Hybrid cars defeat official greenhouse gas figures subtly so nobody notices. Their fuel consumption is two-and-a-half to three times higher than bureaucrats think. Hybrids emit more CO2 than petrol cars, which don’t have such burdensome batteries, so the government ban in 2035 should be no surprise. What’s missing is some encouragement for fuel cell and hydrogen research, or new technology to replace them. Pure electric cars with banks of recharging points won’t. Hybrids are fraudulent as dieselgate VWs.
Paul Hollick, managing director of TMC, which has done an audit on fleet users said: “There is a real risk that drivers are adopting hybrids for the right reasons but unknowingly increase their fuel bills. On the evidence of our sample, one has to question whether some hybrids ever see a charging cable. In a lot of cases, we see them never being charged and doing longer drives.”
The problem is not so much technology as the way legislation has been framed. Official figures are compiled on the basis that hybrid cars are plugged in to charging points so don’t rely entirely on their petrol engines to top up the batteries. This is the same difficulty I demonstrated in Scotland on Sunday, testing a then-revolutionary Toyota Prius in 2003. Its official combined fuel consumption was 65.7mpg yet I could manage only 46mpg over 1300 miles. Its petrol engine was a feeble 4-cylinder, inadequate for pushing a broad-shouldered saloon at any speed, so it had to work hard.
The Prius was not a plug-in hybrid and Toyota complained that I had used it on motorways, which was true. I had driven it to Scotland but that accounted for less than half my 1300 miles. What I did point out was the discrepancy between the government-sponsored “official” fuel consumption, against what you got in the real world. There had been wishful connivance between officialdom’s anxiety to please the green lobby and practicality. The plain truth I wrote: “It is accomplished technology. You can follow it on a monitor screen, which shows power going to the front wheels from the petrol engine, or the electric one, or both at once. It is not especially swift. It is slower than a 1.4 Ford Focus but its CO2 output puts it in the lowest tax category.
“The facia monitor shows fuel used every five minutes. One column gives an instantaneous read-out, so downhill goes off the scale at 100mpg because the petrol engine is shut down. Labouring uphill it collapses to 25mpg. Ambling along on the level, it registers 50mpg, then goes up to 60mpg cruising at 50mph. Its best was 95mpg driving slowly with the electric engine helping.”
It all reminded me of another technical breakthrough, the Wankel rotary piston engine of the 1960s, which was just such an industrial cul de sac. Wankels went into production with NSU, licences were obtained by Curtiss-Wright, Daimler-Benz, Deutz, Rolls-Royce, MAN, Krupp, Fichtel & Sachs, and BMC. Citroën planned the GS of 1970 with a Wankel engine. Lots of people got over-excited. Small, light, minimalist engines, they spun like tiny turbines but they had two drawbacks. Problematical rotor seals made them unreliable, and fuel consumption was like the bath running out, especially going fast. I drove a splendidly aerodynamic NSU Ro80 down the then-new Autoroutes to a Monaco Grand Prix before the days of credit card readiness and had to send for money to pay the petrol.
It came as a shock last week when the government announced that hybrid car sales would stop in 2035. They are no more cars of the future than battery-electrics, prevented by immutable laws of chemistry and physics, from providing a usable range. Lots of charging points are not the answer. Wireless charging might be, but better surely to look elsewhere.
Big hydrogen-production plants are some way off, yet every major manufacturer has researched fuel cells. Ford, Daimler and Chrysler took stakes in Canadian Ballard Power systems, the fuel cell developer. General Motors has shown its Hy-Wire concept vehicle but even this managed only 94kW (126bhp). VW and BMW were among Europeans who once felt that if you were going to have hydrogen available, it was best used in internal combustion engines like we already had. I drove a hydrogen BMW in the 1990s and it worked much like any other BMW. Fuel was in a pressure tank like LPG. A fleet of hydrogen-powered BMWs clocked up 125,000 miles in 2001 offering motoring much as we always did.
Instead now let us develop the work of Welsh scientist and justice of the peace Sir William Grove who, in 1839, discovered how to produce electricity from an electro-chemical reaction between hydrogen and air. His “gas battery” only became feasible in 1955 when General Electric’s Willard Grubb and Leonard Niedrach produced their hydrogen-and-oxygen fuelled, proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell used by NASA to generate power for Gemini in the 1960s. A Hyundai Nexo fuel cell car now has a range of some 500 miles, over twice that of any pure-battery electric car.
In 2011 I applauded a Honda topping up at a hydrogen filling station in Swindon. Now somebody needs to calculate its long-term benefits. Hydrogen cars would mean less dependence on oil, cleaner air, and they would be as smooth and silent as anything conceived by Lanchester or Royce. Spending billions encouraging them would gain approval from environmentalists, left-wing subsidy junkies and practical-minded pragmatic engineers.
TOP PICTURE: Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) for the Brecon Beacons National Park. Wardens work daily maintaining public rights of way and footpaths over 20,000 hectares of southern Wales.
An electric Nissan Leaf has just driven from Cranfield to Sunderland on autonomous technology. After 30 months’ work by the HumanDrive consortium led by Nissan engineers, advanced vehicle control systems provided a 230 mile journey on country lanes with minimal road markings, junctions, roundabouts and motorways. The technology changed lanes, merged with traffic, stopped and started with one recharge en route for the longest autonomous drive in Britain.