Mr. Andrew Murphy:

Fundamentally, the next ten years will be extremely different from the past ten years where the deployment of EVs is concerned. The primary reason is that the range of cars available in a showroom and their prices are largely decided by EU legislation. This legislation forces manufacturers to lower the CO2 produced by those vehicles and therefore puts more electric vehicles on the road. In the last quarter of 2019 and 2020 there was an uptick in sales of EVs in Ireland. They were offered at lower rates to encourage uptake. On the issue of cost, those who have bet against the cost of EVs declining have lost every time. Batteries have reduced in price by 85% in the past decade and have decreased by 17% in the last year alone. Batteries are one third of the cost of electric vehicles. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which is among the most optimistic about the cost of EVs, upgraded its forecast for price parity between EVs and internal combustion vehicles to between 2023 and 2025. EVs are cheaper to produce, maintain and power.

The next ten years will be very different. People point to Norway and say we will need Norway-type subsidies to ensure the deployment of EVs but that is not necessarily the case. If they are going to become this cheap, they can be deployed. However, I would stress, and this is very evident in yesterday's figures on the sale of EVs of Ireland, that there is a big difference between battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The Irish taxation regime needs to be amended to reflect some misleading figures by manufacturers and the European legislation needs to be amended to fix some of the loopholes which are emerging with EVs. Targets for Ireland refer to zero or low-emissions vehicles. We need to drop the reference to low-emissions vehicles and just go all in on zero-emissions ones.