Yes, well, that’s a very specific case, but you will probably find that the reason why you have those problems with the car in use is because it’s more efficient to produce it with all these problems. It’s like I mean, I work a lot with old cars and in really old cars, everything is bolted together so you can unbolted and unscrew it and things like that. On a modern car they use plastic clips to fix panels and it’s very difficult to get the panel off without breaking those clips. But it’s much more efficient in production to make cars that way. So cars currently are produced to be efficient in production, but not necessarily to be efficient in repair, maintenance, recycling re-use and things like that. So it depends on where you optimize your efficiencies. And the car industry, of course, doesn’t care that it’s difficult for you to take it to bits and maintain it. They just want it to be easy to make so they can maximize their profit margin.
I think that is a really good point to take it to what the future has.
So shall I carry on? The last section, Right. The future. Right. The struggle to reduce and where possible, eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases ultimately have greater repercussions on the motor industry. Any efforts made to cut down the amount of greenhouse gases? This is something we wrote in the Green Car Guide in 1992 were for some reason I don’t I don’t know why we had that foresight. We worked out that really the attempts to reduce CO two and things like that would have a far greater impact on the car industry than cutting down toxic emissions. And that is how it’s proving the reason why we are now seeing a revolution in the car industry is to deal with greenhouse gases. So the push for zero emission vehicles, you’ve already mentioned the Chinese influence there. They are really a response to both toxic emissions and climate change concerns. So greenhouse gases not those broader environmental concerns. However, I mean, this often makes for a useful proxy for the wider concerns. If a car is more has lower greenhouse gas emissions low or toxic emissions, that also often reduces other impacts, but not necessarily. So I’ve got the chart here shows the number of global electric vehicle sales really. And as you can see from the start, China has been a significant player and is still a significant player with about half of electric vehicle sales. And it’s to do with various issues. And partly this issue I mentioned earlier on that the Chinese decided early on it would be much easier for them to compete on battery electric vehicles than on internal combustion technology.
And to some extent, they’ve caught out the more developed countries in that respect, which are then following relatively late. So you can see earlier on by 2015, the others are also runs. But now we are beginning to build more sales and manufacturing in more established countries. The potential issues I flag up here are the higher embedded carbon in electric vehicles, which I explored earlier less abundant raw materials for electric vehicles. We are needing to access materials which are less plentiful than what we’ve traditionally used for internal combustion vehicles. And of course, there will be new economic and political dependencies. Rather than being dependent on, say, Saudi Arabia, we might be dependent on lithium from Bolivia or something like that. So these are all issues to consider, which again, are not always considered. Another thing is that size still matters, although Elon Musk assures us that he’s saving the planet by making electric vehicles, his electric vehicles are very big. Even a model three weighs about 16 1700 G. And as you can see, even electric vehicles, even zero emission vehicles, you can make smaller. So this is a sort of footprint system we developed many years ago for for a client and I’ve since used a few times, I can give you the metric for this. It’s it’s a bit complex, but it’s essentially a performance footprint.
And you can see the Tesla model three is much bigger than, for example, the Renault Zoe small electric vehicle vehicle, and both of them seat five people even smaller is the river Simple racer This is the car I mentioned briefly. I’ll mention it again soon which is made here in Wales. It’s used uses a hydrogen fuel cell technology and a supercapacitor to to allow for extra energy for acceleration and things like that. So it’s actually a very small power car. And then at the bottom of the note is, which is a little two seater that you may be familiar with that’s even smaller. So it’s. Large vehicles still use more raw materials and energy and construction and use, and they create more waste. This is inevitable whether they are zero emissions or not. So it’s still an issue that needs to be addressed and at the moment is tends to be largely ignored. So size still matters. Electrification has a number of advantages, though it’s zero emissions at point of use. So in your cities, if you have zero emission vehicles, you clean up your air. It’s very easy, very desirable. Another advantage of electric vehicles, it gets cleaner as electricity generation gets cleaner. So you can introduce them now when we still have an energy generating mix that includes coal and stuff like that. And as we green the energy generating mix, our cars will also become greener and cleaner. So that’s a nice one. It’s something you can’t do with internal combustion.
