From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Yet more taxpayer money to be thrown at the cars nobody wants to buy!
The cost of some new electric cars will soon be reduced by up to £3,750 under grants being introduced by the government to encourage drivers to move away from petrol and diesel vehicles.
The discounts will apply to eligible vehicles costing up to £37,000, with the most environmentally friendly vehicles seeing the biggest reductions, the Department for Transport (DfT) said.
Carmakers can apply for funding from Wednesday, with the RAC saying discounted cars should start appearing at dealerships “within weeks”.
But some drivers have previously told the BBC that ultimately, the UK needs more charging points to spur people to buy electric vehicles (EVs).
The government has pledged to ban the sale of new fully petrol or diesel cars and vans from 2030.
Under the scheme, discounts will range between £1,500 and £3,750 and buyers will be able to claim a discount at the dealership.
The grants to lower the cost of EVs will be funded through a £650m scheme, and will be available for three years.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Britain was broke, but with EV sales still languishing at 21%, Miliband is becoming ever more desperate.
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Well, any bad product needs bribes before people will buy it.
Well £650M/£3,750 is enough for173,333.33 vehicles. Out of over 30M on the road (19.3 million petrol cars and 10.9 million diesel cars) isn’t even a dent in the numbers… tis but a scratch.
Probably just about covers a couple of months of the depreciation. The average of battery cars on sale here from Geoff Buys Cars is £50,000 so no bung of taxpayers cash for the average car.
One study found that EVs lost an average of 58.8% of their value within five years, another showed greater than 13% annually. £50k x 13% is about £6,500 so £1,500 is about 3 months depreciation and £3,750 is about 7-8 months depreciation
“tis but a scratch.”
They are seeking the Holy Grail 😉
My well tuned diesel car is environmentally friendly so I will ask for the £3750 discount next time I change it.
( My understanding is that diesel fuel uses less energy to make than petrol, I get 30% better milage per gallon from my car than the petrol driven model, it is far lighter than the E model and it doesn’t use much in the way of polluting rare earth materials. It also tows a trailer which the E model can’t. )
“but with EV sales still languishing at 21%”
That was marhet share 21.6%, up from 16.6% in 2024. Hardly languishing.
EV sales increased 34.6%, when total vehicle sles up only 3.5%. Doing pretty well. PHEV showed a similar increase. Petrol down 9.4%.
See below, Nick. If only it were as simple as you suggest….
You have theories. But the observed reality is rapid growth.
Reality is not a theory, Nick… it’s very real. And you are in complete denial.
+1 for the laugh.
Always ask who is buying and why, and if the buying behavior makes no sense in economic terms, look for the subsidies and incentives. And then ask how much longer it can continue.
Company cars are going to be a target one of these days, and Motability is welfare, and that too is going to be a target.
Take off all the incentives, and EV sales would fall to single percentage figures. They make a lot of sense for an elderly couple living in the country doing short trips, but that’s about it.
Gullible or what.
One of those Yahoos from Gullible’s Travels
Gullible is not a word. It’s not in any dictionary. Go ahead and look it up, you won’t find it anywhere.
Challenge accepted…
OK…looked it up…Oxford Dictionary
Oxford Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
adjective
easily persuaded to believe something; credulous.”an attempt to persuade a gullible public to spend their money”
Merrriam Webster
gullibleadjectivegull·ible ˈgə-lə-bəl
variants or less commonly gullable
Synonyms of gullible
: easily duped or cheated
selling overpriced souvenirs to gullible tourists
Cambridge Dictionary
gullible
adjectiveus /ˈɡʌl.ə.bəl/ uk /ˈɡʌl.ə.bəl/
Add to word list
easily deceived or tricked, and too willing to believe everything that other people say:
There are any number of miracle cures on the market for people gullible enough to buy them.
You actually looked it up? My my, you are quite gullible aren’t you.
2 seconds on Google, 3 minutes copy/paste…nothing really invested. Just another false claim debunked.
It’s not a ‘false claim’, it’s a joke. You say that ‘gullible’ isn’t a word, and someone believes you mean it and looks it up to prove you wrong.
I’ve used it here several times, years ago. People used to get the joke then.
