Car boss right to criticise deluded politicians chasing electric vehicles dream

Carlos Tavares knows about cars. He’s been obsessed with them since he worked as a teenage flag steward on the Estoril race track and harboured dreams of racing professionally.

Deciding he wasn’t good enough to go pro, the Portugese car fanatic switched to studying engineering at the prestigious Ecole Centrale Paris in France.

He joined Renault in 1981 as a test engineer, catching the eye of Renault’s visionary boss, Louis Schweitzer, who gave him the responsibility for developing one of its new models, the Megane 2.

After a highly successful career at Renault – which then merged with Nissan – he went on to head up Nissan in the US, moving to Nashville, where he continued NASCAR racing.

In fact, Tavares had never stopped racing.  At the age of 22, he took up rally-driving seriously and  has gone on to take part in 500 rallies around the world, driving an eclectic mix of cars ranging from a tiny Peugeot 104 in the Monte Carlo historic rally to testing a Ligier LMP3 at Spa-Francorchamps – and still works on the mechanics of his cars along with his team.

And if in any doubt about his petrolhead credentials, he has a fine classic car collection which includes a 1979 Peugeot 504 V6 Coupé and a Porsche 912 from 1966.

After falling out with Nissan’s then boss Carlos Ghosn, he moved on to head up the PSA Group, owner of Peugot, and he now runs Stellantis, the world’s fifth biggest car maker, which is the owner of the Chrysler, Vauxhall, Jeep, Fiat brands and more glamorous marques such as Lancia and Alfa Romeo.

As well as being addicted to cars and racing, Tavares understands more than most the extraordinary freedom that cars have brought us over the last century but also the beautiful precision of how the engines function, their aerodynamics and design and what goes into making them more than any other automotive boss in the world.

So when Tavares stands up at the Financial Times Future of the Car conference in front of fellow car nuts – as he did this week – and dares to say that governments around the world do not have a clue about what they are doing with their mad rush to go completely green via electrification, we must all sit up and listen. Going green just got a whole lot more interesting.

This is what Tavares said, and it will make for fascinating and uncomfortable reading for governments around the world, and will hopefully worry Number 10. Boris Johnson has made 2030 a cut off point for banning fossil fuel cars and ushering in a new era of electric cars.

Tavares was blunt. He warned that electric cars are becoming so expensive to make that they may no longer be affordable for the middle classes but the preserve of only the very wealthy.

Here’s why. A petrol Vauxhall Corsa today is selling for about £16,000 while the company’s cheapest electric version, the Corsa E, costs £26,400. He said: “I can’t imagine a democratic society where there is no freedom of mobility because it’s only for wealthy people and all the others will use public transport.”

“How can we protect freedom of mobility for the middle class who may not be able to afford €30,000 for a battery electric vehicle when today they pay half that for the same product with a conventional engine?“

It’s a good question, one which governments such as Britain’s committed to abolishing fossil fuel cars will be asked time and time again when voters realise. Just wait until the deadline approaches. As he also pointed out, the pandemic has underlined the public’s dependence on cars for “personal mobility” and this should be seen as a fundamental right.

“If we make mobility only affordable for the wealthy people, we will not have a strong impact because we will have a fleet of old cars which will continue to emit.”

His argument is persuasive: ”How do you keep cleaner mobility affordable to have a significant impact on the number of tonnes of CO2 we emit? It’s not as simple as having cars on sale: you need people

willing to buy and afford them. If we don’t keep the affordability, we will impact freedom of mobility, which is a major problem for modern democracies.”

What is not understood by either the politicians or indeed the environmental campaigners, he said, is that electric cars are more expensive to produce because making efficient long-life batteries will mean that over the next decade they will be up to 300kg to 500kg heavier than a petrol car. Add to that the need for exotic materials, such as cobalt, to make the batteries work which are already in short supply and expensive to mine.

Quite apart from the inflationary impact of higher prices for minerals, there are also huge social issues raised by the fact that children are being used to mine these exotic minerals – found mainly in Africa and being mined by the Chinese.

Even more powerful was his argument that politicians and campaigners must consider the total lifecycle impact of their decision to go electric – including the impact of mining metals for batteries – rather than focusing solely on how much less carbon they produce when running.

Going electric may well fail to reduce carbon emissions anyway, he added, because the vehicles will need to rely on other sources of energy from power stations, which could ultimately mean emissions are higher.

That’s pretty punchy stuff, and probably the first time any one of the world’s big automakers has come out and dared speak the unspeakable to governments.

But his comments got punchier still, and go to the heart of the hypocrisy and inconsistencies being paraded by so many western governments, particularly those in the US and Britain, over their policies to reduce CO2 emissions.

It’s this. Tavares reminded us that the scientific decision on the choice of the latest electric technology has not been made by the automotive industry but by central government diktat.  He quite rightly says it would have been far better to have allowed  the industry to develop multiple, competing technologies rather than to concentrate all research on one single solution such as electric. As someone once said, necessity is the mother of invention.

Instead, what governments have done is close down innovation by deciding to go electric, mainly because they have caved into what they believe to be the popular demand for going green or as Tavares says, “surfing on public opinion.”

While Tavares may be a petrolhead, he will follow the rules.

Stellantis, he said, is committed to bringing in electric vehicles as demanded by legislation and following the call to cut emissions. Yet he also points out that by doing so, governments mandating EVs purely on tailpipe emissions are not going to fulfil their ambitions of reducing CO2.

By forcing automakers and researchers to go electric, governments have cut innovation off at the knees, indirectly preventing them from looking into alternatives, whether they be hydrogen powered or other technologies which could result in even lower carbon emissions and cheaper too.

Surfing popular opinion has landed governments in the most foolish and potentially irreversible mess: forcing car makers to make cars that people can’t afford and potentially pushing carbon emissions even higher than before does not make sense.

And all because the politicians have given into a momentary crusade forced upon them by a minority of prejudiced, well-meaning fanatics rather than leading a robust and vigorous debate about future technologies. They think they are being progressive but the danger is they are taking us backwards.