The Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate (ZEV for short) aims to have 100% of all new car sales to be electric or hybrid by 2035 – but will this get pushed back for the second time, as the government realise their goals are unfeasible?
Norway currently leads the world with regards to electric vehicles, having roughly 25% of its cars on the road being either electric or hydrogen-powered.
Compared to that, the UK’s meagre 3.75% really doesn’t seem like much – and with the still ongoing cost of living crisis, your average person understandably wont have the funds to drop a whopping £46,000 on a new electric car.
Hybrid cars don’t seem to be making much of a dent either, with an underwhelming 5.7% of UK cars being either a plug-in (PHEV) or mild hybrids (MHEV), with the latter crucially not even having a full electric (i.e. zero emissions) mode.
So with just under 92% (slightly above 30 million) of our cars being petrol or diesel, how can the government expect to get people to make the switch, and more importantly how are they going to provide the infrastructure to support it?
(Image: Chad Russell, Pexels)
The mandate has already been pushed back from 100% in 2030 to 2035 under Sunak’s Government back in 2023 (which Labour have incidentally promised to change back in their manifesto) due to what the then PM described as ‘the practicalities’ – i.e. the UK has nowhere near enough charging stations to support 100% electric by 2030.
We currently boast a whopping 70,000 (roughly) public charging stations, of which an equally whopping 58% will take around 12 hours to fully charge up an average car, 23% will take 7 hours or more, and the remaining 19% will only take an hour or less on average.
Now, taken at face value, this really doesn’t seem too bad – 1 in 5 charging stations will be able to fully charge your car in under an hour – except that over 50% of all charging stations are located in the south of England, including Greater London.
Factoring in the injection of new electric cars into the network, even if the UK continues on its charging point growth rate of just under 40% a year, which is by no means a small amount (and it only gets bigger as time goes on) we end up with 2 million charging stations around the UK – by the end of 2026, we’ll have to double our existing number of charging points and in 2030 alone we will need to build 150,000 new charging points to attain this goal.
This is most likely not going to happen, mainly due to the low incentive to buy a new electric car rather than spend half the price for a used petrol car that’s going to have the same lifespan (or longer in some cases), as well as deal with the extra 78% in car problems reported by electric car owners.
But it remains to be seen what the new Labour Government is cooking up – will they revert the phase-out year to 2030, or extend it even further to 2040 – it really seems like they have a lot of problems to fix either way