Thanks for ‘splainin’ it to me
“rapid growth”
+with subsidies.
FTFY
As per below that is the minimum growth they could have to meet the new enforced targets. The government got away with it once but the whole UK car sales industry is collapsing.
It is anything but impressive … they literally scrapped over the line 🙂
😂
Nick, you should go and watch Barrie Crampton (YT) on the facts on the EV market. He has 30+ years in the industry as a dealer. What he reveals isn’t theory, but actual market reality.
The majority of new EV car registrations are fleet buyers, private individuals don’t want them.
One in 5 new car registrations are for the Motorbility Scheme, all expenses paid courtesy of the taxpayer.
MG, BYD, and GWM Ora etc. are rubbing their hands in glee, their profit margin per unit just exploded courtesy of the UK government’s stupidity.
Obviously the lack of availability of new and used(eventually) IC cars will make EVs ‘popular’, same as grass and earthworms are popular in a famine.
Forcing people to have a more expensive faster depreciating product they don’t want, that is inferior in everyway, even for the environment in a real world conscientious impartial honest full life audit, is not a success or progress.
Yep, the Yahoos are definitely laughing at the stupidity of the ruling powers…laughing all the way to the bank of China!
BYD has 340,000 unsold cars in China so are looking to dump them on the export market. China has 100s of battery car makers but they are slowly going bankrupt in the face of low demand.
“are looking to dump them on the export market”
Shipping them might prove rather dangerous , though. !
Does anyone believe they are keeping those cars charged between 20% and 100%, or is it more likely the batteries are sustaining damage that will shorten their lifespans?
you need to look up ‘pre-registration’..
This is from a quick query to Grok. Fleet sales are heavily incentivized to EV because there is a great tax advantage to taking an EV. A company car is treated as a benefit in kind for tax purposes in the UK. But the assumed benefit is much lower for an EV. Which has given rise in the past to people taking plug in hybrids and just driving them, never even unwrapping the charging cable.
Summary
To assess the health of the UK EV market you need to look at a bunch of things.
Even with all the incentives the Governments of both parties have failed to get EV sales up to the levels they want. These levels ratchet up every year and are getting progressively more out of reach.
What will happen? The crisis will come next year, when manufacturers are obliged to sell 33% EVs. That is not going to happen. The numbers then get even less realistic:
2025 28%
2026 33
2027 38
2028 52
2029 66
2030 80
The likely market reaction is that people just hold on to their existing cars. Maybe also that there is a crisis caused by the gap between purchase price to a leasing company and resale value at the end of the contract.
There is a real problem with EVs, and there is only so much tax and regulation can do. They cost far more than ICE or mild hybrids to buy. They then cost more to run and insure. And they then depreciate more rapidly to a discount to ICE. When the quotas get to 50%+ this combination of circumstances is going to make the present system untenable. Will the government blink? Probably not, until market developments force it to.
I expect its U-turn on subsidies to coincide with an urgent visit from the IMF, which will also motivate many other U-turns in fiscal policy….
Yes, the leasing companies are already getting nervous about the damage trying to off load battery cars will do to their balance sheet.
I happened to have visited 2 public car parks in the last 2 weeks that provide battery car charging points and they were all empty. Presumably another waste of taxpayers money.
Beware the propaganda. These ‘sales figures’ are fake. 75% of them are dealer fraud. They have been registering new cars to make them appear as if they are a sale, to avoid fines. They are now on Autotrader as ‘2 year old, delivery mileage, 2 owners, at half or less of the new price.
Where have they been for two years?
If you want an EV you pay for it.
EV Market share will crash without the subsidies.
It will even with the subsidies as our working people do not raise enough money to give everyone a cheap car. Introduce a modified Trabant with a large lead acid battery and instead of worrying about charging, you just pull in to a state battery station to get it changed.
Without government edicts only a small part of fleet sales would be EVs. I suspect Mobiliy would not be able to push EVs as hard either.
You do realize they had to grow to that rate …. the article tells you the back story.
Here read it again 🙂
>>> Electric car sales made up 21.6% of sales in the first half of 2025, only marginally below the 22.06% share needed to meet existing rules once concessions are taken into account <<<
If the car sales don’t meet that target what happens
>>>> It forced carmakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric cars or face steep fines of up to £15,000 for every vehicle above their fossil fuel quota.<<<<
So the real story goes when the car sales yards are beaten with a really big stick, they will find some way to try and sell or give away the required number of EV’s.
