20 pledges for 2020: Could cheaper oil prices delay the shift to electric cars?

Will cheaper oil prices or concern for the planet have a bigger impact on our decision-making in relation to cars in the coming months, asks Sean O'Grady

(Getty)

Britain sounds and smells different, does it not? The quiet roads, the clean air, hedgehog nirvana...Yet we know it can’t last.

This week the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), the main industry body, reported that the number of vehicles on our roads had reached a record 40.4 million in 2019. That’s rather more than one for everyone with a driving licence. Some 35 million of them are cars, the rest an increasing number of vans and 607,008 lorries, the highest in 30 years.

Their numbers are in part boosted by the rise of online shopping (which will probably see a step change upwards after the lockdown has passed). They’re not moving much now, most of them, but they’ll be back.

The recent extremely weak oil price will mean cheaper oil and diesel, which won’t help the electric cause. Petrolheads have their eyes on that 6 litre twelve cylinder used Bentley Continental GT they’ve always lusted after (I’ve some sympathy there).

The SMMT say that only 92,913 of the total UK “parc” as the trade calls it, are pure electric vehicles - battery-only rather than hybrids also running an internal combustion engine; 0.2 per cent.

Electric vehicle sales enjoyed a brief boomlet in the brief space between the Chancellor’s Budget, which pre-announced cuts in subsidies, and the lock down. Sales of everything have now collapsed.

Yet when we all go back to normal driving - statistically most likely in a black eight-year old Ford Fiesta - we will also go back to spewing out CO2 and generating vast amounts of vroomy din, but this latest global shock might just persuade us of a couple of things.

First, that it doesn’t have to be this way, and the electric car (and delivery van) means we can have our cake (personal mobility) and eat it (clean air, peaceful streets).

Second, more abstrusely, we might consider where the next planet-wide disaster is going to come from. In fact, it was possible to see the approach of the financial crisis of 2008, the waves of war and terror, and the various pandemics of the twenty first century, including this one, and to have done something about them. There were signs and warnings.

You can see where I’m heading with this can’t you? I’m sorry to be so obvious, but the climate emergency is the next disaster, except that it is already just about upon us. Terrified as we may be now, we can’t allow ourselves to forget about that.