The move towards hybrid and electric-powered cars in Ireland is continuing but at a pace that Government and EU bodies, as well as climate change activists, consider far too slow.

Sales of diesel cars are falling rapidly as new hybrid and electric car options come on the market, with the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) figures showing a 22% drop in diesel car sales so far this year compared with 2018 (Table 1).

Where are these car buyers going to? The indications are that electric hybrid and electric cars are starting to make inroads into the market.

The latest figures show that so far this year sales of new-generation electric and hybrid cars soared by to 8,531 units from just over 5,000 last year, now accounting for over 8% of the new car market and rising.

Used imports of electric and hybrid cars are also increasing, which confirms that this relatively new technology is being well received with some confidence. The last SIMI figures show that over 2,900 used electric and hybrid cars were imported for the first four months of 2019, a 51% increase on last year. That means that there are almost 15,500 additional electric/hybrid cars on our roads this year.

Electric and hybrid cars are now a real option for Irish drivers but some things need to change. The range anxieties haven’t gone away but they are being tackled which means that cars such as the Hyundai Kona electric and Nissan Leaf, can be a realistic commuter cars for the typical rural driver. Nissan has registered 602 versions of the full electric Leaf car this year compared with 194 last year, and that speaks for itself.

The changes needed to increase the electric car uptake include many more additional charging points as a priority. We hear that shops such as Lidl are moving to install charging points in their car-parking areas. There is a greater need in other smaller towns across the country. And why not have charging points at all areas where people gather in numbers, whether they are sporting events or marts?

Go to any rural town of reasonable size and you’ll be lucky if there is charging capacity for more than two cars at a time. That’s hardly good enough if we are to take on board the targets for electric car use.

Target

There were over 2.7m cars on Irish roads in 2018, up by almost 42,000 on the previous year. If setting a target of even 10% conversion to electric cars that means replacing some 270,000 cars with electric versions and we simply don’t have the charging network to accommodate them. This is especially evident in rural towns and villages.

If the Government is serious about encouraging us to change, a few serious incentives must be put in place. These could start with even more attractive vehicle registration tax (VRT) rates that act as a real incentive for change. That’s because hybrid and electric cars are still more expensive to buy in many cases then their diesel counterparts.

Other than the Renault Zoe electric, most other electric car entry prices start at over €30,000.

Hybrids are more modest, including the likes of the Toyota Yaris, and for them the range anxiety is eliminated while the contribution to lowering CO2 is probably less because these hybrid cars don’t force us enough to adopt new driving habits.

The other change has to be to ourselves. Moving from diesel driving to driving a hybrid or electric car demands a change in driving style.

The nature of diesel engines allow us to compensate for certain driving styles, that will not be as kind to our motoring running costs if we transfer them without change especially to hybrid cars.

That’s because most hybrid cars use petrol engines as their main on-demand power source.

Petrol engines don’t take kindly to high-rev driving. They will perform in a smoother way to diesel engines but at a cost.

Petrol is still more expensive than diesel at the pumps.

On a like-for-like basis, diesel engines will also be about 20% more economical, especially if driven at higher speeds. So we need to change our driving styles to take account of a new world driving regime.

That change comes to the fore most, especially when we drive full electric cars or want to achieve economy with plug-in hybrid (PHEV) cars.

Journey planning takes on a new meaning for us with that change, especially with the relatively few public charging points across the country.

The changeover

The truth is that we can change and we will change when we see value in the change and that’s beginning to show now.

We also need high torque and high towing ability diesel for many farming applications, especially trailer towing.

So let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to legislating for a cleaner driving future.

We need a more positive incentive rather than additional penal taxes for those people who will continue to need the value of diesel power, which in itself is almost 100% cleaner than diesel power of the past.