>>> The lack of natural demand among private consumers has forced manufacturers into unsustainable discounting and led them to seek increased regulatory flexibilities to avoid the double whammy of having to incentivise sales and pay punitive fines.<<<
The UK car sales industry is now on the point of collapse 🙂
Given how close they are to the required number … If i was a betting man I would guess that the car sales yard have a lot of demo electric vehicles on hand and I will leave you to think about why that might be 🙂
pointless to reply to idiocies.
For a moment, forget which fuel is being used.
Tell me, Nick, do you think it’s fair that our government is giving my money to people who can afford to buy a brand new car at the expense of those who can’t afford a brand new car?
Einstein, head banging… same results
“At last, the government has found a use for that large pile of surplus money which has been causing it such a headache: it is going to bribe motorists with grants of up to £3,750 to buy an electric car. If that sounds familiar, it is because the previous, Conservative government had a similar scheme, offering grants of up to £4,000 before they were whittled down and withdrawn in 2022.
If the government is going to subsidise the purchase of electric cars on the grounds that they are less environmentally-damaging than petrol and diesel ones, why isn’t it offering even larger bungs to people who don’t buy a car at all?”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/bribing-motorists-to-buy-electric-vehicles-is-an-expensive-mistake/
Currently, ~6 in 10 EVs are registered to companies. And will companies be buying more of them? Unlikely. National Insurance (NIC) on Company Car Benefit from 2025/2026 tax year (commencing 6 April 2025) the rate of employer’s national insurance contributions will increase from 13.8% to 15%. This 1.2% additional rate of national insurance means that the cost of company cars will increase. Employers will also pay more in Class 1A National Insurance – a tax on jobs…
“business leaders accuse the Labour government of having ‘betrayed the nation’ following the national insurance hike for employers”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/national-insurance-budget-rachel-reeves-b2644928.html
Just to make matters worse, the economy has contracted again and inflation is now up to 3.6%. More tax increases are heaving into view in the autumn and these jokers think less on offer this time round to buy an EV will fare better than the last Tory attempt.
It’s easy to see why Reform is streets ahead with the public at large. One question that nobody has been able to answer satisfactorily is: Why do vegetarian dishes have to imitate meat products?
Broiled brussel sprouts resemble lamb fries.
/humor
How is something that is not cheese allowed to be called vegan cheese or milk that isn’t be called milk? How do you milk an oat, an almond or a soya bean?
I don’t know, but you can milk the taxpayer by using the tax to give subsidies to the “renewables”.
+10
I always found it interesting that meat has never been processed to taste like vegetables. Evidently, all those on carnivore diets don’t miss eating vegetables.
Story tip.
https://x.com/NetZeroWatch/status/1945395530240069857
“Ed Miliband has opened the way for a fleet of new gas-fired power stations to back up Britain’s patchy wind and solar farms, telling NESO that by the end of the decade it must keep 40 gigawatts of spare generating capacity on standby.”
What, so enough gas generation for the vast majority of peak demand?
Couldn’t we just use the gas and avoid the massively expensive, grid destabilising, landscape scarring, wildlife slaughtering, subsidised, renewables?
SLAP. Stupid boy.
We haven’t got enough cranes to place turbines in every garden….
Let the wind & solar farm owners pay for their own back-up. And for their own grid connections. It’s time to end the fantasy renewables economics.
Agree, Back up is necessary, therefore it should be part of the cost.
They have to subsidise them as the AI gorillas engage in a green power grab with the move to electrify the globe and so much for all those pipedream Megawatts required for superfast charging the new battery tech-
Google inks $3 billion US hydropower deal in largest clean energy agreement of its kind
TOU and smart meter fickle trickle charging at usurious rates for you deplorables.
This is in addition to the £millions in EV subsidies to relatively wealthy users of company salary sacrifice schemes.
Racheal in Accounts tells us that we have a ‘fiscal black hole’. It’s being made deeper by such stupidity.
They could try giving them away with cornflakes.
