Driving forward green transport

Tim O’Brien talks to GreenFleet about the Technology Strategy Board's work and its pioneering trials with fleets to find out their views of zero and low-carbon vehicles

The Technology Strategy Board is the UK’s innovation agency. Its goal is to accelerate economic growth by stimulating and supporting business-led innovation.
    
Transport generates about 25 per cent of UK carbon emissions, and congestion is set to cost the economy £22bn by 2025. With this in mind, Transport is one of the agency’s top priorities. Here the Technology Strategy Board’s Tim O’Brien tells GreenFleet about its work to make transport more sustainable in the UK and the work it is doing with fleets and the public to understand how they engage with electric and other low emission vehicles.

What are the Technology Strategy Board’s objectives concerning road transport?
As the UK’s innovation agency, we focus our efforts on the industries and technologies that will drive UK growth in the future and address global challenges and opportunities.
    
Transport is one of our priorities. We have a vital leadership role across the whole industry, asking the difficult questions and promoting innovative solutions. We need to maintain the UK’s strong capabilities in vehicle and system design and development while considering the wider transport system.
    
Our objectives centre on helping UK businesses, science and supply chains to benefit commercially from developments that improve transport effectiveness and efficiency and that support manufacturers to develop and deliver new vehicle technologies.    
    
On the roads, new emission regulations will require new technologies and a new automotive supply base. We have been supporting the development of low-carbon road vehicle technologies and now need to take these closer to production, while continuing to develop technologies which reduce carbon emissions.

What was the Ultra Low Carbon Vehicle Demonstrator Programme?
The Technology Strategy Board launched the Ultra Low Carbon Vehicle (ULCV) Demonstrator programme in 2008 as the first major step in a UK wide journey to support the development of technologies and markets for ultra low carbon vehicles. The programme was jointly funded with the Office for Low Emission Vehicles.
    
Throughout the trial 349 low carbon vehicles were deployed. More than 90 per cent were pure electric vehicles (EVs) and the rest were plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). Collectively the vehicles completed over 276,000 individual trips, covering more than 1.5 million miles and recording over 51,000 charging events.
    
The data was collected and analysed by Cenex and Oxford Brookes University on behalf of the Technology Strategy Board. A report detailed the results of a study of the drivers’ perception and attitudes towards the pure EVs, and their real-world performance.
 
What has been learned from the ULCV Demonstrator Programme?
Drivers entered the trial with a variety of motivations. The EV was seen as simple to drive and unfamiliar components such as regenerative braking were adapted to within the first trip. The EVs were seen as fun to drive, smooth, and rated very highly on their acceleration performance.
    
EVs were considered easy to use, with comparable performance to a normal car, although less flexible. This was observed in the vehicle data where the average trip length was 5.1 miles compared to the national average trip length of 7.0 miles. The maximum journey length achieved was 107 miles. The EVs were used mainly during the working day with 71.5 per cent of trips being undertaken between 8am and 6pm.
    
Drivers assumed it would be easy to judge remaining range, but learnt that a variety of factors combined to decrease range such as a reduction in temperature. They learnt to adapt their driving style and ancillary equipment use depending on the journey length they required.
    
Drivers said that charging was easy and safe. Private drivers quickly established a routine for themselves and did not charge each day. Pooled corporate drivers endeavoured to charge after every trip in order to accommodate the next driver and consequently did not learn how many trips/mileage could be achieved from a full battery charge. Private drivers showed a marked preference for charging over refuelling at petrol stations.
    
The mileage drivers undertook between charge events increased gradually throughout the loans as drivers became more confident in journey planning and range prediction.

Having a public charging infrastructure was strongly endorsed, yet drivers felt they could complete trips without one. Home charging was the most popular charging location.
    
Low noise came to be seen as an asset. Drivers paid more attention to pedestrians than they would normally when driving at low speeds.
    
All drivers believed EVs lowered carbon emissions. Corporate drivers were often employed by organisations involved in energy or intent on reducing carbon emissions. These drivers endorsed the use of renewable energies more strongly than private drivers.  
    
To maximise future uptake, drivers said that EVs needed to perform and look as good as normal internal combustion engine cars, but still be distinguishable as EVs so that the variety and presence of contemporary EVs were visible to the non-EV driving public.
    
People expected EVs to be priced at the same level as normal vehicles. Their intentions to purchase were influenced by residual value, second-hand market, insurance, battery, maintenance costs, and how quickly the current EV technology would be surpassed.

