Why Grant Shapps shouldn’t accelerate the ban on petrol and diesel cars

How fortunate that electric vehicle technology has moved on to the extent that transport secretary Grant Shapps is able to announce he in looking at bringing forward to date on which petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2040 to 2035. Or maybe not. On closer examination, it isn’t battery technology which has advanced – only the political pressure for being seen to act on climate change. It is possible, of course, that some as-yet unknown technology will arrive to make it feasible to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles from 2035. But we are no nearer discovering it yet. Without it, the government is heading for a very big policy failure.

I wrote here about electric cars in August 2017, just after the then environment secretary Michael Gove had announced the 2040 date. At the time it seemed like a leap in the dark, for two reasons: firstly, the very limited range of electric vehicles and secondly their high price.