Classic News
Danny Hopkins says that classic vehicles are here to stay
All there is to know about everything classic – that really matters.
The bringing forward of the ban on the sale of diesel and petrol cars to 2030 has been seen, by many, as the beginning of ‘the end’. I’m not so sure. Firstly, it’s only a ban on selling new cars, so the internal combustion engine is not going to disappear from our roads, just new car showrooms. Secondly, the development of low emissions engines and new fuels continues, brilliant engineers creating breakthroughs that could make the filthy extraction of lithium and cobalt for new batteries a thing of the past.
That 2030 ‘ban’ might well ‘evolve’. Thirdly, as far as we are concerned, any ban on the sale of cars with petrol and diesel engines with potentially make all classic cars more important.
Our cars will become a core element in a hands-on, heritage revolution. The key here is to make sure our rights to use our cars are ring fenced, and that is where the surveys produced by the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs become so important. Because when we are talking to politicians who simply do not understand just what we do… the sentence ‘Every year, the historic vehicle industry is worth £7.2 billion to UK plc’ will cut through anti-classic car prejudice like a hot knife through butter.
Add to that the inspiring work of the Heritage Skills Academy and Association of Heritage Engineers, with their recently launched Sustainable Skills Network, and no government worth its salt would want to mess with the formula. I just wish Haynes, which is about to shut its new manual operations, would see that in doing so it is way behind the curve.
Classics are here to stay, and electric conversions are not the reason… internal combustion engines have to be under our bonnets, along with the next generation of engineers who will be inspired by them. They will be in the driving seat, even after 2030.
‘Classics will be central to the hands-on revolution’