The Government recognise this, and have announced consumer incentives to start in 2011, around the time when there’ll begin to be a selection of EVs on the market from big auto companies like Nissan, Smart, Renault, Mini, and Mitsubishi. The recently announced Plugged In Places scheme also commits £30m for the installation of more charging points around the country, (the UK has 273 charging points, but only 54 are outside London), which is just part of the £400 million of support to encourage development and uptake of ultra-low emission vehicles. But are the government taking a broad enough view of the potential for business?

Currently there are consumer incentives that are only set to get better – no tax, no congestion charge, and some free parking. Then from 2011 there’ll be £5000 subsidies available to help you purchase an EV, and £2000 subsidies for scrapping an old car and buying an EV.

But outside of these consumer-focused efforts, the UK government is failing. American companies such as Coulomb Technologies and ZAP have benefitted from the US’s venture capital culture, having secured US $3.75 million from Estag Capital and $25 million from Cathaya Capital respectively. There’s also companies like Infotility, who develop software to manage the grid, and have received funding from the US Department of Energy for a number of joint projects. Obama’s stimulus package also committed $1 billion of support for companies making car batteries. The US government recognises that there are spaces to fill in this emerging industry, and an opportunity to capitalise on the huge opportunity for growth.

However, in the UK, the only apparent funding is in the form of a general grant scheme for established companies (not targeted at EV developers), or a 50% costs grant available to businesses wanting to install charging points. Instead, the focus of the government’s projects are on consumer incentives to drive what they call a “motoring revolution”, and on the hope that EVs might reinvigorate auto-manufacturing in Britain.

Of course, auto-manufacturing in the UK is largely dependent on the big international auto companies, so the hope is that, despite a savage fall in profits, they will plump for British factories and British workers to produce their EV lines for the European market. This is not entirely wishful thinking. At the time of writing, Ellesmere Port is in the running to produce General Motors’ ‘Volt’ model or Vauxhall’s Ampera, and Nissan’s Sunderland plant has won a £380m loan for the development of electric car technology, which could potentially generate 4,500 jobs.

Superficially this appears great news for UK economy, creating jobs at a time when unemployment figures sit at 2.46 million. But much of the revenue actually generated from the manufacturing itself is falling back into foreign hands. There’s a bigger opportunity here, and bigger potential benefit than manufacturing opportunities and consumer take up.

The transition to EVs is comparable to the emergence of mobile phone technology into the mass market, only with the added environmental benefit. Think of all the businesses which are built around mobiles – from the phone unlocking nooks on the high street to network providers. The EV industry opens up the same broad opportunity for business startups not only in manufacturing and charging points, but in anything EV owners need, not readily available in the marketplace, like charging cables, electronics maintenance, energy management technology and portable battery packs.

Clare Keen, a spokesperson from the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation, admitted that there was little support being offered to UK startups wanting to provide these services: “There’s no specific support that we provide. There’s funding available for low carbon auto projects, but it’s not targeted at startups, it’s targeted at established companies, and it’s focused around production and products. Jaguar Land Rover have just received a [£1m] grant to produce a low carbon product as part of that general grant scheme. There is nothing specific around startups connected to electric vehicles.”

The government is encouraging manufacture, and throwing money at charging points, but what needs to be developed is a supportive network for startups in the emerging EV industry, and help for existing businesses like Elektromotive, Pluginsure and Park and Power. The UK can be an incubator for many more enterprising startups, who have the potential for high growth and international expansion. But they require a better infrastructural network to work with and support in the form of an investment environment that will allow them to grow.

Just like any 21st-century squabble worth its salt, the attempted thunder-theft of Nissan by GM yesterday was addressed on Twitter – “Nissan Leaf = 367 mpg, no tailpipe, and no gas required. Oh yeah, and it’ll be affordable too!”, read Nissan Electric Vehicles’ feed after the announcement. Oh, snap. Nissan hasn’t said just how affordable it’ll be, but estimates are currently between $15,000 and $25,000, which is considerably less than the projected $40,000 the Volt will cost. GM is saying the Volt will cost 40 cents to recharge, while Nissan are going for the figure of $13 a month – impossible to properly compare though, as they’re based on American and Japanese energy prices respectively, and anyway, there’s already debate over the veracity of the energy prices GM’s used. The pricing estimates don’t include the price of leasing the battery to owners, which Nissan is planning on doing; it looks like GM will not be leasing batteries to customers as Nissan will, thus raising the price of the Volt as it comes with a battery thrown in (though obviously then has risk of replacement costs).

