MCIA conference; biofuels & charging infrastructure | FEATURE

We recently attended the Motorcycle Industry Association’s annual conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. 

The main topic of conversation was the planned end date for new fossil fuel motorcycles/scooters and the massive rollout of electric solutions. Synthetic and biofuels were also discussed. Could they be a future solution? Here’s a quick look at some of the key points and interesting facts. Plus a few thoughts from us.

Net Zero Strategy

The Government’s Net Zero Strategy is the planned strategy for decarbonising Great Britain by the year 2050. As set out in ‘Carbon Budget Six’ and reported in this article. It means all new ‘L Class’ vehicles in the UK (that’s all bikes/scooters) will have to be zero emission by 2035 – 2030 for up to 125cc. 

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV)

According to the DFT and DVLA, at the end of September 2022, there were a total of 603,000 BEVs on UK roads. In the same quarter of 2022, they made up 12% of all new registrations. Compare that to 2019; there were around 90,000 registered BEVs. It’s estimated that there will be 10 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2030. That’s a hell of a lot of vehicles to charge…

Infrastructure

The UK currently has 37,000 public chargepoints, including 6,800 rapid chargers. 600 new chargepoints are installed every month. A driver is never further than 25 miles from a rapid charger along our motorways and major A roads. Lamppost charge points are also increasing in availability. Even so, there are often queues to use public chargers. Imagine waiting behind a car at the fuel station for 45 minutes whilst they fill up? That’s the frustration EV car drivers often experience.

Currently, public chargepoints are very expensive in comparison to home charging. They can also be run by different suppliers, use different apps and be confusing for the consumer. Regulation is on the way though to improve the consumer experience. As the infrastructure grows things should improve in many ways.

Wiring a plug

During the conference we were given lots of facts, figures and predictions about the public charging network, however, this was a motorcycle event and the speakers neglected to realise that virtually all electric PTWs (Powered Two Wheelers) use a conventional 3-pin plug to recharge. No provision has been made for this. Arguably it’s much easier to charge a scooter at home or work and the batteries are often removable. Even so, that doesn’t give any scope for travelling further afield when using your machine for leisure. 

Zero emission fleet

The Zemo Partnership are a non-profit organisation that bring together Government, industry and a wide range of expert stakeholders in the field of zero-emission mobility.

Zemo are working alongside the MCIA and are including zero-emission scooters/motorcycles in their future transport plans. This is good news because it means £300m of extra funding is available as an incentive to get consumers to switch to electric. It also means our needs as riders will be taken into consideration and it’s likely two wheels won’t have quite such a negative image as they had in the past.

Getting noticed

The Government now realise that two-wheeled users can get around towns and cities much easier than cars. The adoption of local e-scooter rentals in cities and the widespread use of electric scooters for delivery purposes has helped to get us noticed as part of a solution rather than the problem.

60 billion deliveries

A very passionate and entertaining presentation came from Dr Tracey Worth, chairman of the Institute of Couriers. Tracey spoke of “Low hanging fruit” in relation to the massive growth of ‘final mile’ delivery solutions. Since Covid home deliveries have skyrocketed.

Home deliveries in numbers

• 2019 – 25 billion
• 2020 – 40 billion
• 2021 – 52.7 billion
• 2022 – 60 billion

That “Low hanging fruit” is there for switched-on electric vehicle suppliers to pick. That huge rise in the need for couriers means suitable electric scooters, small vans, bicycles and the like are needed in ever greater numbers. Tracey told the conference that scooters needed a box capable of taking 100-litres to make it more flexible for deliveries.

Bio/synthetic fuels

With the news that Formula 1 will be running on 100% sustainable fuel in 2026, synthetic fuels may well help save us petrolheads. MotoGP are following in the F1 wheeltracks and will have to run on 40% non-fossil fuels from 2024 and 100% from 2027. There is a real chance that the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) may still live on. 

The MotoGP regulations state that biofuel can’t be derived from food crops (ethanol is often produced from maize/sweetcorn). It can only be synthetically produced using sustainable energy or from non-food biomass (waste products from farming/forestry or from crops grown on land unsuitable for food production). 

