The future of the UK Motor Industry raises some interesting issues but before we can consider this, we first need to look at the current situation.
The SMMT, the trade body for the UK motor industry suggests that the industry contributes £202 billion directly and indirectly to the economy. Whether or not you accept this exact figure, it is beyond dispute that the industry contributes significantly to the economy when you consider research and development, logistics, retail and distribution, finance, insurance, fuel and maintenance. The SMMT website suggests that 200,000 people in the UK are employed in new car retail, the vehicle fuel industry supports 40,000 jobs and more than 340,000 work in vehicle servicing and repair.
But the UK motor industry is currently in difficulty. In 2021, Honda will close its only UK factory in Swindon. There are concerns over the Nissan plant in Sunderland and a collaboration with Suzuki will see a larger number of vehicles being produced at the currently under-used Toyota plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire. Concern over the fate of the motor industry in the UK is nothing new. I remember the almost constant stream of bad news from British Leyland over the 30 years from its initial collapse and nationalisation in 1975 until its administration in 2005. This brought to an end to mass production of cars by British-owned manufacturers.
In the UK today, the foreign companies producing cars at a large scale are predominantly Japanese. The Japanese manufacturers took advantage of government incentives to invest in the UK because it offered a relatively benign financial environment from which to produce cars for the European market. The European Union meant that parts and finished vehicles could cross internal borders quickly and tariff-free, facilitating just-in-time assembly. The departure of the UK from the European Union will, inevitably, increase the challenges faced by the UK manufacturing plants at a time when vehicle manufacturing is experiencing significant difficulties across the world due to over-production and failure to anticipate some significant shifts in customer demand.
The complete demise of the motor industry in the UK is unlikely to be imminent but are the difficulties experienced as much of a problem as the government and the media imply?
Clearly, if we look at the use of cars, vans and trucks in the context of the climate emergency, the end of the motor industry as it currently appears cannot come too soon. The 40 million cars, vans and trucks on our roads are major users of fossil fuels and contribute around one third of our greenhouse gas emissions. As we already know, we cannot continue to extract, refine and use fossil fuels if we are to avoid climate breakdown. But they also consume large amounts of energy: in the extraction and refinement of the raw materials needed to build the vehicles; in the transport of parts across vast distances to meet the demands of just-in-time manufacturing; and in vehicle building itself.
We also need to factor in the raw materials. Most of the materials used in vehicle manufacture are finite and until relatively recently, few were or could be recycled. The situation improved with the Directive on End-of Life Vehicles which, in the year 2000, introduced the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility. This puts some of the responsibility for the product at the end of its life on the manufacturer. The Directive aims to reduce the waste arising from end-of-life vehicles but it is limited to passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, so resource intensive heavy goods vehicles do not have to comply. From 1 January 2007 the Directive covered all vehicles a given producer has ever introduced in the market-place.
Motor vehicles are also implicated in causing pollution other than carbon dioxide emissions. The air quality in our towns and cities ranges from poor to toxic. Although London is often singled out for criticism, all major cities across the UK suffer from poor air quality, particularly, it seems, in the vicinity of our schools. Our veneration of the car together with our fear of harm to our children paradoxically leads to us poisoning our children and ourselves with the noxious gases that arise from burning fossil fuels in our car engines as we drive them to school. And the pollution effects are much worse when we and our children are inside our cars and in a queue of stationary traffic! We could be in a position where the life-expectancy of our children is less than we enjoy.
Electric vehicles are the favoured solution of both government and the motor industry. While a move to electric vehicles is to be welcomed if it removes some of the pollution from our streets, it only addresses one aspect of the problem with our car use. The emission of carbon dioxide and other gases from vehicle tail-pipes will be eliminated but if a high proportion of these new cars are powered with electricity generated using fossil fuels, we are just shifting this part of the problem from the streets to the power stations. Only if the vehicles are powered using electricity from renewable sources do we remove much of the carbon dioxide and the particulates. But some of the particulate pollution arising from cars and other vehicles comes from the brakes, the tyres and the road surface, an issue that moving to electric vehicles will not overcome.
Neither does a move to an electric vehicle fleet address the impact of resource use in the manufacture and disposal of the vehicles. In fact, electric vehicles add another layer of complexity with the need for batteries that require large quantities of scarce minerals. And appropriate large-scale facilities for recycling these batteries do not yet exist.
We have a highly developed infrastructure for refuelling our existing vehicle fleet and although some progress has been made in installing charging points on the motorway network and in some towns and cities, there is still more to do. Disruption from installing the cabling necessary to meet the need for additional charging points does not appear to have been factored into the move to an electric vehicle fleet.
In addition, if we simply substitute vehicles driven by internal combustion engines for similar vehicles with electric motors, we will do nothing to address the problem of congestion in our towns and cities and on our motorway and trunk road network. As the number of cars and other vehicles on our roads increases year on year, journey times increase and frustration builds as people sit in traffic queues. Even if the climate emergency allowed for it, building more roads is not the answer due to “induced demand” where the increasing supply of a commodity (in this case roads) makes people want even more of it.
With this catalogue of challenges caused by the demand for personal transport in the form of the car, is the contraction of car manufacturing in the UK such a problem? Or should we be looking at this as an opportunity to disrupt the UK motor industry? I do not know what the next generation of personal transport is going to look like. I certainly do not think it will just be a question of substituting the existing car fleet for a similar one powered by electric motors as neither situation is sustainable. This is a time that calls for re-imagining our need for our chosen modes of transport and the infrastructure associated with them.
Individuals can take action to avoid some of the problems associated with climate breakdown. One of the most effective is to avoid owning or using a car. The average car in the UK travels 7,900 miles a year and for much of its life, it is parked. The annual carbon dioxide emissions associated with owning the car and running it is 2.4 tonnes. If you consider that the average individual carbon footprint in the UK is about 14 tonnes and the government target is 10.5 tonnes, going car-free could make a considerable impact.
But, in common with many of the problems associated with climate breakdown, the solutions are not all down to individuals.
The closure of the Honda’s Swindon plant is a massive blow to the people who work there. But the nature of car manufacturing has changed over recent years so that many of these people are now highly skilled engineers who have much to offer other industries. This is surely an opportunity for the government to invest in the area, promoting, for example, the manufacture of solar panels or wind turbines; green refrigerators or the next generation of transport system designed to overcome the issues with our current generation of cars, vans and trucks.
It is up to government to set the policy framework and to provide the right economic environment for the necessary changes to take place. We need a government that is not fixated on a single issue but which grasps the magnitude of the climate emergency we face and is willing to make the major policy changes that will allow us to avoid climate breakdown.