Fiona Howarth of Octopus Electric Vehicles has hit out (Image: OCTOPUS)
Wander into any supermarket right now and your eyes will be greeted by aisles packed with chestnuts, panettone and, of course, turkeys.
Christmas is around the corner. Shoppers know it, supermarkets know it, suppliers know it. Now suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine there is talk of moving Christmas to the summer – let’s say we love the idea of Australian-style barbecue turkey.
The suppliers and the supermarkets won’t love the change because it’s going to cause them short term disruption and change established supply patterns.
But the one thing they would prize above everything would be certainty. Don’t say you’re moving Christmas to the summer and then flip flop and hint you might move it back to the winter.
It leaves everyone in limbo.
Rest assured that no one’s moving Christmas to June any time soon. But in my industry, there is a lot of speculation right now.
I run Octopus Electric Vehicles, a business that leases electric cars. Electric cars are fantastic fun to drive, up to six times cheaper to run than a petrol car, as well as better for the planet and the air we breathe.
They can even store energy and help balance the grid with clean, renewable power. They are key to the clean energy transition and offer the UK a huge business opportunity. Lots of wonderful future-proofed jobs.
However, the car market is driven by the manufacturers – and we buy what they make. A law called the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate was introduced at the start of the year to help us seize that opportunity.
It says that car makers must sell a certain proportion of electric cars every year. This year, it’s 22 per cent. It will go up in subsequent years and by 2030 manufacturers will need to sell 80 per cent electric.
Car makers who don’t hit those numbers could pay £15,000 for every car outside the target (although there is a fair bit of flexibility on this) – so the equivalent of almost £4,000 for every fossil fuel car they sell this year.
The law was introduced by the previous Conservative Government and is supported by the new Labour administration.
But some car manufacturers are lobbying to dilute the mandate. By coincidence, they tend to be the same manufacturers who haven’t invested enough in electric cars.
There’s no demand for electric cars, say the lobbyists. And yet figures from transport data experts New AutoMotive show that one in four new cars in November in the UK were electric, while global EV sales continue to rise.
That’s well above the 22 per cent manufacturers need to sell and continues a trend of high electric car sales.
The law has nudged car makers to lower the upfront costs of electric cars, making them an even better deal than they already were, and bring a huge range of over 100 different electric cars to the UK. And there’s now a growing used electric car market.
The Government could recycle the money from the mandate fine payments to lower upfront costs more. We could also bring down charging costs, by reforming the way electricity is priced, now that renewable energy is cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels (but still charged at the higher rate).
The public charging network is poor, say the lobbyists. It’s actually much, much better than they claim – there are more than 70,000 public chargers in the UK and one is being installed every 25 minutes. In fact, if you add chargers at homes and work, there are an estimated 1 million chargers.
The network will improve as we have more electric cars, but as only 1 in 30 cars are electric today, it’s almost 1 charger per car.
The mandate gives charge point installers certainty. It gives investors the confidence to double down on the £6 billion they’ve already pledged for the next five years.
Jobs will be lost, say the lobbyists.