Test
Failed
😉
I wasn’t around then but I’m sure that Henry Ford, Standard Oil and others had to work hard to get people out from behind their horses and into stinky, smelly, noisy and expensive gasoline-powered automobiles.
Change is hard and seldom happens overnight.
From Microsoft Copilot, ” … this shift (to automobiles) wasn’t just a matter of marketing polish; it was a full-blown economic, technological, and cultural upheaval.”
Living that close with horses, I’m pretty sure most people didn’t love horses the same way people do today. Horses gotta get fed, watered, cleaned, housed, bred, exercised, medicated, and at the end of it all, put down. And that’s whether anyone wants to ride the horse or not. In their own way, horses are also stinky, smelly, noisy, and very expensive.
Even an early car will only need fluids changed and corrosion knocked off if it’s sitting in the garage for weeks. So that list is a lot shorter and more manageable. Most people objectively would prefer an early car to a horse once the price point justified the change.
Price point. aka economics.
The only thing worse than a stinky, smelly, noisy and expensive gas powered car, is a stinky, smelly, noisy, expensive, slow and dangerous horse.
Ford didn’t have to work hard at all. People were quite eager to swap walking and street cars for a car of their own. (Very few people owned horses, they were much to expensive.)
Pre registered by dealers. It’s all fake.
This’ll certainly incentivise manufacturers to bump up the list price of their products.
I understand that EVs cause greater emissions during manufacture and that, with emmissions-free electricity, they only break even on total emissions after 60,000 miles driving. Presumably, with the electricity that the UK grid provides (about 50% emissions-free), they will never break even. Clever technical people, is this true? Does it mean that ALL EVs being purchased now will always give off more emissions throughout their lives?
YES.
Take further in account that “recycling” an EV causes emissions too. My gutt feeling tells me that the most advanced vehicles of today compared to those built 50 years ago must be true recycling nightmares.
Car dealers and price reduction. The only way you can establish if there actually IS a price reduction is when there is a fixed price. Otherwise a dealer will just top up the exact price reduction on top of the previous one and make that the official adverticed price, after which the ‘price reduction’ can take place.
Does anyone remember the trade in system? Another perfect con..
Mad Magazine had this decades ago.
20% off everything in the store (after we raised the prices 20%).
Wouldn’t that be a 4% decrease on the original price?
That would be humor.
No wonder they have major budget problems with punitive fuel tax revenue threatened and subsidies up.
They have major budget problems because they fail to recognize it is all supply and demand (of money).
My wife and I have been travelling in England, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. We’ve seen some charging ststions, but very few EV’s. I think I’ll trust my lying eyes on this matter, rather then the proponents of EV’s.
In other news, the price of new EV’s just went up by 3,750 pounds.
You sir, are remarkably cynical. I’m just not sure if you’re cynical enough!
If you need to subsidise something in order for it to be bought then it is not worth buying. The government think that we are thick. No new innovation was ever successful while being subsidised. Any new concep will only be successful if it is better than what is already available. EVs are a niche product, only for wealthier people who can afford a frolic, that’s all they are.
Well they would subsidize them now wouldn’t they?
Electric vehicles will be harder to access in Hawaii
Kaohsiung battery factory fire sends 15 to hospital | Taiwan News | Jul. 14, 2025 10:07
Two Fires, Four Months: This EV Battery Facility Keeps Burning
Calling LLoyd’s names….calling LLoyd’s names…?
PS: Just don’t call the fire brigade in Canberra-
Canberra’s issue-plagued $1.6 million hybrid electric fire truck is out of action again
I have no desire to buy an electric car. I do not support subsidising the sale of electric vehicles. But there is a problem facing people who own ICE vehicles which doesn’t seem to get mentioned. The number of electric vehicles on the road is increasing. The number of ICE vehicles is, presumably, decreasing. As the number of ICE vehicles decreases, the demand for petrol and diesel for these vehicles will decrease. What effect will that have on the availability of outlets selling petrol and diesel. Will there be fewer of them? Will that make it less convienent to fill up your tank? Even more worrying would be a decision by the government to put controls on the sale of petrol and diesel. As the gap between targets and actual sales of EVs widens, the government might well be tempted to do such a thing.