How does the Low Carbon Vehicles Innovation Platform operate?
The Low Carbon Vehicles Innovation Platform (LCVIP) invests jointly with the industry and other funders to encourage innovation and market development of low carbon vehicle technologies in the UK automotive industry and related sectors.
    
The platform, set up in September 2007, has a dedicated team of three technologists and three key goals: contributing to the growth of the UK automotive sector, accelerating the introduction of vehicle-centric technologies to the low carbon vehicle market, and working towards national and international green house gas reduction targets.
    
The key stakeholder groups in the Low Carbon Vehicles Innovation Platform are industry, government and academia. We work in partnership with them, shaping and delivering the innovation landscape. The creation of the Automotive Council, and the integration of our previous work into its programmes, has added to our effectiveness. The Advanced Propulsion Centre, the centrepiece of the joint industry and government strategy for the automotive sector, will also be key to our activities.
    
The ways in which the industry engages at national and local levels often reflects geographic size and location, population density, heritage, dedication to research and development, skill base and cost base. For the LCVIP, the stakeholders representing industry are across the sector and include vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, research organisations and industry bodies.
    
The UK Research Councils invest around £3 billion in research each year. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the main UK government agency for funding academic research and training in engineering and the physical sciences. We have developed a close working relationship with EPSRC that has resulted in co-funding (currently £13m) to help support academia develop projects towards industry goals. Importantly, this provides a feedback loop from academia back to industry.
    
The LCVIP also collaborates closely with the key industry groups including the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the LowCVP, the Gas Vehicle Alliance, as well as the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) and the Centre of Excellence for Low Carbon and Fuel Cell Technologies (Cenex).  

What is the Transport Systems Catapult?
Our Catapults are technology and innovation centres where the very best of the UK’s businesses, scientists and engineers can work side by side on research and development, transforming ideas into new products and services to generate economic growth.
    
The Transport Systems Catapult will support UK industry in exploiting the massive global market for new products and services that will drive the integration of transport and its systems. The key challenge is how to increase mobility: the efficient and cost effective movement of people and goods.
    
Some of the early challenges that will be addressed through the Catapult include seamless journey systems, remote asset manage ment and monitoring, traffic management and control systems, journey assistance systems, infrastructure integrity and security, connected vehicles, and novel economic and business models.  

Is the agency working on any schemes with fleets?
The Low Carbon Truck Demonstration Trial is a project we are running jointly with the Department for Transport and the Office for Low Emission Vehicles. It is helping to fund 13 consortia of technology developers and commercial fleets to run 350 HGVs to trial alternative fuels in single-fuel or dual-fuel engines. The trucks are in daily use with large and small logistics companies, including Mueller Wiseman Dairies, Tesco, John Lewis and DHL.
    
Twelve of the consortia are trialling gas as an alternative fuel. Some have chosen to trial it in compressed form on their trucks and some in liquefied form. One consortium, led by United Biscuits in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, is trialling a by-product of their food processes – used cooking oil.
    
All the fleets involved see the alternative fuels as a way to reduce their carbon footprint while also having better control over their running costs and, in the case of the gas-fuelled trucks, as a pathway to replacing fossil gas with biomethane.
    
In addition to the trucks, 26 new gas refuelling points are being installed as part of the funded trial, 13 of which will be publically accessible for other fleets to fuel their trucks from. The trials began at various times through 2013 and they are all due to complete by the end of 2015 when the Department for Transport will write a report about the findings. In the interim, the 13 consortia are disseminating their findings through a series of bi-annual workshops run by Cenex, which are open to interested parties from the sector to attend.

What are the major barriers to greentransport innovation?
There are barriers to funding the development, adoption and exploitation of a great idea which will ‘green’ an aspect of the transport sector. This, more often than not, needs the innovator to find friends out in larger industrial companies to help with the burden. But then comes the second barrier: the numerous obstacles which deter individual and SME innovators going ahead with their idea. These include patent protection; finding the right development partner(s), having the necessary business skills as well as the technical capability to make the innovation happen.
    
Another barrier is the investment and infrastructure which is already in place and would need, possibly, wholesale change to adopt the more radical ideas, for example, a complete switchover to a fully electric or hydrogen fuelled transport system
    
Finally, there is the obstacle of people’s perceptions and what they are willing to accept as a new transport paradigm, for example, driverless cars or accepting the use of much more public transport.

What other activity is in the pipeline?
One event to watch out for is the High Performance Low Carbon SME Showcase on 15 May, a new venture which brings together the automotive and the motorsport sectors. Held at the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, the day will also incorporate the Meet the Engineer event.

Further information
www.innovateuk.org/transport