Reduced dependence on unsavoury oil regimes that we don’t like. Electric cars are user friendly. They’re nice to use, nice to drive. So you have an enhanced ownership experience. Again, a lot of people are still skeptical about them, but once they start using them, then like them, I should flag up. By the way, I do not have an electric vehicle myself. Right. Just saying that the assembly costs are potentially lower, electric vehicles are potentially simpler to build, but the material costs are higher. That’s why they are still more expensive. They are potentially more durable and lower maintenance. And it’s just as well because of that embedded carbon thing I flagged up earlier. But it does mean that we need to change the system such that we accept that electric vehicles will last longer and will be in use longer, which again affects that pushing cars into the system from from the beginning. The energy supply can be localised Again, this is something that’s not often flagged up. But I could have solar panels on my roof. If I had a field, I could have some wind generators in there. And I can actually generate all the electricity to run my electric vehicle. Now, unless you have an oil well in an oil refinery in your back garden, you cannot do the same for an internal combustion engine car. And this is potentially a game changer. Traditionally, electric vehicles have been seen as an urban solution, but we sort of pioneered some work about 12 years ago whereby we said actually they are just as useful in a rural environment.
Here in Wales, we have a strange geography. We have cities in the south and a few small towns in the north, and then in between it’s all rural, it’s all agriculture. And we’ve actually been working with some local communities there that have micro hydro systems, solar panels and things like that and have actually bought electric vehicles as pool cars just for their local communities because it is the most viable solution in those areas. We published some papers on this because again, it’s not something that most people have twigged, but you can actually have very decentralised generating and car use systems because of electric cars. We are used to decentralize energy generation, big nuclear power stations and that sort of thing, but there is no need for that in the future. Right. There are some disadvantages as well. There is the embedded carbon I’ve already flagged up. Does the battery cost? At the moment the battery cost is between 30 and 50% of the vehicle vehicle value. So if you buy a new electric vehicle, a large chunk of it up to half is purely the cost of the battery. And it’s partly to do with the fact that there are more esoteric materials needed in the battery. New supply chains are being created, which also will change the dynamics in the car industry at the moment.
The final assemblers, the Fords and General Motors are the big players and suppliers tend to be smaller. However, if you look at the top five lithium ion battery producers, by capacity, these are big businesses, LG Chem Korea and of course CATL, Chinese, BYD, Chinese, Panasonic, Japanese. These are all big companies and they can act as equal partners to the car makers. So you might get some changes in dynamics in supply chains as a result. Another thing you will get is the stranded assets of the legacy car makers. What are you going to do with all those engine factories that are sitting all over the world, for example, and the R&D and the expertise in making internal combustion engines for the electric vehicle? New skills are needed both in development, production, manufacturing sale, but also, of course, maintenance and repair. And that’s only gradually coming on stream. There will be more pressure on electricity generation and distribution, and you also need a charging infrastructure again. People are working on this. We have been involved in projects on this as well. But you need to manage the grid much more. So you need smart meters installed that can sort of adjust your household consumption such that your car only charges overnight and things like that. So you do need these changes. Again, we’re working on it. But again, these are investments that are needed and we might get a new dependence on different unsavory regimes. Now, a brief slide about hydrogen.
I’m often asked, I don’t know if it’s come up in your work as well. Oral battery electric vehicles are all very well, But what about hydrogen? Hydrogen is often dismissed by people in the battery industry, but there may still be a role for hydrogen and electric vehicles as well. A hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle works very well. And this picture here is of the river Simple rasa. This is made just up the road in wheels and very small numbers at the moment. It’s a tiny, lightweight vehicle to minimise resource use, minimise energy use, and it uses a small fuel cell. It’s about this big a fuel cell you can buy off the shelf. So it’s quite different from the fuel cells you find in Toyota and Hyundai fuel cell cars, which are American sized cars and very big fuel cells. Hydrogen avoids the heavy battery making. Hydrogen is energy intensive, but it is a very useful storage medium for excess renewable electricity. So if you have too much wind and solar power, one thing you can do with the excess is to turn it into hydrogen. Then you’ve got a way of storing it. Once you’ve got that hydrogen stored, you could, for example, run vehicles on it. And it suits some locations such as Iceland, for example. Particularly well. A small fuel cells such as used in that little card or ASA, is cheap. You can buy them off the shelf. A big one, as used by Toyota and Hyundai is not.
