Powering into future mobility
Fuel cell electric vehicles will be the mainstay of vehicles going forward, according to Jon Hunt, manager of alternative fuels at Toyota. During an enthralling presentation at Forecourt Trader’s inaugural Summit at The Belfry Hotel in Sutton Coldfield last month, he told delegates that Toyota believes "pure electrification is not ...
Moving the goalposts
The announcement that the government may bring forward the end of sales of new petrol and diesel cars and vans to 2035, or even earlier, has alarmed many stakeholders involved in the automotive industry. The sector has been working towards a target date of 2040 since it was first set ...
Riding crest of the wave into 2020
After MFG got approval for its huge takeover of MRH in 2018, the market was bracing itself for an even bigger deal in 2019, with Sainsbury bidding to take over Asda to become the UK’s biggest fuel retailer by volume. But while the Competition and Markets Authority was willing to ...
Zeroing in with fuels
The government made its commitment to electrification of transport clear in its Road to Zero strategy, which it published in July 2018. The document claimed the government remains ’technology neutral’ but then devoted the majority of its pages to highlighting its support for the development of electric vehicles (EVs) and ...
EVolving the network
Shell is planning to be the first fuel retailer in the UK to take out traditional fuels from an operating service station and replace them with an electric vehicle-only charging hub. An application for planning permission for the development on the company’s site in Fulham, west London, was made at ...
Speeding ahead
Sales of electric cars in the UK are currently minuscule compared with their internal combustion engine (ICE) cousins, but the country’s biggest-selling car maker is gearing up for a rapid change in this state of affairs. At the Frankfurt Motor Show last month, Ford announced that it expects the majority ...
A moving target?
In July 2017, when the government published its long-awaited clean air strategy and its Road to Zero transport policy, its confirmation that it would ban sales of conventional internal combustion engine cars and vans by 2040 met with very little opposition. Just the fact that it had set a firm ...
We should be ’celling’ the future
A future where battery- powered and hybrid vehicles are superseded by vehicles running on hydrogen fuel cells was predicted by Jon Hunt, manager, alternative fuels, at Toyota. Speaking at a conference organised by the Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum, he explained why the company that produced the ...
Emission impossible
Government indecision over the introduction of E10 a blend of fuel with up to 10% ethanol content compared with the current limit of 5% in E5 is nothing new. It was just after the London Olympics in 2012 when the then Transport Minister Norman Baker wrote to industry ...
C-store growth rate set to soar
New market analysis by HIM, revealed by insight director Gareth Nash, predicts that the growth rate in the convenience sector in 2019 will accelerate, with overall turnover up 3.5% to £41.7bn, compared with a growth rate of 2.7% last year. He said the growth rate had been slowing slightly over ...
Fuelling the future
The UK is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of automotive hydrogen development, with countries such as China, Korea and Japan pushing ahead at a rapid rate, according to Charles Purkess, business development manager at ITM Power. He was part of the ’Fuelling the Future: On the ...