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This week we saw the Government announcing some new initiatives to enable them to get to their 2040 target of no more petrol or diesel cars on our roads. Whilst they are trying to make the right noises in truth I don’t think they give a damn. Or maybe I’ve got it wrong.

A few years ago in an attempt to get us into diesel cars, we saw scrappage schemes that took us out of old chuggers and put us into new or newer cars but incentives to get us into electric cars seem to have missed the mark. Electric cars are so much more expensive than their equivalent petrol or diesel car to manufacture that even with the subsidies applied the cars they are still too expensive.

They are cheap enough to run at the moment if you charge from home but given the fact that most cars aren’t achieving their range and the cost of charging at public and filling station charge points is now incredibly high it costs less per mile in fuel to run a petrol or diesel car than an electric car.

I’m sure that it’s for these reasons that just 7,441 electric cars were registered in the first 6 months of this year which was fewer than the same period in 2017. So it seems that the Government stance has changed to push Ultra Low Emission Vehicles (ULEV). These are ‘vehicles with pure-electric engines, plug-in hybrid engines or cars with CO2 emissions lower than 75g/km at the tailpipe’.

Another interpretation comes from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders’ (SMMT) who say that they ULEV’s are ‘vehicles using low-carbon technologies; emitting less than 74g of CO2 from the tailpipe; capable of operating in zero tailpipe emission mode for a minimum of 10 miles’.

It is all very confusing. To make matters worse the Government has announced that it will now settle for ‘at least 50%’ of new cars being ultra-low emissions by 2030. But as Mike Rutherford of Auto Express points out, surely this leaves the door open for the other 50% to be medium or high emissions vehicles?

As for the 2040 ban on petrol and diesel, that is looking decidedly dodgy as the biggest growth area is in the petrol hybrid cars and with no petrol the hybrids won’t work. So is that target in the toilet?

In their plans the Government has made a promise to ensure that all new homes will have an electric charge point fitted. Hmm, how does that work with flats that have fewer parking spaces than flats in the building? In fact I’m told that some new city flats are built with no parking at all. As Mr Rutherford suggests, possible on-balcony parking or maybe in the hanging baskets – we get the message. Clearly, the Government doesn’t.

Finally, in their disinterested way, they’ve said that all new street lights will have charging points fitted. They clearly haven’t so much as looked outside their windows or driven around their local town or city to notice two things. Firstly that most lighted areas are the most dangerous, on double yellow lines, pedestrian areas, dangerous bends etc.

A glance out of my window shows that all the new energy efficient lamps that were installed a couple of years ago emerge from the pavement on the opposite side to the road. This will mean that when charging a cable will lay across the pavement.

I think the Government should start to get serious or pass over planning for electrification to an organisation like the AA or RAC to get to grips with the problem. By Graham Hill