Not quite. The UK govt has a rolling target of how many EVs are sold as a proportion of all vehicles. The manufacturers get "fined" £15k per ICE car sold over the target. The targets are ramping up rapidly - 22% in 2024, 28% in 2025, 33% in 2026, etc, reaching 80% (AFIAK, keeps changing) in 2030. There's various trading mechanisms in place and what not so it's a bit more complicated than this.
So it's far better to sell EV below cost (Chinese or not) to get more sold than have to a pay £15k for an ICE car.
The Chinese manufacturers are arguably at double advantage here as they have more BEV to sell so it's far easier for them meet the targets, and they can 'sell' the excess to the Western manufacturers (and further subsidise their EVs!).
I'm not personally against it, I got a brand new EV on a lease recently for close to free after all the tax advantages, and it's not like the Western manufacturers didn't have time to prepare...?
The problem is that there is not enough infrastructure for EVs. If you can't charge at home (e.g. you live in a flat), it is hard to live with an EV and it's much more expensive than the ICE.
I had a rental EV while I was there for 6 weeks last summer, it was a pretty low spec jeep model and I stayed at mates places all over England none of which had parking or charging, to tell the truth charging was a bit spotty in town, but if I was just going around the local area the battery was good for a week or more. My take away was I would definitely rent an EV again, but a lot of the older charging infrastructure still sucks, under-provisioned at peak times, and cost 2-3 times what a similar charge would cost here in NZ. I ended up doing most of my charging at the Tesla superchargers on the motorways and at supermarkets in town. I did 2900 miles total and it was about the same cost as petrol in the end, but worth it as the EV was cheaper to rent and was automatic (which renters charge a premium in UK)
Not sure fast charging all the time is good for battery life though. 99% of my driving in NZ is on a normal 10A overnight charge
Local government can quickly change that, if they get their act together. Here in the Hague, there's literally thousands of public chargers available on the city's residential streets. Coupled with the fact that the charging-price is city-mandated at a fixed rate (currently around 35ct/kwh), this gives a perfectly fine solution for most people. (I can charge at home, for 20ct/kwh currently, so that's even nicer)
Electricity is expensive in the UK (~25p/kWh) But not gas car expensive. It is £1.57/L (£5.94/gallon).
The EV infrastructure is also pretty dang far along, especially compared to the US. Remember that everything in the UK is a lot smaller and closer together than it is in the US. Further, the UK has a functional train system for long distance travel. You can go from the top of Dunnet Head to Lizard Point in a 15 hour drive.
People downvoting me, Look up chargers in plugshare to see just how many there are in the UK, it's a lot. And also correct my math if it's wrong. An 80kWh car costs £20 to fill up. A 55L car, which has about the same range, costs £85 to fill up.
Also if you are able to charge at home you can subscribe to a smart tariff that gives you electricity for 4p/kWh overnight. That’s £3.20 to fill an 80kWh battery that on a modern car will take you up to 320 miles.
This won't happen unless they outright ban non-EV vehicles which is unlikely considering how many people are still using old cars and cannot afford new cars, how many car enthusiasts are there, and not to mention potential lobbying from big oil.
So 20 years from now, all the old gas regular people cars have aged out. You’re left with what, 1 or 2% of enthusiasts cars? Seems like success to me, and fairly inevitable
There will undoubtedly be a death spiral of sorts when it comes to gas stations, refineries, etc. where they become fewer and farther between as less people buy fuel. And that makes it more expensive and inconvenient, so more people buy EVs, which in turn...
Death spiral to gas stations? why? EV cars need to charge somewhere (and on long trip it can’t be at home) and people need to take a break and grab a coffee sometime too. They will change, sure, but certainly not die.
Refineries will be fewer but we do need another products from them also.
Presumably a lot of people will charge at home which significantly cuts down the number of stations needed or the traffic to those stations.
For example, I have 2 gas stations within a mile of my home. They stay pretty busy because people around me constantly need to fill up. I, on the other hand, basically never visit either of those stations since I switched to an EV. I charge at home.
