Carmakers are dangling a huge ‘carrot’ to boost electric car sales and this shows the reduced interest from car consumers to embrace electric car ownership.
According to Bloomberg news earlier today, these Electric Vehicle (EV) manufacturers are on course to offer a massive £2 billion (USD2.6 billion) in discounts for shiny new electric vehicles this year and still fall short of the UK government’s sales mandate, according to the industry’s trade body.
Steep price cuts or discounts in recent months did help lift battery-electric vehicle registrations to a record in September, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said today, Friday. But even last month, zero-emission cars came up shy of the 22 percent share target the government has set for this year.
So, this British based industry group is echoing concerns that manufacturers including the ‘big boys’ like Stellantis and Ford Motor have raised concerns about the UK trying to hasten the phase-out of combustion engines while scaling back government incentives.
Meanwhile, the pullback of subsidies in several markets across Europe has contributed to a slump in EV demand and profit warnings from the likes of Stellantis and Volkswagen are showing.
Battery-electric vehicle sales rose 25 percent last month, a big jump within an overall market where registrations increased just 1.1 percent from a year ago. EVs accounted for just 20.5 percent of total sales in September and 17.8 percent of all registrations in the first nine months of this year in the nation where the EV push has been hard and concentrated in the last few years.
Incidentally, the SMMT estimates that around 18.5 percent of new cars sold this year will be EVs.
Right now, the best selling new electric cars in UK starts with the Volvo EX30 for 32,850, followed by the KIA EV9 for 65,025, then there is the Hyundai IONIQ 5 N at 65,000 and finally the Volkswagen ID.7 at 51,550 (all prices are in pound sterling).
