Part of London Motor Week every year are the motoring lectures, which take place in the days leading up to the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. They’re always very educational, combining a look into the future of the car with a view to history.
This year, the theme was “From EV to AI: Is this Evolution, or Revolution, in Motoring?”
Mike Hawes, SMMT
First up was Mike Hawes, CEO of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the UK’s SIMI and he always has interesting things to say.
He was quite bullish about the future prospects for the industry, pointing out that the OE supplier’ side is actually bigger than the total value of finished vehicles produced in the UK. The numbers have fallen recently from around 1.7 million to around 1 million vehicles this year, mainly on account of losing Honda and the move by Jaguar to the upper echelons of the market. Jaguar have just announced that they will stop production of their F-Type so amazing as it may seem, there will be no new Jaguars on sale for almost two years.
Nevertheless, investment is strong, with £22bn committed last year, indicating a recovery from the uncertainties of Brexit.
There’s still a need to upskill for electric vehicles, even though the move to EVs has slowed. In order to achieve the target of net zero by 2050, most zero emissions vehicles need to be on the road by 2035 and on current trends, that’s not going to happen, particularly as growth in the market has plateaued for now at least.
Mike wasn’t overly concerned about a potential flood of Chinese cars. He reckoned that they’re cheaper, but not cheap and they need to build up brand awareness. Besides, quite a few traditional brands and importing Chinese-built cars.
New car sales are driven mainly by fleets and even though there are considerable tax benefits for company purchased EVs, it’s still necessary for the industry to subsidise EV sales. Additional proposals made by the industry to encourage the switch to EVs include halving the VAT on EVs for the next three years and moving to a 5% VAT rate for on-street charging, to match the rate charged for domestic charging.
EVs suffer from heavy depreciation as the technology settles, so for most private buyers, ICE, that is petrol or diesel cars, are still cheaper to run overall, particularly as 40% of owners in the UK don’t have access to off-street parking and so would have difficulty charging from home.
Erin Baker, Motoring Journalist
Motoring journalist, Erin Baker was next up, on the topic of EVs and again we were told that growth was stagnating and private sales had ground to a halt, with manufacturers trying to figure out how to reach new EV owners now that the early adopter market has been satisfied.
By 2028, EV sales need to be at 52% of the market and they’re now at 17%. In the last couple of years, there have been a huge number of new models launched, with an average range of 275 miles, which should be adequate for most needs.
Because of tax breaks, 22% of business fleets are EV, yet only 9% of the private fleet is powered by electricity. EVs are on average 31% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, with only 16 electric cars on sale for under £30,000, with a median price of £51,000. On average, each EV has to be discounted by 11%.
Barriers cited to buying an EV include the cost of on-street charging and the lack of home charging, both leading to unclear running costs. Other, perhaps less credible reasons, include car fires, long queues at chargers, insurance costs, EVs not being cheaper to run or more environmentally friendly and the risk of ageing multi-storey car parks collapsing under the weight of battery cars. This has been comprehensively debunked.
Currently, 82% of EV users charge at home and interestingly, women in particular say they don’t know enough about EVs to buy one with confidence and research has shown they generally don’t read car magazines or watch videos on the subject. Nevertheless, once they do take the plunge, 80% would go on to buy another EV and recommend one to a friend, which in a lot of ways, is the easiest way to speed up adoption.
Jamie Hodson, Oxa
Jamie Hodson was the next speaker, from a company called Oxa, who write software for autonomous vehicles, so they’re at the cutting edge of AI.
Some of the products they’ve worked on and are out on trials in America, include autonomous shuttles, designed for 10 passengers and used on college campuses, shopping centres and airports. Currently, these shuttles have a driver to oversee the process but that may change in the future. The lack of a driver will bring other issues. What happens if elderly or disabled passengers need help? Do you have a helper on each shuttle or at each sation? These are the issues that are going to have to be grappled with before all this autonomous tech can take off.
I was fascinated to learn that in the UK, an Automated Vehicles Act was only proposed in this year, so there’s no expectation of regulations until at least 2027. It brings up the thorny question of what exactly is an automated vehicle and the perhaps surprising answer is that an AV is a new kind of road user, not just a new type of vehicle.
Self driving brings new responsibilities and once the vehicle takes on the driving task, the driver is no longer responsible. The AV, as a separate legal entity, is. The company who produce or operate the AV become legally responsible and given that there are penalities of up to 14 years in jail for bad actors, AV is most likely going to be restricted to public transport, which can be better controlled.
A further problem is that lots of electrical power is needed to power all this tech, with some suggestions of up to 40kW. This level of power would severely reduce the range of a standard electric car.
Eman Martin-Vignerte, Bosch
Eman Martin-Vignerte, from supplier Bosch, spoke on much the same topic and declared her colours very quickly with a typical engineers’ statement that she didn’t care whether the technology was ICE or EV – just give the motor industry targets to meet and let them get on with it.
ICE cars are inherently more complicated, with typically over 600 components versus the nine modules of an EV that deal with power. EVs typically have very high efficiency and to make the most of that, they need low weight and excellent aerodynamics to maximise range.
The challenges for AI and self driving in cars start with data collection, which the vehicle needs to sync with its surrounds. Additionally, and something I hadn’t thought about, that data needs to be compared with data from other sources to ensure that it’s accurate. Currently, that probably means data created by Google or Microsoft.
Of course, all this data needs to be processed and the amount of processing needed is significant and will only increase in the future. We’ll need to move from our current binary computers to edge and quantum computing, both of which are largely theoretical at the moment, so there’s lots of work to be done.
The amount of code to do all this is estimated at around 300 billion lines and the only way for all this to work is to separate or decouple the software from the hardware, allowing these centralised architectures to be deployed across a wide range of vehicles.
The surprising thing I took from this talk is that the task is too big for any one supplier and there will need to be collaboration between multiple companies so, for example, one company would be responsible for controlling the suspension or steering, with these sytems being presented as a black box to other systems in the vehicle.
Going back to the penalties for company directors getting things wrong and with multiple companies involved in automated vehicles, I reckon the only ones who will make money from all this will be the lawyers.
It was a fascinating morning overall but I was disappointed that there was no mention of alternative technologies such as eFuels or Hydrogen. At the moment, the production costs of eFuels far exceed those of conventional fossil fuels but if the technology could benefit from the same level of investment enjoyed by electric vehicles, I’m sure production costs could be greatly reduced and production ramped up to make this a viable solution, which would slot in neatly and not force ICE cars needlessly off the road.
The second half of the lectures, dealing with historic matters, is coming soon.
Read about the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run with pictures here.
