(L-R): Ashwoods' Hybrid Van at the Brandenbury Gate and Leyland DAF's Leylad LF hybrid

Low-emission cars are making steady headway in the UK. Certainly, hybrid vehicles are not the oddity they once were – sales of ‘alternatively fuelled’ (i.e. hybrid, electric, natural gas or biofuel) vehicles rose by 9.4 per cent in 2012 and now comprise 1.4 per cent of all new sales. It is accepted that if the UK is going to make any sort of progress towards its promise to cut its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 then, given that one fifth of emissions come from road transport, such vehicles will have a big part to play.

But trucks, vans and lorries are another story. Here, low-emission technology has yet to make any serious inroads, which is unfortunate given that the heavier the vehicle, the worse a polluter it tends to be. A light van with a 0.5-tonne payload will, on average, produce 22.5 kilogrammes (kg) of CO2 per 100 kilometres, whereas a 19-tonne heavy goods vehicle (HGV) will produce 74.3 kg over the same distance.

The reasons for the slow uptake are numerous, but according to Nigel Base of the industry body Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), it boils down to one fundamental snag: price. “For electric vehicles it’s the price of the batteries”, he explains. “Plus the fact they’re heavy and they take up a lot of space. For hybrids, there’s still the batteries – though not quite to the same degree. Nevertheless, you’ve got issues around the weight and cost. You’re talking significant increases in capital costs, and as a result there is little or no take up. In reality, of course, there are little or no products on the market for the same reasons.”

It is, he explains, a vicious circle. “The diesel engine has been around for 100 years. It works, it’s efficient, well understood and it’s extremely good at moving heavy vehicles around, and at the moment there is nothing in sight that’s going to replace that. There is a lot of talk about hydrogen and fuel cells but if it’s going to happen it’s a long way off. Fuel cells have been around for as long as the diesel engine but they can’t be made to workin an automatic environment, not so far. But all these systems are more expensive than what we have at present. People aren’t going to pay more for less. We don’t do it in our personal lives and we certainly don’t do it for business reasons.”

For manufacturers and fleet purchasers, this wouldn’t be a problem, except the EU has recently approved a draft law proposing that emissions from new light commercial vehicles be reduced from current levels of 203 grammes of CO2 per kilometre (g CO2/ km) to 147g CO2/km by 2020, as well as indicating further reductions to between 105-120g from 2025. It looks very much like manufacturers are going to have to produce increasing numbers of low-carbon light commercial vehicles to balance out the older, less fuel-efficient HGVs.

These ambitious targets create a greater urgency for manufacturers to up their game. But government has also been active. As part of the low-carbon vehicles innovation platform, it was announced earlier this year that £9.5 million is to be invested in trials in commercial vehicles over two years. This will involve private firms being funded to the tune of up to £750,000 for technology that could range from gas powered to hybrid to electric powered. The successful bids are expected to be announced in early August.

The government has also committed itself to the ambitious goal of every car and van being low emission by 2050. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) has beencentral to this, introducing a number of initiatives like the Plug In Grant, whereby UK companies wishing to purchase a low-emission vehicle can apply for grants covering 20 per cent of the cost of that vehicle up to a maximum of £8,000. There is also the Low Carbon Vehicle Procurement Programme, which was originally set up in 2007 but has recently expanded and now provides up to £1.7 million for public fleet buyers to purchase up to 500 low-carbon vans.

Mark Roberts, Managing Director of Ashwoods, a Devon-based development firm that also claims to be ‘UK’s leading supplier of hybrid commercial vehicles’ suggests that there are ‘at least’ 20 low-emission vans and lorries on the UK market at present, including electrics, hybrids and ‘alternative’ fuel vehicles. “Although I’m loath to say that hybrids are the long-term solution, they are certainly the most suitable solution for now”, he posits. “I also think we’ll see a growth in ‘range extended electric vehicles’, which run 90 per cent of the time on EV mode but have a generator to charge the battery when it needs to travel a bit further.”

Indeed, on the lighter end of the market there are a number of models that do currently use low-emission technology. Mercedes has its Canter Eco truck, for instance, a seven-and-a-half-tonne hybrid that it claims uses up to 23 per cent less fuel than a similar sized engine in a conventional truck.

Meanwhile, Leyland DAF has the LF hybrid that was first produced in 2010. “It’s a 12-tonne vehicle powered by a diesel engine”, explains Phil Moon, Leyland DAF’s Product Marketing Manager. “It works in conjunction with a motor generator, so whenever the vehicle slows down or comes to a stop, the generator puts electrical energy into a series of lithium-iron batteries with 1.9 kilowatt hours of storage capacity. It stores the energy at 340 volts, and then you can use that energy to help drive the vehicle forward, which is where the fuel-efficiency benefit comes from.”

Moon, however, does point out that the battery pack in the motor generator doubles its cost and as a result, like many similar models, it’s largely been a niche product, bought by companies that “have a desire to demonstrate their environmental credentials”. Nevertheless, Leyland DAF is keen to pursue hybrid technology further. “It’s very much part of our developmental strategy. It has the reliability that is expected in the market place, it’s cost effective and has a pay back.”

Refuse and recycling vehicles are notoriously inefficient in terms of their fuel usage, but some are turning their attention to efficiency lately. Romaquip’s Kerb Sort vehicle, which was put onto the market in 2011, claims to be ‘most economical vehicle to purchase, run and maintain’. It does 10 miles to the gallon (which is impressive for a slow-moving recycling vehicle), not because of any alternative engine, but mainly because its high payload means it is able to take in more material.

Others may soon break into the world of hybrids. “I can’t say much about it yet, but we’re doing some development work with the leading refuse vehicle manufacturer about hybridising their vehicles”, says Mark Roberts of Ashwoods. “On-board technology like compacting uses a huge amount of fuel when it’s engine powered, so there is a lot of work currently being done about hybridising this.” Indeed, while entire vehicles won’t necessarily run on hybrid energy or lowemission fuel in the immediate future, the technology is already available for components of RCVs. Take Terberg’s line of electric binlifts such as the OmniDEL e, which run on the vehicle batteries’ electricity alone, reportedly decreasing overall fuel consumption by between 8 and 14 per cent.

Yet despite these examples, widespread use of low-emission technology in UK commercial vehicles still appears to be some way off. Nigel Base, for one, is pessimistic: “Cars are easy – you just set a per kilometre target, job done and let the manufacturers get on with it. As soon as you get to heavier commercial vehicles, there is just no simple metric you can use and this is what policymakers are grappling with. We talk to them nearly every week about this sort of stuff. OLEV has great difficulty getting its head around heavy stuff.”

He doesn’t see any immediate solution on the horizon. “You’ve got to bear in mind product lifecycles. If you sat down today and said ‘We’re going to devise a new truck with a new low-emission engine drive system’, it would probably appear on the market in about 10 to 15 years’ time. It takes that long to design something from scratch, test it and put in on the road. But the Department of Transport has got some very, very aggressive targets, and I suspect that it is not going to hit them. In fact, it’s virtually impossible for the department to hit them because that technology needs to exist right now.”

In other words don’t expect a truly lowcarbon HGV or RCV to be making its way down a road near you any time soon.