PMM editor Kieran Nee travelled to Wrexham to visit Andy Brooke, Managing Director of Maverick Diagnostics and now director of the Automotive Training Academy – a newly opened academy dedicated to electric vehicle training.
Hi Andy, should our readers be focusing on EV training now?
Right now! There are so many EV and hybrid vehicles being sold in Britain – particularly hybrids, actually, because people really bark on about battery electric vehicles, but there are more hybrids being sold.
You need to be looking at those hybrids to ensure the future of your workshop. Battery electric vehicles are a slightly different matter, really. There aren’t as many being sold as people actually think, but there are still opportunities in there to repair battery electric vehicles.
There is a lot of need for EV training right now. I think a lot of people are burying their heads in the sand. That’s why we’ve built this facility specifically to do hybrid and EV IMI training levels one to four, four being the more sophisticated one.
How can traditionalists learn to love EVs?
A lot of people don’t like EVs, they don’t like the thought of EVs, they don’t like the thought of hybrids. I, myself, am a massive petrol head. And when I say a massive petrol head, I actually drive a dragster at Santa pod, I’ve got a hill climb car, I sponsor a touring car – I’m hugely into it, just to prove the point.
But I realise that we have to accept these changes now and start to plan and look at the future of our workshops now. I think internal combustion engines, particularly petrol engines and other engines are going to be more about motorsport to be perfectly honest with you and long may drag racing continue.
The driving experience that you get from an EV and hybrid vehicle is incredibly different: the smoothness, the acceleration. I ended up jumping from a B7 RS4 into a BMW I8 and the only complaint is that it doesn’t sound quite as good.
What are you hearing from garages, are many prepared for EVs and hybrids?
We do a lot with technical support and we seem to have two types of garages. We’ve got the “bury the head in the sand”-type of garage, saying, “I’m never having these EVs and hybrids, I’m going to retire before that happens”. Then we’ve got the ones who are really forward thinking, saying “Okay. I’ve got an opportunity here. I’m going to do the training. and I want further opportunities. I want to learn how these things work.”
When you look at a hybrid vehicle, it’s a highly sophisticated bit of kit because you’ve got two systems running side by side, you’ve got a normal ICE engine, which you need to service. But on top of that, you’ve got a battery pack, which actually is serviceable on most vehicles, even though a lot of people don’t seem to know that, but you can. If you’re at IMI level four, you can take your battery pack to bits and you can service it yourself. So there’s a lot of opportunity in there for them.
How real is range anxiety?
If you’ve got a Tesla, you’re alright cause you’ve got charging points everywhere. The first time I actually took the Skoda down to Oxford, a 300 mile round trip. Unfortunately, half the rapid charging stations were shut on the way home. So, it took me rather a long time to get back. So, range anxiety isn’t quite unfounded in my opinion, you do get it.
Is hydrogen a feasible solution?
The big problem with hydrogen is its element number one. So it’s literally the building blocks of absolutely everything. You can’t compress it that much. So you can’t get much hydrogen into a tank to start off with, so you need a pretty big fuel tank for hydrogen.
It also leaks very easily, as it’s very small. So, if you were to fill a party balloon with it, after a couple of days, it would just leak through the skin and the party balloon.
But the biggest thing is if you are then going to use it in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, it needs to be 99.9 per cent pure, which is very difficult to make.
