Chris Bayliss

Tinkering with the electric car mandate won’t help manufacturers

Keir Starmer at a Jaguar Land Rover car factory (Getty Images)

Presumably, some future government will have to reverse the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles in Britain. The country quite obviously lacks anything like the necessary charging infrastructure for a wholesale switch to electric for the national vehicle fleet in the foreseeable future. Let alone sufficient generation capacity at peak times. But if or when they do, those future vehicles will now have to be manufactured abroad.

The 2030 deadline was first announced by Boris Johnson in 2020, and UK car makers began grandfathering the plant and production lines for new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in the wake of that decision. If the 2030 deadline were now to have been changed, it would have taken years of planning, capital expenditure and preparation to replace what would by then have been very tired facilities in order to go on producing petrol and diesel cars after that date.

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