Electric Buses, Brexit, Plastic and The Future of Cars

The sun shines through high frosted windows, illuminating guests having coffee by well-crafted wooden and leather chairs, standing on a glowing tile floor, waiting in the Jaguar Experience centre for their cue.

Automotive experts, plastics professionals and academics leave the bright reception and head down the corridor to the seminar room. They’re here to talk Brexit, China, driverless buses, super-light cars, and the future of the automotive industry – does the UK have one?

Around 12% of everything the UK exports comes from the automotive industry - £15.5bn is added to the economy thanks to the 800,000 people employed. If you are interested in the future of the UK economy, taking a close look at the automotive sector is a good place to start.

Gathering in the seminar room are plastic suppliers and moulders who are the blood that flows into the automotive industry, or some of it at least; a growing part, it turns out.

“The industry is in a state of flux”

Martin Rees of Prime Advantage Advisory tells the room that despite being over a hundred years old the automotive industry is in upheaval; nothing established can be taken for granted.

He spends his own time looking toward China, and implores others to do the same, ‘they are holding the doors open’ to the UK, ‘they like us’, he promises. Mr Rees seeks to convince us our industrial revolution roots still stand us in some good stead internationally; that our expertise in design, marketing and manufacturer is sorely needed, if only we were to look to the East.

“When we’re under this much pressure, we forget how good we are in the UK”

“We can’t think about what we’ve done in the past anymore”

Nissan aren’t car manufacturers anymore, Mark Ellis announces, but suppliers of ‘personal mobility solutions’! This turn of phrase is perhaps supposed to put a stake in the coffin of the ‘any colour, so long as it’s black’ Ford factory model, and point towards personalisation, connected cars, new payment models, and sustainable solutions as the new ways to turn a profit.

“If you haven’t got a strategy for reducing emissions, you’re going to be facing some massive fines”

Reducing CO2 emissions is high on the agenda, and this is where light-weighting enters the seminar room, a call which the plastics industry is prepped to answer.

“Electric vehicles are only ONE technology”

Mr Ellis says Nissan look towards Europe - not the mass market of Asia - for new polymer technologies, and tells the plastics professionals in the room that the future will require replacing metal with polymers, consolidating parts, increasing composites, foams and thermoplastics and optimising vehicle design. Is a new relationship with suppliers required? Yes, something Nissan has already begun, he assures. 

Ortwin Meuss, of Sabic and PlasticsEurope, takes the room back to O-Level physics with Newton’s famous equation Force = Mass x Acceleration. The engineers in the room sit up – and hear the basic truth that if you have a lighter vehicle (the “mass”), you need less fossil fuel to move (“force”).

This simple fact is lost on the European Commission according to the way they regulate and, in effect PlasticsEurope explain, by permitting heavier cars a higher emissions level, they punish manufacturers for making lighter cars. PlasticsEurope are fighting a battle to make the EU strategy for low-emission mobility take into account the importance of light weighting; and as Mr Meuss explains, the battle continues…

The spectre of Brexit looms over this day like the gathering clouds outside.

“9 out of 10 economists think it will bring an economic cost”

Professor David Bailey of Aston University introduces the deals the UK could get with the EU. Taking us on a country tour of the Norway, Swiss, Turkey, and Canadian solutions, as well as the ‘oh my god we got no deal’ WTO solution which he clarifies with the desperate urgency of a man at the end of his tether, is the one, he says, we must avoid. This will mean a default to 10% tariffs on everything.

“There is a fundamental asymmetry not understood by the media -  we need them more than they need us”

His outlook is largely bleak - trade doesn’t work the way the government thinks it does, he says - we don’t just build a car in Britain and then sell it to the rest of the world, there are dozens of channels through which pieces and equipment are made at different stages and transported across borders. If a tariff imposes friction across borders, there is going to be a problem getting potential investment in the UK, he explains.

“A real danger we could mess things up”

Car manufacturers, many of whom Professor Bailey points out are not based in Britain, are making decisions right now and in 2018 about where to invest to build the models that will come out in 2021, 2022 and beyond. Right, that is, smack bang in the middle of Article 50 – this is where the vague notion of “uncertainty” grows teeth, biting us when foreign companies decide the UK is not worth the risk and take their investments elsewhere.

“More change in the next 10-15 years than in the last 100 years”

There are no windows in the seminar room – just a giant Jaguar motif jutting out from every wall – but perhaps outside the clouds abate, as Professor Bailey contemplates the just-a-little-bit further future, wondering if in fifteen years driverless cars will turn up from an app to take you anywhere cheaply, and no one will need their own car.  

Cenex’s Keith Budden talks about electric cars, right now.  

“In the city it’s inevitable, it’s cheaper to run an electric van right now that a diesel van”

Drivers, he tells us, could get paid for owning an electric car under new plans from Nissan and Ovo Energy – owners will be able to connect their batteries to the grid during low-demand cheap tariff periods, and sell it back at profit during expensive times.

‘Sounds a lot like a train to me’, he quips when considering a future full of electric trucks digitally linked together, driving as one. There is a trend we’re seeing right now for high powered batteries, Mr Budden explains. All over, it appears, technologies are being dragged up to the mass-adoption waterline; even if they’re not right in front of our eyes (and many of them are), there’s a feeling that they’re coming.

“An opportunity for the plastics industry”

What’s the opportunity for the plastics industry?

Charging cables. Currently they’re all imported, Mr Budden says – he imagines a Birmingham airport – just down the road – full of expensive-to-make charging points. Marketing is also important, he continues – consumers will demand cars made from recycled material, whether or not these actually have a lower carbon footprint.

As if on cue, Keith Freegard is introduced to take the room on an adventure into recycling plastic.  

“I love traffic jams” he reveals, as to him a motorway blocked with cars is actually his raw material supply on its way to his company Axion Recycling to recover and, in their role as a chain in the new circular economy, supply back to the automotive industry. “Material Stewardship” is how he sees the future.

Ending the session we discover why plastic parts in cars break. Jenny Cooper from Smithers Rapra gives a technical tour of avoiding failure, something that’s always going to be vital, especially as light-weight demands mean plastic will play a bigger role in the vehicles of the future. (Upcoming BPF Webinar: Why Plastic Products Break (Fail))

On this cold November afternoon the sky is overcast but the sunlight makes its way to the carpark. Large slow-moving clouds above break into many more smaller ones. The guests walk to their cars in the midst of a breeze, two of which at this point, are electric. The changing weather casts a mosaic of shadows – some can see dark clouds growing and moving slowly towards them, others are basked in beams of light. 

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