Richard Jones and Greg Chambers on Radio 4: An Insight into The Present and Future State of The Electric Car Industry

In a recent Radio 4 interview, our Managing Director, Richard Jones from EV Camel and Greg Archer from Clean Vehicles & Energy provided a detailed insight into the electric vehicle industry in the UK.

In the UK, the popularity of Electric Vehicles has reached a record high in 2018. Manufacturers and electric vehicle society members are boasting that as much as 1 in 12 new cars in the UK is electric.

Furthermore, approximately 80,000 new charging points will be needed to meet the market demand by 2020, as the UK currently has only 17,000 charging points.

Richard Jones, our Managing Director of EV Camel, which installs electric vehicle charging points for the private and public sector in Lincolnshire offered an insight into the rapidly growing electric vehicle industry:

“At the moment there’s Government support for charging points in the workplace and at home, but there’s no Government support for publicly available charging points.”

Focusing on the lack of support from the Government, Richard Jones continued to elaborate the immediate effect this has on business:

“As a result, business owners, for example, hotels and so forth are struggling to have the confidence to invest in charging points, when they just don’t know when they will see a return on their investment… It may be a few years away – very much a chicken and egg situation, in that people won’t invest until there’s the cars and the cars won’t come until there’s a charging point network. It’s a matter of trying to bridge that gap.” – Richard Jones.

The Brussels based sustainable transport organization Transport & Environment have recently released a report analysing the number of charging points in Europe.

Greg Archer, the Director of Clean Vehicles and a member of the Transport & Environment group, addressed the issue of there not being enough charging points in rural areas throughout the UK:

“It is certainly the case that we continue the need to increase the amount of charging points. At the moment, there is around 1 re-charging point for every 8 electric cars in the UK. That is a good ratio – as good as any other European country and they are being installed all the time.”

Greg Archer confirmed that the distribution of electric vehicle charging points is not evenly spread between urban and rural areas due to the difference in usage rates. Charging points are mostly used at home, work or along highways, but with the ever-increasing popularity of electric vehicles, the amount of charging points is set to increase in rural areas as well based on demand.

Drawing from the contrast in electric vehicle policies between the UK and the Netherlands, Greg Archer was asked to elaborate on the strong European policies to shift to electric vehicles in some of the European countries:

“The Dutch have very strong policies to encourage people to shift to electric vehicles. High taxes on people buying conventional cars for example. They have highest shares in new electric cars, except Norway.

I think what the Dutch case shows, is if the vehicles come, businesses will invest into recharging networks because there will be a good business case to do so.”

According to Greg, the tipping point for the electric vehicle industry may be the early 2020’s, as it is expected that there will be a substantial increase in electric vehicle quantities. By 2035 it is expected that there will be no more new combustion engine powered vehicles.

Don’t miss out on the action – listen to the full Radio 4 interview today.

Are you ready to go electric? If you wish to invest in your own green future, please get in touch with us at EV Camel!