The mpg predictions are also debateable, considering they’re attempting to place a gallon-based value onto an engine that doesn’t do gallons of anything. One can expect the Nissan though, with its trim chassis, to trump the Volt, which is chunkily styled like something out of a Hollywood vision of the future, and shows that GM just can’t kick its hatred of little cars.

The comparison water gets muddied all the more by the fact that the Volt is a hybrid with a wee little petrol engine as well, while the Leaf is all-electric – the Leaf’s zero-emissions distance is better, but the Volt can go further if you count in the contribution of its petrol engine. The Volt’s engine can also be filled with E85 biofuel though, a detail that hasn’t been particularly trumpeted, and was heard by some eavesdropping folks at The Auto Channel – it can therefore make a slightly better claim to be a truly non-petrol car. In short – it’s bloody difficult to quantify just how green these cars are.

And of course the green-ness of these vehicles is also affected by where they get their electricity from, like a coal-fired power station. And then there’s the strain on the grid – the Leaf battery can accept an 80% charge in 30 minutes from a special charger, but that involves a heavy load on the grid. A hypothetical future situation is one where commuters are charging their cars en masse on the way home from swift-charging power points, creating a massive drain on the grid.

So while the manufacturers are likely to carry on bickering about whose car is better, we’ll just have to wait for some clearer pricing information before trying to begin making a comparison about which is better value.

Ford is spending its on making 13 big names like the Focus and Mustang more fuel efficient, while Nissan is spending it on making one of its plants ready to manufacture its upcoming electric family car. Tesla are less well known on these shores – they make a “roadster” that was apparently designed by Barbie and Ken to ferry them to a volleyball party, but their new sedan, the Model S pictured above, is actually pretty desirable. It’ll use its loan to build a manufacturing plant for the new machine. It’s a 2003 startup that has only delivered 500 vehicles, and has some niggling question marks over its business model; nevertheless it’s set to shift into profitability next month, and is already 10% owned by Daimler, with potentially more to follow. Way to go, you little tyke! Even more satisfying for them is to be deemed “financially viable” and therefore worth investing in, while GM and Chrysler have been left on the naughty step and denied these loans. 

It all makes the UK government’s pledge of £250m towards the entire electric car industry – vehicles and infrastructure – seem pretty pathetic. I know it’s not easy to push through more debt at the moment, but the damage would be offset by the gains, both financial and political. The manufacturing industries are in need of some real, tangible support, Labour need votes in their heartlands – isn’t this a no-brainer? A little incentivising for Opel, Jaguar et al now could mean an ongoing manufacturing industry for years to come.

And let’s not forget our own Teslas, the small UK car startups. Tesla’s exponential rise can be attibuted to creating a sunshine-friendly, environmentally-friendly vehicle in a sunny, environmentally-aware part of America; the UK government should see the potential for things like Riversimple, who make Smart-like city runarounds. Let’s get into this industry before the rest of Europe gets there first.

Gordon Brown said last year that he wants all British vehicles to be hybrid or electric by 2020, and the announcement comes as various major car manufacturers outline their plans for electric cars. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn was talking up his company’s prospects yesterday: ”Somebody’s got to invest massively and bring to the market zero emission cars, and we think we can do it”, he said, before slagging off GM’s Chevy Volt for being, at $40,000, way too expensive. Chrysler is developing the Dodge Circuit, an electric sports car, to be the first of five electric or hybrid models to be out by 2012 (that’s if it can negotiate a deal with Fiat to manufacture them). Mitsubishi have recently been showing off the i-Miev, a tiny car that looks like a cheerful robotic hamster storing food in its cheeks, and plans to launch it in 2010. Then there’s the adorably happy little gentleman pictured above, the Peapod, who can only go at 25mph and is designed as a “neighbourhood” vehicle, but which is so goshdarned cute I could just eat it all up.

This month’s Fortune magazine features Warren Buffett alongside the Chinese electric car company he’s invested in, BYD. Don’t underestimate the power of the Oracle – his slavish followers will be on the BYD waiting list before you know it. It only costs $22,000, and looks like a Saab if you squint hard enough, but does have its limitations – its 60-mile range is only good if you’re pootling along at 30mph, while lack of demand in China might be a stumbling block to expansion.

