Mr. Brian Cooke:

Regarding measures that can be taken to create a second-hand market, what we have in place is very significant. We need to give some certainty to the industry that the grants will be extended for a few years. The only way to create a used car market, as I said, is to have a strong new car market today. The more we can sell today, the more quickly we will be able to create that used car market. We have incentives in place and they need to be extended. The company car sector is an obvious one to target because such cars tend to come back onto the market within two or three years. The benefit-in-kind incentive has started to reduce, which means someone who buys a car next year will not get as much benefit in the following two years. I mentioned the Government fleets. It is encouraging that the Government has committed to go electric on the next vehicle change. If those vehicles are changed every couple of years, the cost to the State would not be huge and it would provide good-quality used vehicles to the market.

In terms of investment, it is hard to put numbers on it. The vehicle manufacture sector at European level is putting billions into the vehicles, including research and development. At a local level, particularly in the franchise dealer sector, a lot of money has already been put into it. We have some dealers who installed electric substations in advance of electric vehicles coming to their premises. In the case of new dealership premises, the service areas are huge and very well equipped. We could be talking about hundreds of thousands of euro of investment by some dealerships. Even at the independent level, there is a huge demand for equipment and training to upskill people to deal with hybrid and electric technologies. Many of them have not yet seen an electric vehicle in their workshop but they are putting in that investment now. We provide that upskilling training for them and Skillnet Ireland gives us very good support to do it and offers value for money. Investment is going on at all levels.

The commercial vehicles sector is behind the car sector. The vehicles are bigger and need larger, more powerful batteries. When the battery technology improves in the second half of the decade and the batteries in cars get smaller, we will see more vans going electric. The State has a very generous scheme for taxis, which I understand is oversubscribed this year. It offers up to €11,000 and is a significant scheme. The State has really stepped up to the mark and there is a commitment to give money to the scheme again next year.

Deputy Bríd Smith mentioned electrification of buses. We are already seeing hybrid buses and we will start to see some electric ones. Over the next decade, we may be having the debate about hydrogen technology, which offers zero emissions, especially for heavy goods vehicles and buses. There is investment right across the industry and from Government. There is a real appetite for this from all the stakeholders. The ESB's e-cars initiative has also been very supportive of this project, which has very much helped to sell it in our sector.