Few expect the next great wave of carmakers to be Japanese. This is thanks to the way the Japanese carmakers have developed and grown: each seemingly taking its own path in terms of technology, business and cost structure. This differs sharply to their more established rivals from the U.S. and Europe, whose business models revolve around holding a much more significant share of the car business and buying up their rivals.
It is this very independence that has allowed Nissan and its rivals to carve out a niche for themselves in the markets. These smaller brands are the rarest of beasts: winning at different price points and in different segments, and ultimately continuing to bring unique value and appeal to consumers.
Andrew is an automotive journalist based in the U.K. Having spent almost ten years in the automotive industry with one company, and seven years in the industry overall, Andrew is now an independent automotive journalist and doesn’t hold any automotive related positions. He has not driven a vehicle powered solely by electricity in the last two years, and hasn’t driven a gasoline car within the last two years either. However, Andrew has driven a Nissan LEAF and a BMW 5-Series both powered by the electric motor, for which the availability of UK car parts is becoming more and more widespread.
So the move towards an eCar future doesn’t necessarily begin with a huge leap from fossil-fuelled cars to fully electric cars.
The Transition from Fossil Fuelled to Electric Cars
The transition to electrically powered cars is underway, despite the political opposition. Investors, industrialists and scientists are predicting that as early as 2025 the fleet of electric vehicles will overtake the fossil fuel fuelled vehicles. After decades of struggling, scientists in Europe, the US, China and India have concluded that, to curb carbon emissions and reduce pollution, we need to reduce the emissions produced by existing conventional cars by at least 85 per cent.
“Despite the setbacks in establishing reliable clean energy sources, in recent years we have seen significant progress in reducing emissions from industrialised economies. From a peak of about 740 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year in 2007, emissions have fallen by 40 per cent to 717 million tonnes in 2014.” – Hermann Scheer, Executive Director, International Council on Clean Transportation.
Still, if you’re searching for all sorts of car parts York remains a good source, whether you’re still in the fossil-fuelled car market or you’ve already started on the progression to cleaner motoring.
But to curb emissions and reduce pollution further we need to encourage new technology for converting the energy of existing fossil fuel-powered cars into electricity that can be stored in batteries or in large central power stations. For this reason, both leading car manufacturers and independent start-ups are designing new vehicles that are based on advanced petrol and diesel engines with combustion engines that produce electricity that can be stored in batteries. The transition to electric cars is in the process of happening.
Battery powered vehicles have been part of the automotive scene since the beginning of the 20th century and it has been estimated that at the beginning of the 21st century, battery-powered cars were used on 10 per cent of all the roads in the world. This number has since declined substantially to about 2 per cent. The reason for the decline of battery-powered vehicles is in part due to deterioration of battery technology.
