UK powers up plans for world’s largest electric car trial

UK government’s £25m scheme to slash emissions from transport will allow public to take part in long-term trials of a range of electric cars

The UK government will today unveil the world’s largest ever coordinated trial of environmentally friendly vehicles. The £25m scheme, which is designed to accelerate the introduction of electric cars to the UK will allow people to take part in long-term trials of everything from electric Minis and Smart city cars to sports cars and electric vans.

From the end of this year, around 340 of the vehicles will be available to qualifying members of the public in eight different locations around the country including Oxford, London, Glasgow, Birmingham and the north-east. Power companies, regional development agencies and universities will also be involved in coordinating the experiments, building infrastructure such as charging points and analysing the way the cars are used.

“Here’s an opportunity to position the UK as a world leader in the adoption of this technology by supporting the largest ever trial of such vehicles,” said Paul Drayson, the science minister. “That encourages companies working in this field to do their research and development here. That knowledge generated by the trial then gets fed back to the follow-on systems that come through.”

Around 22% of the UK’s carbon emissions come from transport, with 13% of these from private cars. According to a study for the Department for Transport (DfT), widespread adoption of electric vehicles capable of a range of 50km or more could cut road transport carbon emissions in half.

“We have about 33m cars on the road at the moment and it’s going to go up by another 4-5m in the next 10 years,” said David Bott of the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the government-backed agency that promotes the development of new technologies and is coordinating the national demonstration project. “There’s a lot of people buying new cars anyway so the question is how quickly can we get credible alternatives out there?”

Moving the UK’s drivers onto cleaner forms of road transport would not be addressed by a single piece of technology, said Bott, and so the demonstration project had been designed to try out different cars in different places. “We get to find out what we can’t do and we get a whole bunch of new problems that are real. We get confidence that we’re on the right path or the knowledge that we need to change.”

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Tags: buying new cars, carbon emissions, city cars, electric cars, electric vehicles, Innovation, national demonstration project, smart city, sports cars

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy, The Guardian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.