When Vauxhall announced the closure of its Luton plant a few weeks ago it seemed that the government had finally woken up to how the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate was killing off Britain’s car industry. We were promised a consultation on the rules – which demand that manufacturers ensure 22 per cent of cars they sell this year are pure electric, with fines of £15,000 for every petrol or diesel car sold over the limit. This morning we got it. Does it promise salvation for our remaining car factories? Sadly not.
Where are all the booming car factories?
The government is suggesting that manufacturers be allowed a little more flexibility in balancing car and van sales – if they overshoot their target on van sales, for example, they might be allowed to undershoot their target on car sales without penalty. But that is about it. Otherwise, the government has used the opportunity to tighten up the restrictions on the sale of hybrids after 2030, limiting how many grams of carbon dioxide they are allowed to emit per kilometer – before hybrids are banished for good from 2035.
There is nothing in the consultation to acknowledge that take-up of electric cars from car-buyers is well below what was imagined when the ZEV rules were drawn up by the Conservative government in 2023. On the contrary, the new transport secretary Heidi Alexander seems determined to stick her head even further in the sand, asserting: ‘In many cases ZEVs are significantly cheaper to run, maintain and repair than their petrol and diesel equivalents’.
This is a reference to a year-old press release from the Energy Climate and Intelligence Unit, an EU-funded PR operation, which claims that petrol and car drivers paid £700 a year more to run their vehicles than they would have done had they owned an equivalent electric one. Sadly, it provides no workings, but if it is assuming that people always charge their EVs at home, at night, it is living in a different world from the 8 million UK households who have no off-street parking. Nor is it very informative to compare running costs between high-taxed petrol and low-taxed electricity – one day the government is going to come up with new taxes to replace the £28 billion a year that it stands to lose in petrol duty.
The government is still failing to explain why the UK needs to progress so much faster than the EU. It continues to assert that being the first country to ban petrol and diesel cars will allow Britain to ‘lead the world in the industries and technologies of the future’.
If that is true, where are all the booming car factories? Once again it is China – which keeps talking about but has so far set no date for a national ban on petrol and diesel cars – which is cornering the market.
What our own government has achieved is to stifle innovation. The new consultations reaffirms that the government wants all new cars to be pure electric by 2035. In other words, it is pretty well ruling out alternative technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells or internal combustion engines powered by hydrogen – the latter of which technology Britain really does lead the world in thanks to work of JCB, which has developed hydrogen engines for its own machines. Given time and space, this could prove a better technology for cars, too. Had the government not undermined development of hybrids by pre-announcing their demise, most cars sold by now could well have been in that format. Instead, the government continues to try to force on us electric vehicles which most motorists find expensive and impractical. The promised ZEV consultation proves that it has failed to learn a thing.
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