Mr. Frank Barr:

Thank you Chairman. I will start and Mr. McCabe will finish our presentation. We welcome this opportunity to address the committee. We represent end users of electric vehicles so a lot of what has been said is very relevant to us. I am sure that the committee wants to hear our views, based on our experience of using electric vehicles. Our association is the only organisation for electric vehicle owners in the country. We currently have 200 registered members and a Facebook page with over 900 members. We represent a huge proportion of the electric vehicle owners in Ireland.

We organise events to promote electric vehicle use. We explain to the general public what it is like to use electric vehicles and try to assuage their fears. We try to explain what is happening with electric vehicles in Ireland and our experience of them. Given Ireland's desire to meet its climate change obligations and the important part that transport plays in emissions, it is clear that Ireland needs to aggressively promote and encourage electric vehicles, especially battery electric vehicles. While hybrids have their place, they are a transition technology. Eventually, we are all going to move to fully electric vehicles.

There are just over 2,000 elective vehicles on the State's roads at present but given that the target is 20,000, we have lot of work to do. Previous speakers have referred to incentives that have been provided in other countries, particularly in Norway, which worked. In Ireland, incentives are clearly necessary to encourage growth in electric vehicle use. The current incentives to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles are a key decider for a lot of people. The grant that is given towards the purchase price is good and the installation of the home chargers by the ESB is also important They both need to be continued for a substantial amount of time. Current incentives such as free or low-cost charging should be guaranteed for a defined period. I know that the ESB said earlier that at some point vehicle charging will have to be commercialised. Two or three years ago it was going to commercialise it with a price structure that would have destroyed sales of electric vehicles in Ireland. The cost would have been roughly the same as diesel. At the moment there are lots of disincentives to driving electric vehicles, including range anxiety and so forth.

We have had a lot of problems in recent years in terms driving electric vehicles. The infrastructure took its time to develop. I purchased my car in 2012 and to get from point A to point B, if point B was a long way away, required a lot of planning. Long journeys were difficult enough but that situation has improved a lot. One can get around most of the country relatively easily now. The infrastructure, broadly speaking, does work. It is new technology but broadly speaking, it works. The biggest problem we had was with parking spaces but SI 325 allows local authorities to designate electric vehicle charging areas. Not all local authorities have fully adopted that but it is fundamentally important. I presume most members of the committee do not drive electric vehicles so I ask them to imagine arriving at a petrol station to find a car parked in front of the petrol pump, blocking access to the fuel. How happy would they be about that? That was the situation we faced for a number of years and it was quite frustrating. It is not the situation now. In most counties, one can be certain of one's ability to charge one's vehicle now.

The association believes that incentives will be necessary for a number of years. Consideration should be given to a reduction in benefit-in-kind, BIK, for company electric vehicles and there should be grant aid to encourage the installation of chargers in business premises. Norway, which was mentioned by others, has had the most effective conversion to electric vehicles which it achieved through various incentives. There were practically no purchase taxes or VAT on electric vehicles for a defined period. In Ireland consideration should be given to fiscal prudence in removing as many purchase taxes as possible to promote electric vehicle use. Incentives are never in place permanently - they are usually in place for a defined period. We need that at the moment to really kick start electric vehicles. Mention was made of the increase in numbers of electric vehicles this year. We can see that on the road. The economy is getting a little bit better and people are more inclined to make the slightly more expensive purchase of an electric car but we would emphasise the importance of continuing with the incentives for a period of time.

The question of the use of bus lanes is controversial but that certainly worked in Norway. In Norway, the incentives have been so successful that they have started to remove some of them. They really worked.