Driving the Sales of Electric Vehicles in the UK?

The electric car market is growing quickly. There are more than 164100 pure-electric cars run on UK roads in 2020. Electric vehicle markets have become stronger in the UK even despite the Covid-19 pandemic situation. Electric vehicles delivered record sales figures in the UK in 2020. Carmakers have sold more than 500,000 battery-electric cars in Europe during 2020. Milestones in the automotive industry’s move away from fossil fuels to Electric Vehicles. According to data collated by Schmidt Automotive Research, Sales of all plug-in cars including hybrids have surpassed one million during the year in the UK and the largest 17 European markets.

More than double the number of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) has been sold so far in 2020 compared to the whole of 2019. Full electric car sales and increasing consumer demand have prompted manufacturers to spend billions of Euros on developing new models capable of driving longer ranges.

Fig: Chargeable new car sales at 18 markets in West Europe

In the UK, the sale of new cars run solely on petrol or diesel will be banned in 2030 – although new hybrids will be legal until 2035. The number of UK consumers searching online for an electric car doubled overnight after the government’s announcement of prohibit of petrol sales by 2030, according to Auto Trader. During the year, one in six new cars bought in the UK was electric or hybrid.

However, the car industry still faces a vertical uphill journey away from fossil fuels. Total UK and European new car sales in the year to October 2020 were 13.3mil. The vast majority of which had petrol and diesel engines, which are expected to be more profitable than battery cars until about 2024. Carmakers are keen to sell more battery electric cars because they face steep fines if they do not lower the average carbon dioxide emissions of the cars they sell.

British consumers bought more than 75,000 electric cars in the year to October, 2020, well over double the sales in the previous year, plus another 50,000 plug-in hybrids, but the UK market share of battery electric cars was still only 5.5%.

The majority of popular cars in the UK in 2020 have been electric. The mass-market brand with the maximum percentage of electric car sales across Europe last year was Hyundai at 13 per cent, due to the popularity of its electric Kona model.

The latest Department for Transport figures available show that Mitsubishi's Outlander PHEV is the most popular plug-in vehicle as of the end of June 2020. With more than 46,400 units sold, it has been the best-selling plug-in car for more than five years, and is considerably ahead of the second most popular plug-in car, the Nissan Leaf. More than 31,400 Leafs have been sold in the UK however, making it the best-selling pure-EV in the UK, and still comfortably ahead of the BMW 330e in third.

Tesla Company was suffering a fall in pure electric sales with its market share falling by 16 percentage points to 13.4 per cent in 2020, because of the impact of Covid-19 on its distribution channels to Europe.

Volkswagen, the market leader in Europe, selling almost 174,000 electric cars in the region, plans to push harder this year with the Wolfsburg-based company aiming to more than double electric car sales.

The rapid increase in electric car sales in 2020 means Europe is compete with China as the world’s largest market for electric and hybrid cars. However, many more fully electric cars are sold in China than in Europe, which is more reliant on sales of plug-in hybrids.

Most of the largest European manufacturers believed they are confident they will meet their carbon-reduction targets, although some have paid others to artificially lower their average carbon emissions. European carbon dioxide emissions restrictions have encouraged the development of electric cars globally.