The popularity of electric vehicles in the UK is ever increasing, with over 395,000 pure-electric cars and over 740,000 plug-in cars registered on the road, compared with just 3,500 in 2013. New models are being released all the time and there is a constantly expanding recharge network. The UK Government today announced that they will invest £100m in Britishvolt, a new large scale electric car battery factory, near Blyth in Northumberland.
The UK Government also announced last year the end of the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK by 2030 as a climate change measure. This will put the UK on course to be the fastest G7 country to decarbonise cars and vans. With all this in mind, servicing and repairing electric cars will become a skillset increasingly in demand in the future.
Accrington and Rossendale College are ahead of this trend by announcing their investment in a top class new training workshop. The new facility will cover the servicing and maintenance of EVs, battery fault diagnosis and repair, electric motor technologies and the installation of charging equipment – an investment of almost a quarter of a million pounds. The funding for this initiative has been provided from a Government Skills Development Fund designed to support the move to greener technologies.
Dr Steve Wright, EV project leader, said: ‘I’m delighted to see the College making such a significant investment in this field.
“The roll out of electric vehicles is crucial to meeting our country’s climate obligations and it’s vital that the technicians working with these new vehicles and their charging systems are up to date and ready for the challenges of the next era of motoring.
“We’ll be using the new equipment to make sure that all of our motor vehicle students have experience of working with EVs.
“Some of the new resources are very specialist and beyond the reach of smaller businesses. We’ll be making them available to local employers to upskill their staff if they wish to.”
Accrington and Rossendale College is part of the Nelson and Colne College Group, and you can see more about them here: www.nelsongroup.ac.uk
#AmazingAccrington is a business leaders group in Hyndburn dedicated to improving outcomes for residents of Hyndburn, and you can see more about them here: www.amazingaccrington.co.uk