Vauxhall have announced the Ampera, which looks totally evil, the sort of thing the Terminator would take his kids to football practice in. Encouragingly though, it could be built at Ellesmere Port, helping the UK, as Boris Johnson potentially sees it, to be the “electric car capital of Europe”. Ah, and therein lies the rub.

£250m is a drop in the ocean in terms of the investment in infrastructure needed for electric cars to be feasible UK-wide. George Osbourne has  described the plans as “fantasy”, highlighting the lack of preparation for charging points and no mention of a grid to deal with the extra electricity demands created by a nation of electric car drivers. And as John Sauven, chief exec of Greenpeace, told the Telegraph: “electric cars are only as green as the electricity they run on”.

The recent fails concerning renewable energy funding means these cars aren’t going to be running on wind or waves; it looks like Ed Miliband’s next generation of nuclear power plants is going to be sorting out energy in the medium term, but until they’re operational the UK is going to running on carbon-rich gas, right when the electric car revolution is meant to begin.

I scraped a B at GCSE, but let’s do some maths anyway. Assuming you charge your 25kWh car battery from a gas-fired power station emitting 400g of carbon per kilowatt hour, you’ll create 10,000g of carbon dioxide to charge an electric car for a day. An electric car like the Ampera or Volt can generally go about 64km on a charge. A 1.4l diesel Ford Fiesta generates 119g of CO2 per km, or 7616g over 64km; that’s 2,384g less carbon than the electric car, right? (Please tell me in the comments if I’ve really dropped the ball here). OK, so a diesel Fiesta has very low emissions compared with most vehicles, and this doesn’t take into account the carbon created by manufacturing the diesel, but even so, electric cars charged off gas-fired power stations (which aren’t even as bad as coal ones) can’t really claim to be cutting Britain’s carbon emissions substantially. And the above scenario doesn’t take into account the strain that fast-charging batteries will have on a power grid.

There’s also a huge shortfall in Hoon’s proposal in terms of allowing the UK to reap the benefits of the electric car. Sure, the Ampera might be built in the North West, but the batteries will be coming from China. If oil-producing nations were the beneficiaries of the internal combustion engine, then battery-producing nations are set to be richly rewarded in the electric car age – the market for lithium-ion batteries to be used in cars could reach $17bn by just 2012. To say, as Labour are, that your electric car plans are to merely subsidise people to buy them, rather than even attempting to tap into the revenue-generating potential they have, is pretty pathetic.

Obviously the government championing electric cars is a good thing, but they have to be powered by renewables, they have to involve British industry, and they have to have a supporting infrastructure that will stay in place for decades to come. Concentrating on the consumers should be the last on this list of priorities; Labour is currently putting it up at the top.

And ringing in this new week? Well, the ENTIRE automotive industry.

Suppliers of car parts, who have obviously been feeling the knock-on effects of car companies slowing production, are to request $10bn-worth of TARP funds in the US; last year 40 automotive companies, many of them suppliers, filed for bankruptcy protection. And the car parts pain continues in Germany, where Continental and Schaeffler are both asking the governments in their home states for help with their combined debt of €22bn. Of course if you happen to supply Porsche, you’ll have already been conspicuously bailed out by their CEO Wendelin Wiedeking, who recently took the opportunity to turn the plight of suppliers into a tidy bit of positive spin for himself.

Governments are also bailing out workforces. Japanese workers at Mazda and Mitsubishi are to have their earnings propped up by government aid while the companies slow down production; companies must pay at least 60% of wages on days when shifts are cancelled, and the government will be funding at least half of those sums. European companies, like Daimler, Bosch and Cartier, are using similar schemes to prevent redundancies during this hopefully short period of reduced production. 

Not joining the party though are Canadian GM and Chrysler, who refused the government loans extended to them last week, surprising given the lust for cash displayed by their American counterparts. But UK car companies will get the bailout they’ve been waiting for this week, as Mandy announces on Wednesday his plans for the industry. In short, companies will be able to access credit from the Bank of England to fund attractive financing deals for new customers.

So what of the green New Deal promised by Brown, Cameron and Obama? The Telegraph reports that some of the UK bailout money will go on “grants for ‘green’ research and development”, while the FT says that “Obama’s government is also studying other measures that could help parts suppliers over the longer term, including support for research and production of advanced batteries”. While the electric car could be the New Deal for the auto industry (just as long as Bolivia, with half the world’s lithium, doesn’t squeeze everyone trying to make electric car batteries too tightly), it all still sounds suspiciously vague – let’s hope it doesn’t get swept under the carpet amid the clamour for short-term solutions.