COMMENT: Air Quality in London: Diesel at a tipping point: Fuel cell spotted

Sited, 12 March. Regent's Park Inner Circle.
1 of 26 Toyota Mirai fuel cell cars registered in the UK

COMMENT: Air Quality in London

2017 will hopefully be looked back on as a tipping point for air quality in London and perhaps even the UK. January saw some dreadful pollution and as a cyclist I noted extensive irritation to my nasal tract and throat. I kept producing phlegm. Since then I have experimented with masks but we all know they're not very nice to wear and are not a 'solution' to the underlying problem (do we want all Londoners and their children clamped to masks all day?).

Wearing my motoring journalist hat, the good news is that the Geneva Motorshow this year was heavily dominated by electric propulsion and the 'D' word has become a dirty word post-VW, Renault and Nissan scandals (among others). See my extensive report on the diesel tipping point

http://www.carandvanfunding.co.uk/theres-no-d-in-geneva/

The prettiest vehicle at Geneva was a Bentley - and it was electric

The good news is that the SMMT, the UK car maker trade body, has just revealed that February saw UK diesel sales dropping off a cliff. They fell 9.2% year-on-year. That's fantastic and appears to confirm a trend that is much stronger than it might have been, and much more sudden. People are not stupid. They bought diesel vehicles in good faith and I was the owner of one 2009-13. They produced marginally less CO2 so were sold as 'green'. The trouble is that over time their more immediate emissions, especially nitrogen oxide and other particulates, become filthy, and that's before we even embark on the car maker emission scandals - enter VW and more recently the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Now the cat's out of the bag, no one wants a diesel, and their residual values are about to plunge (if I'm not mistaken).

Now that half the fleet in Europe and UK is diesel, the full horror of the pollution is plain, with an estimated 9,400 Londoners a year dying prematurely from the pollution. It's completely changed my perspective as a cyclist - although long before the VW scandal erupted in September 2015, I was well aware of the black soot coming out of all manner of vehicles, even newly registered ones. The really horrible fate is being stuck behind a pre-Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF - mandatory since 2007 but often not working correctly because blocked) white van, Vauxhall/Renault/VW-Group brand/Ford, or indeed most luxury bruisers, old E-Classes, Five Series Bimmers, many with really big diesel engines that start to compare in emissions with the ultimate culprits, the buses and black cabs.

Anyway, back to a consumer perspective. You'd be surely crazy to buy a new diesel from here on, owing to the fact that the government, twice sued by Client Earth and twice lost, is shortly (April we believe) to reveal a raft of hopefully credible measures to clean things up. If there is a comprehensive diesel scrappage scheme then you might prosper if you have an older diesel, but who knows. The devil will be in the detail.

The other excitement is that the government just added £23 million towards hydrogen infrastructure. See the above image of the Toyota Mirai I spotted the other week. I'd been lucky enough to already drive this vehicle in May 2016 at an industry event. It's a large, nearly-silent, plush limo; very comfy. Terrific. But this is the first one I've seen 'On-The-Road'. The driver said it was great because with a handful of service stations already supplying hydrogen to all four corners of London, (even Cobham, on the M25) he said his range was the same as a diesel but a fill-up took no longer than a petrol one. A lot of senior industry people think the hydrogen fuel cell will leapfrog over hybrids and electric vehicles because they are more efficient, producing electricity on demand without any transmission losses, they don't require loads of heavy batteries or ugly charging points, and their sole emission is water. Of course, there's a lot of work to be done on producing green hydrogen in the first place, but that will come.

Final thought: the Chinese-backed Coventry factory that opened this week for manufacturing the zero-emissions capable black cab is great, but I still don't know why black cabs are exempted from prospective 2019 Ultra Low Emissions Zone, nor why according to Steve McNamara, the cabbie's trade body boss, it'll need six-seven years to convert the fleet. This is incomprehensible, as is the fact that there is no mandatory retirement age for cabs. There are 23,000 thousand of them in London, half of one percent of the fleet, but they cause an estimated 20% of the emissions due to being extremely dirty and because they drive around all day. They also idle endlessly at ranks even when not moving, which is flabbergastingly bad: a total fail. If there is one way to quickly clean up London's air, you would start by scrapping all diesel cabs, plus all older buses as funding permits.

On a cheerier note, and going back to the future, there was one sensational fact about the Geneva show which went largely unremarked: Hyundai are coming, big time, and they are years ahead of the Euro-car makers for fuel cell technology, as are Toyota. Even Brexit folks are going to go out and buy these vehicles when they look as pretty as this and are not consigned to 'odd-ball' status:

Prettier than a Jag iPace.
And it is a fuel cell vehicle with a huge range.
And it's going to be reality sooner than we think.