Andy Burnham looks set to give in to car industry lobbying on EV sales targets with an announcement on a review of the ZEV mandate set to be made imminently.
Ministers are said to be planning to relax rules around EV sales – which currently require 80% of cars sold by 2030 to be zero emission – in order to keep car industry bosses happy. (What is the ZEV mandate? Check out our guide here.)
There have been aggressive efforts in recent months, spearheaded by industry body the SMMT (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders) and its CEO Mike Hawes (below), to loosen the rules around electric car sales because car companies have complained about the costs involved in selling and marketing the vehicles.
This despite electric car sales reaching best ever numbers in July's registration announcement last week, where the SMMT contorted itself around welcoming the figures but saying that EV were actually bad.
The energy secretary is also said to be considering dropping strict net zero rules under the guise of dropping household energy bills, and Andy Burnham has apparently directed ministers to find ways to allow new drilling in the North Sea without impacting the Labour party’s manifesto pledge to put a halt to any new efforts.
The consultation on the ZEV mandate will apparently seek respondents’ thoughts on watering down the EV targets to 70, 60 or even 50% of sales by 2030 and could see the 2030 ban on purely petrol and diesel powered engines dropped indefinitely in a similar way to the European Union.
Penalties for carmakers who fail to meet the targets are also likely to be watered down – they currently sit at up to £15,000 for every car sold that doesn’t meet the targets, but manufacturers are already able to use a myriad of tricks to boost their EV sales.
They can buy credits from other carmakers, pull in an allowance from another year and even use PHEV sales to offset petrol sales. With those in mind, research organisation New Automotive estimates that this year’s real-terms ZEV mandate figure is more like 25% rather than 33%.
Tanya Sinclair, chief executive of Electric Vehicles UK, a body which supports EVs, told the Times newspaper that carmakers had spent more time complaining about electric vehicle demand than creating it.
