It is impossible not to be struck by reports of the rapid pace of change in the UK’s light commercial vehicle industry.
The pressure to move away from the internal combustion engine and towards alternatively-fuelled vehicles is, of course, the main driver for this upheaval and in a News Analysis we scrutinise Operational Fleet Insight: Clean Air and Alternative Fuels, a report jointly produced by the AA and BT Fleet Solutions.
The LCV sector, however, is heavily reliant upon diesel and the transition to cleaner fuels is far from straightforward. Indeed, one of the findings the research threw up was that over the course of the next five years, the expected reduction in the percentage of fleet managers using diesel vehicles is just 16%.
One problem flagged up at the conference held by the AA and BT Fleet Solutions to launch the report was the government’s failure to instigate a centralised, joined-up strategy to lower emissions and tackle the pollution in our cities that is damaging people’s health.
It has been left to local authorities to devise their own clean air policies, which has inevitably led to a lack of coherence nationally.
Surely greater collaboration between government, manufacturers, vehicle operators and fuel providers would yield more fruitful results.
James Dallas is the Editor of What Van?