Record number of electric cars were sold in UK during 2024

It’s all a fad. Too heavy, too expensive, nowhere to charge, batteries need replacing after a few years, child labour, they are coal powered anyway, set on fire all the time, no soul, filled with Chinese tracking software, depreciation is massive, Elon’s nasty words upset me, can’t recycle them, can’t go more than 100 miles, queues at chargers are too long, cost more to run than a diesel anyway.

Hydrogen is the future and Porsche are making a sustainable petrol any day now.

Thought I’d try and get a full house on the bullshit bingo nice and early.

Miss leading the public real head line record number of evs registered

The devil is in the detail, only around 20% of new EV purchases are made by private buyers as the vast majority are fleet purchases for company cars because of tax benefits. And the demand from private buyers is starting to stagnate.

The fines are incredibly punitive, but they can be offset if auto makers purchase credits from pure EV manufacturers. In practice this will amount to a transfer of money from European auto makers, who won’t sell enough EVs, to pure EV manufacturers outside of Europe, such as every redditor’s favourite Elon Musk’s Tesla and to Chinese manufacturers such as BYD.

I just took the leap and am both excited and nervous.

How many are sold on salary sacrifice or business lease? I work in public sector and don’t have the option for either of those and if sounds like a lot of people who buy electric it’s one of those two 

It looks like these are preliminary numbers – the SMMT’s December numbers come out on Monday. If these are accurate it would suggest that EVs had enormous market share in December…

> The number of new cars sold in the UK rose by 2.6% in 2024 to 1.95m, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) lobby group. **Of those, 19.6% were electric**, up from 16.5% a year earlier.

The year-to-date figures by November were 18.6% BEV.

Since December isn’t traditionally one of the biggest months for car sales, that would suggest that BEVs must have had an enormous market share in December (30%?) to shift the entire year’s figures by a whole percentage point.

I think we might be reaching a bit of a tipping point in the UK car market. The highest projections for EV market share might start looking a bit conservative in the next 18 months, especially if more manufacturers start launching sub-£20k models over here.

The sales numbers will go up whether the general public want them to or not. I can see the government rowing back on the legislation regarding the ICE ban, because at the moment it’s way too early.

However, what I can also see the government doing in a few years is going “ok, all electric cars will cost £100 a year in VED. But your ICE car? £1050 a year, irrespective of engine size, weight, emissions, whatever. You can tax an EV for 10 years and pay LESS than one year of driving your petrol Nissan Micra.” The government will get what they want, whether they do it through legislating manufacturers out of making ICE cars or taxing the absolute shit out of anyone even thinking of keeping one beyond 2030.

I still think we’re barking up the wrong tree by pushing electric cars. By far the most efficient way to deal with transport emissions is to make it so people don’t feel they need to drive their car for everyday journeys at all. And that has lots of other benefits as well. All the money that’s being thrown at electric car subsidies and tax breaks (because no-one wants one at market rate) would have a much better effect spent on improving public transport and cycling infrastructure.

If we want to put a subsidy on electric vehicles it should be on e-bikes.