Uber is adding a ‘green fee’ to every London journey to top up its Clean Air Fund

Uber is going to start charging its customers a 35p ‘green fee’ on every journey, as part of its drive to move to completely electric vehicles.

The fee will be introduced in London, where Uber has announced hopes it will be hybrid by 2019 and has pledged to be fully electric by 2025.

The company has promised to commit £2 million to a Clean Air Fund, which will launch next month. The fund will subsidise drivers with who want to buy environmentally friendly cars, with up to £5,000.

Uber is expecting drivers to claim £150 million in total through the fund, which will be topped up through the green fee, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

Half of Uber’s London drivers already drive hybrid or fully electric cars. The company’s goal is for all of its uberX vehicles in the UK to be hybrid or fully electric by 2022.

“Air pollution is a growing problem and we’re determined to play our part,” Fred Jones, Uber’s Head of UK Cities said. “Londoners already know many cars on our app are hybrids, but we want to go much further and go all electric in the capital.”

The company has said the first 1,000 people in London to get rid of a pre-Euro 4 diesel vehicle will get up to £1,500 of Uber credit, if they provide an official scrap certificate.

“Our scrappage scheme will also take polluting vehicles off the road and encourage Londoners to get into a shared car to connect with public transport instead,” said Jones.

The UK Government has proposed banning diesel and petrol cars by 2040, and Scotland hopes to do the same but eight years earlier.

The government might be banning petrol and diesel engines by 2040, but Nissan thinks EVs will have taken over the UK long before that.

According to an interview with the Guardian, Edward Jones, Nissan’s EV manager in the UK claims that electric vehicle charging stations will outnumber petrol and diesel ones as early as 2020.

The only problem is, the National Grid has voiced serious concerns about how cars will be charged by people without off-street parking or home chargers. Just a look at a map of the car charging stations in the UK now shows infrastructure has a long way to go to cope with the surge in electric vehicles.