F1’s Managing Director, Ross Brawn told F1 TV “We’re working on an E fuel where the carbon circle is completely neutral so the carbon utilised to produce that fuel is the same quantity as the carbon emitted from the internal combustion engine. It means that the engines do not add anything to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“The great appeal is when we find this solution, you can use it in your road car, without making any changes to the engine. We will have close to two billion internal combustion engines on the planet and whatever electric solution we find, whatever hydrogen solution we find, there’s still going to be two billion cars. There are parts of the world where those cars won’t change to electric.

“If we drop a fuel which has much less impact on the environment into those cars, it’s a positive change and we will be sending a strong message that that is a feasible way to go. All the oil companies that work in F1 are all committed to that. It will be a fantastic achievement and a fantastic message to the world that there are other solutions as well.”

Deflated

All that sounds like good news and there’s certainly lots of development to go into biofuels but during the conference I was left feeling deflated. We were told that so called E-Fuels are up to 70% less efficient than petrol and use six times the energy to produce. We were also told that hydrogen isn’t a real contender due to storage issues. However, with F1 and MotoGP both putting significant budgets into developing synthetic fuels there’s a good chance we may get a workable solution in the long term. 

One good bit of news for us classic scooter riders was that there are currently no plans to change E10 fuel to a higher ethanol percentage. What we really need though is an abundant supply of affordable synthetic fuel. A fuel that is able to power our classics, modern scooters, cars, vans and trucks. You can’t get much greener than not having to scrap millions of perfectly good vehicles. Many of our scooters are fifty or 60 years old and will last another 60 in many cases. 

Cross border pollution

Despite the huge expansion of London’s ULEZ, and more cities bringing out their own Low Emission Zones (Newcastle and Glasgow for instance – although neither of those cities includes motorcycles) there was only one mention of the rollout of ULEZ and Clean Air regulations.

Reading between the lines, I imagine we’ll soon be seeing schemes rolled out further than our cities. A study has found (hardly surprising) that areas outside of clean air zones are suffering from “Cross border pollution.” In other words, the dirty air from cities is being blown into other areas and reducing the air quality. I imagine some towns will adopt Low Emission Zones and speed limits will be reduced on faster roads near to heavily polluted areas. Sheffield already has an enforced 60mph stretch of the M1 to help improve local air quality.

LACES

The overriding feeling at the conference was that we’re all destined for an electric future and the powers that be aren’t particularly bothered about finding different solutions. Whether that strategy is workable or not is a different matter.

According to the DVSA, MCIA and Zemo Partnership the future of mobility (and energy) is tied together with “LACES”

Lightweight

Automated

Connected

Electric

Shared

I fear a future of autonomous electric vehicles, shared ‘personal’ transport and less of us actually owning vehicles.

Freedom

From a scooter rider’s point of view, freedom is one of the main reasons to ride. We’re able to switch off from the world, explore new places, ride across countries. At the moment there seems to be no vision or provision for the leisure rider. The only focus seems to be on getting from A to B in towns and cities.

Without a major breakthrough in technology, once we hit 2030-2035 we’ll start finding it harder (and of course more expensive) to get fuel for our existing scooters. It’s not just vintage machines either, earlier Vespa GTS models (and some other 4-strokes) should be run on super unleaded.

We’ll also be facing the wrath of environmentalists for polluting the air whenever we ride. Classic conversions like the Retrospective Scooters ones we featured a while back (pictured above) will become ever more popular for local riders, but not of much use for longer-distance riders until battery tech takes a giant leap forward.

£37 billion loss in fuel duty

We’ve already seen huge rises in electricity prices, in a similar fashion to what we saw with diesel prices once we’d all been convinced it was safer than smoking. I imagine over the next few years those prices will continue going up. The Treasury are estimated to take £37 billion a year from the sale of fuel each year. We’re going to pay for that one way or another, whether it’s green or not.

Of course, we’ll keep you up to date with any news, good or bad as we get it.

Iggy