Call for 15% of all vehicles to be electric

ELECTRIC VEHICLES should make up at least 15 per cent of the national fleet by 2020, or some 350,000 vehicles, a new parliamentary report has recommended.

The report of the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Climate Change also recommends that the Government starts an “aggressive drive” to ensure that all vehicles in Ireland will be electric by 2030.

It says that diesel and petrol vehicles will have become obsolete by then.

The targets are more ambitious than those set out in current Government policy which has set a target of electric vehicles (EV) making up 10 per cent of the car fleet by 2020.

Based on current numbers, that equates to approximately 230,000 vehicles.

Fine Gael’s spokesman on energy, Simon Coveney, who was the committee rapporteur for the report, said that the Government’s targets were not ambitious enough.

He said that no car offered for sale after 2020 should be powered by fossil-fuel.

He also argued for shorter-term aims of having 100,000 EVs on Irish roads by 2016.

Mr Coveney said that if the average replacement rate for cars is followed (8.4 per cent each year), it will follow that all private cars in Ireland should be EVs by 2030.

“For all sorts of reasons this is a no-brainer. The world is moving towards electric vehicles. Do we want to follow what they are doing or should Ireland lead the way?” said Mr Coveney.

“Electric vehicles are a seventh of the cost [of fossil fuel cars] to run.

“Our children will be looking at us wondering why we used combustion engines,” he said.

The report, entitled Drive for Zero: Electric Vehicles are a Winning Proposition was launched in Leinster House yesterday by Seán Barrett, the Fine Gael chairman of the Committee on Climate Change.