Britain Still Charging Toward EV Chaos, Propped Up By Taxpayer Subsidies

Britain’s car industry is back with a bang – or at least that was the gist of the latest press release from the sector’s chief cheerleaders.

As ever with these sorts of things though, it pays to spend more than a few seconds scrutinising the stats.

The headline figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders are certainly encouraging. There were 153,529 new car registrations in October, up 14pc year-on-year. [emphasis, links added]

Overall vehicle uptake is now up 20pc, with sales at their best year since 2019. In short, car sales have bounced back from their pandemic shock.

Yet, dig a little further into the crude numbers and all is not well.

For a start, growth was driven almost entirely by large fleet registrations – cars sold to companies, organizations, and government departments. Here, sales jumped 29pc year-on-year to reach 87,479 units.

But private demand was roughly flat at 62,915 vehicles, while the much smaller business sector saw registrations fall 15pc to 3,135 units. So the rebound is something of a mirage.

The same can be said of Britain’s so-called electric car boom. True, uptake of battery electric vehicles increased for the 42nd month in a row – by 20pc in fact to 23,943 registrations.

But they too are being propped up by generous salary-sacrifice schemes.

The reality is fewer than one in four new battery-powered electric cars are going to private buyers, and as the SMMT points out: building a successful electric car market “depends on encouraging all consumers to invest in the latest zero emission vehicles”, not just profligate corporate finance departments.

One look at this country’s woefully inadequate electric vehicle infrastructure and it’s plain to see why demand is faltering: we simply don’t possess anything like the charging grid required to support a real mass conversion away from petrol and diesel.

So, it can hardly come as a surprise if the vast majority of folk continue to shun electric cars.

As the SMMT also notes: uptake of electric vehicles is “greatly influenced by perceptions of infrastructure availability and accessibility”, and the UK continues to fall desperately short on both counts.

The numbers remain woeful. Yes, 4,753 new standard charge points came online between July and September.

It was the largest-ever quarterly delivery and a significant improvement on the same period last year when one new charger for every 38 new plug-in cars was installed.

Yet, at one for every 26 this time around, there remains a huge shortfall.

Meanwhile, a regional divide that has left Westminster with more chargers than Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham combined, looks like it is getting worse, not better.

Installation was skewed again.

London and the South East received four out of five new charge points commissioned despite the region accounting for fewer than two in five new plug-in registrations.

Yorkshire and Humberside received just 13 new chargers, while the North had 105 chargers taken out of service.

The figures continue to make a mockery of Whitehall targets. The Department for Transport has said that it wants 300,000 public chargers in operation by 2030. Yet at the current rate, it will be another 25 years before that figure is hit.

Read rest at Telegraph