Ross Clark, writing in the Daily Telegraph:
So much for electric cars being cheaper to run than petrol or diesel ones. As owners are about to discover, following Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that electric cars will be subject to vehicle excise duty from 2025, the main reason for their apparently low running costs is that these vehicles are excused from the hefty taxes levied on petrol and diesel models. Once electric cars are brought into the realm of vehicle excise duty a different picture will start to emerge.
And it won’t just be vehicle excise duty. There is no way that Hunt is going to sit back and watch as £26 billion worth of fuel duty disappears as people are forced to switch to electric vehicles – he is going to find a way of making that up, too, most likely through road pricing. The favourable tax position enjoyed by electric vehicles will come to be seen as nothing more than a limited time, introductory special offer. Just as with diesel cars, people who were encouraged to buy them through government incentives have been conned.
The Autumn Statement marked the end of those enticements — and the beginning of coercion. It is now clear: there is no way, on current technology, that electric cars are going to sell themselves to the masses. You can point to data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) showing that sales of electric cars in October were 23.4 per cent up on the same month in 2021, yet their market share has stalled at around 15 per cent (it actually fell a little from 15.2 per cent to 14.8 per cent between last October and this).
Those tempted to mourn the departure of Boris Johnson from office would do well to remember that as prime minister, Johnson, a net-zero zealot, advanced the date for the banning of the sale of new internal-combustion-engine (ICE) cars from 2035 to 2030, because, presumably, he wanted to look good in front of who knows who.
Britain will not be ready for electric vehicles in 2035, let alone 2030, but central planners like speed, and so Johnson (no libertarian, whatever his image) decided to get the chaos going even sooner, and with even less preparedness.
The people who will be worst hit? Ordinary Brits.
The effect on the climate? None.
Clark:
Electric cars are going down a treat with well-off, urban-based drivers who want to show off their eco credentials. They make good second cars for driving around cities, especially with the proliferation of low emission zones…[S]uch drivers will often keep petrol or diesel cars for longer journeys.
For the rest of us, electric vehicles remain very expensive to buy and are only cheaper to run if you ignore the fact that 60 per cent of the cost of road fuel is tax. They don’t travel enough on a charge, they take too long to recharge and rely on a very sporadic network of chargers. If, like 8 million British households, you don’t have off-street parking in reach of your own electricity socket, they offer only hassle. That will remain the case until someone invents a battery which costs no more to build than a petrol engine, can travel 500 miles between charges and takes five minutes to recharge.
Nothing like this could ever happen over here.
Could it?