Dr. Elisabeth Windisch:

There are a few barriers to the uptake of electric vehicles, but many of those will be overcome and resolved in the next few years. One barrier has been the number of available models, which is probably insufficient for a diversified consumer market. In light of announcements made by large manufacturers in the past few months and years, though, I believe that barrier will be overcome soon.

Cost is another issue, but it will be a matter of only a few years before there is cost parity between electric vehicles and their conventional counterparts. In this regard also, I would not be too worried. It might only be for the first few years when we really want to give a push - Ireland should - that additional financial incentives should be provided for vehicle users, albeit within the constraints that I mentioned in my opening statement. For example, such incentives should be used for non-urban areas, public fleets and so on first.

Another important barrier is the vehicles' range autonomy but there will also be important progress in this regard over the next few years thanks to battery technologies advancing rapidly. However, we can probably not assume that there will be parity of autonomy between electric vehicles and conventional vehicles very soon. This barrier will be resolved through the provision of public recharging infrastructure. From a policy perspective, though, I would not overdo it. As soon as people have experience of owning electric vehicles and how to use them, they will realise that range is much less of an issue than they originally thought and the normal range of an electric vehicle will always be sufficient as long as they can charge at home and perhaps at the workplace. As such, infrastructural development should focus mainly on the highway network to cover distances that will be beyond the range of standard electric vehicles.