Those in the market for a new EV can now benefit from a £3750 UK government subsidy over the next five years. Total funding runs to £650 million and is designed to nudge consumers to mvoe from petrol and deisel engines to electric vehicles.
As well as the grants, EV charging points and NHS vehicles will see a vest of £63 million.
ATM 21.6% of new cars sold are electric, and the government aims to bring this up to 28% by the end of this year.
Pros of the EV Subsidy
One of the main barriers to the adoption of EVs is the high upfront price. This subsidy represents between a 5-10% discount on the most popular models of EV cars, so it could be the tipping point for those sitting on the fence over decision to make the switch.
This will also help with the overall Net Zero target, petrol and diesel cars being among the main contributors to greenhouse gases.
This will also be a boost to the EV industry, helping to create manufacturing employment, battery employment, and EV infrastructure employment. The UK automotive industry as a whole can benefit from locally driven growth in sales.
Finally it's necessary that all of this is backed up by charging infrastructure and it's good to see a Vest in this as well to support the likely increase in sales of EV cars!
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 - From £40K
Disadvantages of the EV Subsidy
If everyone goes for the Max subsidy this is only going to help 173K consumers over three years, so that's just over 50K consumers a year, compared to almost 2M new car sales last year.
That's more symbolic than behaviour shifting in scale.
Also this is going to benefit the already rich, it reminds me of the solar panel grants - it wouldn't surprise me if a significant chunk of this money goes to 'second cars' for the richest 10%.
This means it could well be EVs getting sold and mostly sitting on the driveway only being used for every other journey!
There's also the problem of the battery waste, we haven't really got an effective solution for that yet!
Final Thoughts...
I'm generally for Green subs, we do get a payback in terms of reduced emissions, however this amount is so small it's really not going to make that much difference.
I think I can get over the injustice of the middle classes benefitting from this mainly.
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