Hi, it's producer Adrian here. We're bringing you a special podcast today from our Spotlight team.

And the new Statesman podcast team will be back tomorrow.

I'm Alona Furber, editor of the New Statesman Spotlight Policy section and this is a special podcast

from the New Statesman Spotlight team.

This episode is the second in a three-part special series, are we there yet?

How far have we come on autonomous vehicles?

In this series we'll explore the future of autonomous vehicles or AVs, self-driving cars

and the impact they might have or probably will have on the way we run our roads, cities and the world.

In this, the second episode of our special series produced in partnership with Wee Joe, the smart mobility tech company.

We're going to be discussing the policy obstacles and opportunities for rolling out electric vehicles.

In 2020, the UK government announced the end of the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

At the time, Boris Johnson's government pledged £1.8 billion to support greater uptake of zero emission vehicles,

including £1.3 billion to roll out more charge points for electric vehicles across the country.

Today, the 2020 announcement said at the time, a driver is never more than 25 miles away

from a rapid charge point anywhere along England's motorways and major a roads.

Since then, the UK has seen the biggest year-on-year growth in electric car registration for years

at the end of October 2022. There were 590,000 battery electric cars and 430,000 plug-in hybrids on the roads

and 2021 saw a 92% growth in the number of battery electric cars compared to 2020 to put this into perspective.

In 2017, that figure was around 44,000.

There are millions of registered cars on the road in the UK, so how far have we come on the EV journey?

Today, we're going to discuss how close we are to mass EV adoption and milestone on the road to net zero on our roads.

What are the major infrastructure issues for cities racing to roll out charging points,

...