Mobility Operations "Big Event" at the Royal Highland Centre in Edinburgh with Alastair Dalton
Category
🏖
TravelTranscript
00:00I'm Alastair Dalton, the Scotsman's Transport Correspondent at the Royal Highland Centre
00:05at Ingleston in Edinburgh. I'm at the big event organised by Mobility Operations, which
00:12provides cars and other vehicles for people with disabilities. They have the biggest single
00:20electric fleet in Scotland of 5,000 of their customers driving EVs, but they need to move
00:28the other 75,000 on to electric vehicles. Just to demonstrate it, I'm going to be joined
00:37by the Paralympian basketball player Robin Love, who's going to take me on a test drive
00:43driving an electric vehicle for the first time round the circuit here.
00:48Yeah, so first time driving an EV and honestly it is so smooth, like I didn't quite appreciate
00:57how quiet and actually relaxing it is. I think when you go from manual to automatic
01:04your life is changed and then now going from a petrol engine to an electric engine my life
01:12is changed even more. Although when the car does turn on and it doesn't make a noise it
01:17is a bit spooky, it's like is it on, is it not? I'd like a nice jingle when my car comes
01:22on, but I've heard that is a feature of the Mustang so that's pretty cool.
01:27The adaptations on this car is a push-pull hand control which basically is pretty incredible
01:34so to pull, when I pull it pushes the accelerator down and when I push it pushes the brakes
01:40so it makes driving so much easier, not having to use my feet, everything is at my grasp
01:48and for me just when I drive long distances it makes it a lot easier because my legs get
01:53tired and you can also get a little indicator switch on the hand controls as well, this
01:59car doesn't have it but that's something I have on my car and again just makes your life
02:04easy and to be honest my favourite adaptation is the steering ball. My mum was driving my
02:11car the other day and I think she's actually going to get her own steering ball because
02:17she thinks everyone should have one, it makes driving so much easier.
02:20Hi, I'm Dale Groves, the Adaptations Manager for Motability Operations in our Accessible
02:26Vehicles team. I'm at the Edinburgh One Big Day today, an opportunity for customers to
02:31come and try a range of vehicles, adaptations and wheelchair accessible vehicles that they
02:35could have on the scheme. The move to electric vehicles for the scheme partly is the environmental
02:42challenge that faces us all but also we've got a large fleet of vehicles and our customers
02:47have a three year lease so the nature of the automotive industry moving towards EVs means
02:52that our adaptation towards that for our fleet is something we are going to have to do whether
02:58we would like to or not. What are the key concerns that your customers have about moving
03:03to electric vehicles? It's access to charging, it's the compatibility with their lifestyle,
03:11if you don't have home charging using the public charging network, the Motability Foundation
03:15has done some amazing work with trying to influence legislation in making charging more
03:20accessible particularly the public network. Charging cost, there's an inconsistency in
03:26the public charging network between the rates that you pay relative to the charger that
03:30you use and that can cause concern for our customers. In Motability Operations we've
03:36got over 700,000 customers currently and we've got the largest fleet of electric vehicles
03:42in the UK. It's also worth saying we've got the largest fleet of adapted vehicles and
03:46wheelchair accessible vehicles anywhere in Europe so the scheme is huge and the support
03:51that we offer to our customers to make sure that particularly in the world as we move
03:55towards electrification they're not left behind.