USA – On the afternoon of 1 May, the press day of the Advanced Clean Transportation (ACT) Expo in Anaheim, I left the conference centre and walked to a nearby hotel to interview top executives at Westport Fuel Systems. It was not a journey made under the cover of darkness but in the bright, albeit unseasonably chilly, sunlight of a Californian day; nevertheless, there was the atmosphere of a midnight meeting of dissenters or undercover agents about the interview, which was held in a quiet corner of the hotel lobby. Their message to me had the flavour of a heretical counter-doctrine: “zero-emissions” is a lie and combustion is not evil! 

Let me dial back the melodrama just a bit. This is a conversation we were very welcome to have in the expo hall; there were no censors dogging my steps or moles listening in to the interview. The decision to conduct it at the hotel instead of the conference was purely a matter of convenience. Moreover, Westport has no qualms about being associated with unorthodox views about decarbonisation in the commercial vehicle industry. The explicit aim of Westport execs at the show was to “educate” and “promote awareness” of combustion technologies which can help to cost-effectively bring emissions down with vehicles and powertrains that are available today.