Grant Shapps’ plan for electric cars will make China a motoring giant

The problem – well, challenge – is how ever-more ambitious targets for going carbon neutral are practically compatible with the widespread desire for personal transportation. We just can’t make enough electric cars now, even with our present modest ambitions

Related video: charging an electric car ion the road (PA)

The name of Grant Shapps is not normally associated with the shifting tectonic plates of global economic power, but the transport secretary has reminded us about something that will shift the balance of industrial power: the rise of the electric car.

How will we get there? What will it mean? It will take time, given that only about one or two in every 100 new cars sold are pure electric – that is, battery power only, rather than hybrids such as the Toyota Prius that also feature an internal combustion engine. But the pace of adoption is accelerating for a number of reasons.

First, there is government action on the matter and Shapps’ bright ideas of fitting electric cars with a green number plate, of allowing electric vehicles to use bus lanes, of fitting newly developed homes with electric car charging points, and encouraging councils to permit free parking for alternative fuel vehicles.