Lexus: The hybrid debate blog

The majority of Britons now believe that human activity is contributing to global warming. So why don’t the majority of us drive hybrid cars? The simple answer is that we’re unwilling to pay more money for our personal transportation without receiving a proportionate benefit.

It’s difficult for us to visualise or imagine the effects of climate change, not least because extreme weather events affect the Third World more than the First. So we assume the problem is not an urgent one, or ignore it in the belief that we will suffer little as a result. Moreover, we don’t want to be the early adopters of a relatively expensive technology, and thereby pay more than others to solve a problem that affects us all. It’s a matter of fairness.

This is an instance where the free market does not encourage necessary innovation and collaboration. As a society, we want to arrest climate change, just as we want to buy TVs from Japan and wine from Australia. But, in return for generating less pollution, we get no direct reward. In fact, we are more likely to see our standard of living drop. At present, buying a hybrid car is a bit like paying for your neighbour’s loft insulation.

It is therefore up to governments and international bodies to create a level playing field, in which we all sacrifice a small quantity of our resources in order to avert disaster. The technology exists to reduce dramatically the CO2 produced by driving, but manufacturers won’t feel compelled to pass on the cost of this technology to consumers unless they are compelled to do so by law. They didn’t shift voluntarily to unleaded fuel, and they won’t shift voluntarily to hybrid engines or cleaner technologies - at least, not quickly enough.

There’s strong precedent for imposing emissions standards on car manufacturers that bring about major positive changes without harming their industry. When the US Clean Air Acts were being debated in the 1960s and 1970s, they were initially met with fierce resistance by the Detroit car lobby. But Japanese manufacturers decided these laws or similar would inevitably come about, and adapted accordingly, stealing a march on their US rivals. The difficulty with imposing fundamental changes on engine technology, such as hybridisation, is that any agreement would have to be international. So for our notional future to come about - one in which hybrids were mainstream - there would have to be international legislation in place to guarantee that all new cars met strict emissions standards.

At present, the playing field is not level in either the costs or morals of sustainable driving. Middle-class city-dwellers find it easy to afford hybrid cars and adapt their lifestyle to more sustainable forms of living. The rural working classes still need their old bangers to get to work, pick up their children from school, visit the supermarket and so on.

By the same token, a working-class family shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about taking a yearly holiday to Spain on a budget airline, because they can’t afford to take the suggestion of a "Chattering Class" newspaper and drive their hybrid car to a second house in the south of France

For our hybrid future to function, it may need to be supported by progressive taxation. So, for example, wealthier families could be priced out of emitting disproportionate amounts of carbon dioxide through transportation.

At the same time, the car must be viewed in the context of a broad sustainable lifestyle, and not demonised unfairly. The overarching attitude of green lobbyists towards the car over the past 20 years has been to try to defeat it, get rid of it, abolish it. But that simply won’t work in rural areas where people and amenities are widely dispersed and (as yet) not served reliably by public transport.

Instead of trying to beat the car, we should make it the centre of our society, so that, for example, it plugs into the house as an auxiliary battery. We should think of it as a moveable component of our homes and lifestyles. Provided the world’s government’s can agree a level playing field for car manufacturers, the costs of climate rescue can be distributed evenly across the driving population without harming the competitiveness of individual nations or the industry as a whole. More importantly, the decision of whether to pay a premium to help save the world will be taken out of the consumer’s hands.