Mr. Paul Jackman:

I will deal with Euro 6 first. We made a proposal for the Department on the diesel rebate scheme, so that it would lean over a period to steer the industry towards Euro 6. The Chair says diesel for diesel, but a fact about the Euro 6 diesel truck is that it will run on 100% HVO. Some of the other trucks need modification and some can even have issues with it but the Euro 6 truck, and many of the Euro 7 trucks which are coming, are set up to run on biofuel. The clean vehicles directive was revised last year to include fuels for the internal combustion engine, which was not the case previously. It includes hydrogen for an internal combustion engine; the battery electric, CNG, LNG, liquid, biofuels, HVO and synthetic and paraffinic fuels. Like what has happened with cars, the clean vehicles directive has had to tune into the real world.

There are 6.6 million HGVs in Europe but production capacity in Europe is 347,000 trucks a year. Even if all the factories in Europe started to make only EV trucks tomorrow, we are looking at 20 years before we have replaced the existing fleet. We are looking at the internal combustion engine being a significant component of transport into the future. It is about looking at fuels that we can get into that. I was at a production facility with some of our members. The facility was able to produce a maximum of 300 diesel trucks a day. Its EV truck production centre is next door to it, which produces between four and five a day. That is the ratio at the moment. We all know it is going to change over time, between supports and improvements in the ability of the electric trucks to mesh into what is going on in the real world.