When I started in this game, LCV stood for light commercial vehicle.
That’s a van to you. These days it also stands for low carbon vehicle – aka hybrids and electric/battery cars – and I spent Wednesday at an industry conference promoting them. It was the third of its kind and each year it’s got bigger and better attended. That’s an indication of just how important the auto world now considers these vehicles.
We all know times are tough financially, but one speaker – Brendan Connor of Cenex, the ‘Centre of Excellence’ body for this advanced technology – made a very good point. He said there was “a sense of great impending doom” about future investment because of Government cost-cutting, but he highlighted just how much had been done in the last five years. His comments focused on UK development of EVs, hybrid and plug-in hybrid technology, plus the downward trend of CO2 emissions from mainstream cars.
He concluded: “By any stretch of the imagination, these are major successes. We have made progress beyond what we thought we could make.
If we look at how much that cost, it was less than £500million over five years.”
Connor has a point. To you and I that’s a massive amount of money, but in Government spending terms it’s a drop in the ocean. You may not know it, but the UK has scores of small companies doing amazing research and development in this field. Literally thousands of people are employed. Their efforts are putting us in the lead globally, but they are reliant on some Government funding. It would be a shame to see everything risked for the sake of £500million.
Breakdown Cover from 
