuting make?" he asked, adding that governments saw growth of car ownership as ‘a badge of office’, but effectively told the car-buying electorate to "Own it, but don’t use it."
Ross Durkin, Editor of Fleet World magazine, urged that CO2 reduction policy should be removed from the political arena, but also suggested that the chances of establishing a consistent fiscal policy for emissions reduction were practically zero.
Stewart Whyte added, "We can’t just focus on individual vehicles when vehicle demand is increasing." He suggested, too, that awareness of potential solutions for CO2 reduction in the UK were overshadowed by people’s perception of the USA as the biggest source of global warming; alongside the USA, the UK was only a ‘bit player’ in the Kyoto stakes. And he said policy must also contend with public awareness that two-thirds of CO2 emissions came from sources other than road transport: "Governments seem to be less willing to attack people in their homes the way they attack them in their cars."
Summing up the discussion, TransportEnergy’s Richard Tarboton said he had been left in no doubt of the panellists’ concerted view that Government needed to commit to consistent, long-term policies to support alternative fuel adoption, and of its conviction that public education and an improved engineering skills base were both needed to support further transport CO2 reduction.
On air quality, Tarboton noted the priority was now to deal with emissions principally from taxis and buses, while further emissions reduction would need, besides sustainable legislative policy, a stronger alternative fuels infrastructure; strategic investment in public transport; and from the manufacturers, a more glamorous image for hybrid-electric cars.
Added to the database on 25th June 2004
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