It’s very expensive to engineer. So there’s something to be said for this sort of line of thinking. So don’t necessarily dismiss it. Right. The longer term impacts now, how do we close the loop during the transition? We’ve got a waste stream coming out of internal combustion engine cars, and we’ve got a new car stream that is battery electric vehicles. So there’s not necessarily a good mesh there between those different waste streams. And this may affect some closing closing of loops. We may have to have bigger loops that we can feed those materials into other sectors, or we may just have to accept that there is no use for certain materials. It’s something that needs to be explored. The new materials we need for battery electric vehicles and for hydrogen vehicles may be scarce other than for internal combustion engine vehicles. So overall production levels, it’s quite possible. I don’t know anybody who’s looked at this, quite possible that those overall production levels that we are worried about can be sustained in the long term because of this. And then we’ve also got the fact that electric vehicles can last longer. Then there’s the transformation of the electricity system that, again, decisions need to be made on that. Are we going for more centralised control, more nuclear power stations and things like that, or are we accepting that a more decentralised system like in rural Wales, for example, is the way to go, or can we do a bit of both? Again, those decisions need to be made.
Then there is this total transformation of the aftermarket. To what extent can all the businesses that are currently catering for the aftermarket of vehicles in use still cater for electric vehicles in use? I mean. You need quite a high skill level to work on an electric vehicle. Never touch the orange cables in an electric vehicle because you’ll be dead, for example. And there is no such danger at the moment in internal combustion engine vehicles. As long as you don’t like to light a cigarette when you’re opening the fuel tank or something like that, so different business models may result as it may come out as a result. Now, the table of coffee is actually quite interesting. I just picked this up last week. This is the mining quantities for different technologies. The top, the grey and black bars are mining quantities for fossil fuel production systems as a whole. Everything and the little blue ones at the bottom are the minerals needed for low carbon energy. I’ve not dug deeper into this. I trust the author knows what she’s doing. But she’s arguing here that the actual materials we need to shift for a low carbon energy system is a fraction of what we are currently shifting for fossil fuel production. So again, that’s something that we need to keep an eye on. That would be quite interesting. Even though the materials we use are rarer, more esoteric and need more processing perhaps.
So that’s again a nice angle. I mentioned new business models. I was going to say something about our own micro factory retailing, but it’s too, too, too niche. But Tesla itself also uses a new business model. It’s highly integrated with very strong centralized control, although it still uses conventional mass production if you look at how the cars are made. The systems they use largely German manufacturing technology, very similar to what BMW uses, for example. That’s quite conventional. One thing they do in houses, of course, they make their own batteries. At the moment, other than BYD in China, they’re the only electric vehicle maker that makes its own batteries. Another aspect of them, they have an integrated retail and distribution system. So I said earlier on, the model in the car industry is that dealers are separate businesses. Tesla outlets are all owned by Tesla, and that’s again part of their business model. They also have this online software update system, which means that whenever you plug your car in to recharge, software can be updated in the car from the US. Another thing they do is they own two other company, SolarCity, which makes solar panels, and Powerwall, which has domestic storage batteries that that you can use as a buffer to store, store your own generated electricity or between the grid and your house. That’s also made by Tesla. So they have a very integrated holistic business model that is unusual in the car industry, and that’s because they’re not really a car company.
They are a tech company, as they keep telling us. Now, finally, a quick word on connected and automated vehicles. This is a big thing, especially among academics outside the car industry. This is the self driving car thing. People inside the car industry have some doubts about this, mainly because it’s extremely difficult to do and it’s unclear what the benefits are. Another thing is that it would give, again, more centralized control to tech companies because your car will be controlled from outside. In a sense, it goes back to the horse. You’re sitting in a vehicle that has a mind of its own. You cannot control it. Another thing that. People in the tech industry don’t always appreciate this. Artificial intelligence is not enhanced human intelligence. It is a new, different type of intelligence, and it will therefore make unusual and unexpected decisions. And we are not necessarily prepared for that. Hacking vehicles by criminals is a real danger. It’s already been done by a number of people experimentally. People have hacked into Fiat, into Chryslers, into Mercedes cars. Remotely. So that is a real danger. And the car industry is not very good at cyber security. And I can’t see them getting much better very soon either. Another thing is that full automation is unlikely to work in all environments, so we’ll probably see it develop in certain carefully controlled urban environments where you know exactly what’s going to happen, where things are predictable.
