Electric car sales DOWN 20% in 2012

The SMMT are reporting that sales of electric cars in the UK have fallen by 20 per cent in the year to date (2012).

Despite every green evangelist proclaiming that electric cars are the way to save the planet from imminent doom, UK car buyers obviously disagree.

Despite a taxpayer bribe of £5000 to buy an over-priced electric car, car buyers have not exactly taken to the EV in droves. So far, just over 2000 EVs have been registered in the UK since the EV grant was launched, and electric car sales for 2012 are running 20 per cent behind 2012 (despite an 8 per cent rise in September). Just 749 electric cars have been sold so far in 2012.

Those poor sales figures are despite an increase of over 50 per cent in the number of cars eligible for the grant (there are now 156 models eligible for the Plug-in grant – which means each model has averaged sales of just 5 each) and surely prove that motorists aren’t going to be bribed in to foresaking their ICE cars for an EV that does everything less well and costs much more?

And with more and more car makers eschewing electric cars as the future – Toyota has decided it will build no more EVs and Hyundai is concentrating on hydrogen fuel cell cars – the time has come to question the sense of the EV ‘Experiment’.

Surely it’s time to scrap the subsidies on offer for EVs and give car buyers an incentive to buy low emission cars? And by low emission, we don’t mean low CO2. We mean cars that have the lowest NOx and particulate emissions – the stuff that wrecks health and wrecks cities.

But common sense is probably too much to hope from governments who can’t believe what an earner taxation based on CO2 emissions has been.