When Sadiq Khan promised to clean up London’s air by introducing electric buses, did he factor in the black smoke which poured out of the Number 265 as it burst into flames in Putney on Wednesday?
That followed two very similar fires in the past fortnight which consumed vehicles from the same fleet. Paris has already had to withdraw a fleet of electric buses after a couple of fires, while in Venice-Mestre last October 21 people died after an electric bus caught fire and plunged off a flyover.
The “race to net zero”, as the politicians like to describe it, isn’t just expensive; it is dangerous. It isn’t only electric buses which burst into flames, of course – Ken Livingstone’s infamous bendy buses also had a habit of catching fire, and they were diesel-powered. But when electric vehicles catch fire they can be a lot harder to put out due to “thermal runaway” where one overheating cell leads to the neighbouring cell, setting off a chain reaction.
With buses, the problem is even bigger than in cars because the batteries are necessarily larger. The fires can’t be tackled in the same way as petrol or diesel vehicle fires, and vehicles are in some cases being left to burn themselves out.
I am sure these problems may eventually be overcome and electric vehicles become a lot safer than they are now, but it isn’t going to be easy or quick. A couple of years ago I took a speculative punt on a start-up company which seemed initially to have solved the problem of thermal runaway in vehicle batteries. You only have to look at my miserable, shrunken investment now to tell that the technology isn’t coming along quite as hoped. I have been a lot more wary of green technologies since then.
But the problem is that the demands of our 2050 net zero target don’t give anyone the time or space to sort out these sorts of problems properly. The zero emission vehicle mandate introduced by the government on 1 January demands that 22 percent of all cars sold in Britain this year are pure electric, rising to 80 percent by 2030. The plans for the green transition are more than a little half-baked (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say somewhat over-baked in the case of electric buses). Transport for London, like everyone else, is being forced to invest heavily in technologies today despite the point that they will likely improve vastly in the near future.
Khan has promised to make all buses in London zero emission by 2037. But how is he going to get there when it looks as if he may well have to withdraw an entire fleet of 380 buses? If he doesn’t take these buses out of service, I fear he may find himself short of passengers willing to take the risk. Khan is a great one for ramping up public fear when it comes to air pollution. A better definition of a crisis, I think, is a sudden and acute problem – like spontaneously-combusting buses.
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January 26, 2024 at 09:13PM
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The electric vehicle fiasco has become dangerous - The Telegraph
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