That’s probably where we will see automated vehicles. Another point I would like to make is that automated vehicles are not like cars. They’re not self driving cars. They are a new and different transport mode. They’re an additional transport mode. But this argument keeps popping up all over the place, although over the last year it’s gone quite a bit as the companies working on it have realized how incredibly complex it is. So people who are keen to drive like myself hope it’ll all go away. It’ll probably hang about in some form. So it’s again, something to keep an eye on. Right. Finally, the essence of the car. And it’s different from a self driving one. It’s like a horse without a mind of its own. So you have more control over it. It’s like a bicycle, which you also have full control over. I’m also a cyclist. I have five bicycles, but it has greater range. And you’ve got more room. You’ve got this safe and closed space that people really value. It also becomes part of human experience as people remember road trips. People remember where they’ve been with the car and things like that. And this is part of them developing that emotional attachment to to the car. And for these reasons, people will fight to protect it. Another thing to remember, if you look at the history of technologies, you find that very few technologies actually completely disappear. So it’s quite possible that internal combustion engine cars will persist in small niches.
I mean, think of sailing ships. We have better technologies for ships, but there are still plenty of sailing ships around, sailing boats, Lots of people sail steam Trains are still about right. They operate in niches as tourist attractions, as hobby items and things like that. Horses are still in use. I mentioned the horse economy earlier on, but lots of people have horses. So these technologies don’t go away usually. And it’s quite possible internal combustion engine cars will not completely go away even when we have better alternatives, but we’ll still persist in small niches. Right. Finally, paper again. I came across last week, published in December about climate change, and it says climate change mitigation. We won’t hit the target of one and a half degrees, for example, probably this century. We may hit it next century. This means that we have to adapt as well. They run the paper, looks at all the current models and runs through them and looks at what’s actually happening, looks at the cop commitments and things like that, and said the current COP commitment is just not going to happen this century. So we are going to face a number of issues. Which doesn’t mean that we should stop worrying about greenhouse gas emissions. I give you this classic cartoon, which you may have seen before. What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? Right. We should still keep trying. Right. Any final questions then?
We have one question from Marina. They had to leave early is the one question. And one of the questions that she also posted on the forum post, and that is what would be the main drivers of sustainable change and how high on that list are the customers, how much power the consumers actually have to foster change?
Yes, I mean, that is a crucial question because. The tumors have relatively little power. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, excuse me, the consumers can only choose from what is being offered to them by the producers. So the real responsibility is really with the producers and the producers really need to be guided by regulation to produce what is good for consumers. Consumers will like all sorts of products. Consumers do buy environmentally optimized products. It’s not that they dislike them, it’s just that if everybody else drives a massive SUV, am I really going to drive around in a smart surrounded by all these massive vehicles? Do I feel safe? It’s those sort of issues we need to take into account. Also, most consumers don’t look into the detail of these products. I mean, they’ve got better things to do. They’ve got lives to live. They don’t they don’t understand these issues. And people often ask me, what sort of car should I buy and this sort of thing. And when you explore things with them, it’s quite clear they don’t really understand the implications of their car choices. So that is actually a fundamental question. To what extent are things driven by the market? I know the manufacturers, as I mentioned earlier, always give it as an excuse me. Oh, well, nothing to do with us. We only make what the customer wants, but the customer can only choose from what they’re being given. And I’ve only ever come across one car manufacturer that was honest about that and said, Yeah, yes, we determine what’s being bought. And it was Fiat, actually. So yeah, an important question.
Any other thoughts or questions?
I’m good. I really appreciated this. Good.
In that case, let me recommend some of my publications.
Absolutely. Please do.
All right. Yes. This is some of the books. I’ve also got a website and I’m on Twitter if you want to follow me there. I do write books about normal cars as well. You see the little book on duff cars and Australian cars? I do proper car books. But the green book are sustainable consumption production and supply chain management is the most recent book. We did that in 2021, but these are academic books. A lot of the ideas I ran by you today come from the Sustainable Mobility Book. So there we go. Stop the share. There you go.
Well, thank you so much, Paul. Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Good pleasure. Thank you for listening to me.
I’m looking forward to rereading what was said today. And there’s still some new topics out of it that we can discuss with the community. I want to thank everyone who was here today as well for your contribution. And yes, Paul will be in touch. Thank you all so much. Have a nice evening.
Thanks very much.
Bye. Thank you.