If everyone around me switched to EVs, those stations could not stay in business. There's a grocery store in the same area which makes anything those stations offer obsolete.
Those are the majority of gas stations that die with a mass switch over to EVs. There's a gas station for my hometown without an attached convenience store with 300 people there. There's no way that station stays in service if a significant portion of the community switches to EVs. It already struggles to be profitable as is (I know the owner).
Chargers can be anywhere. They are at grocery stores, parking lots, restaurants, I can see the need for a dedicated re fuel station to disappear when charging is ubiquitous.
Charging stations will only need to be on highways if cities are sensible and build slow charging infrastructure (aka normal wall sockets) in parking spaces. Urban gas stations will be a thing of the past.
This has already happened in Norway, where 96% of new cars sold are EVs. They didn’t ban combustion but they did support adoption with subsidies and other incentives
The problem is a 50kWh battery in a car is worth more as a battery than a typical £1500 car.
The lowest end of the market won’t have electric cars unless the batteries are shagged (early Leafs)
And given how insanely cheap petrol is (15p a mile, so £450 for a low mileage runaround) the savings even if electric was free and they weren’t introducing a 3p/mile charge isn’t there.
As sibling comment posted, if you run a company you can write off the cost of the lease against corporation tax (25% tax saving), VAT (a further 10% saving if you have personal use, otherwise the full 20% if it's purely business), and you don't have to pay income tax on the money (albeit with a small benefit in kind payment).
If you're in the higher tax brackets this means a £200/month lease (say) ends up more like £90/month.
And because of the "new" £3kish subsidy the govt put in, the car finance companies seem to basically apply that as a big discount to the lease value (or it seems that way?). So you could get a brand new ~£30k EV with no upfront payment and a 2-3 year term for <£100/month including maintenance. Mine even came with a free car charger install at home.
This only works for business leases. The employee sacrifices part of their salary in return for being provided a lease car, and both the employee and employer save tax on that money (up to 45% employee, ~15% employer).
For an ICE car the government claws this money back through hefty "Benefit In Kind" taxes placed on employer-provided vehicles, but as an incentive to drive adoption the rates on EVs are only 3% of the car's nominal purchase price (and you only actually pay up to 45% of that 3%).
It doesn't work out "free," but it's typically as cheap to lease a new EV through this scheme as it is to pay the depreciation on a used ICE.
Not sure what schemes are that good (would be interested to see). My company has one, but I ended up buying a used ICE because it worked out to cost about the same as leasing the equivalent EV model of that car. But that might have been the case for the specific car I was looking at (small Volvo SUV).
check out https://www.leaseloco.com/ (there's other sites - I am assuming you are in the UK), they have a lot of deals on. If you want a really good deal then I don't think you want to look for a specific car, you want instead to see what deals are going on and choose between them. It _seems_ that from time to time the manufacturers do a bit of a firesale via leases.
> And the presence of lower-cost alternatives can force non-Chinese brands to have to compete, rather than sitting on their laurels and gathering profits from expensive land yachts as the competition’s prices are inflated by tariffs. This is why the UK is getting Honda’s super cool Super-N, and the US isn’t.
The Honda Super-N EV will also be released in Australia, New Zealand, and other countries in Southeast Asia that were also British colonies: this decision has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with left-hand-drive vs. right-hand-drive.
No no, that's obviously wrong. It's because the sun rises in the East much earlier than the west, it only seems like like they're getting it earlier but it's only because of the way the planet works. And the sun never sets on the British empire is why they'll be getting it.
The treatment of our betters regarding "nudged" electrification is borderline misanthropic.
For people with a garage or a driveway who can charge at home, EVs are overwhelmingly a better option. The problem is that large swathes of the population are outside of that and you're making their lives miserable by punishing ICE car ownership.
Meanwhile, adoption numbers are thrown about ignoring that for those in optimal conditions, adoption is already very high and cannot grow much more. While for those particularly misaligned with the strengths of EVs, it will often be so painful to own one they will resist with everything they have, and in many cases they will have to admit defeat and stop driving altogether. Which I guess the government will also be content with. But it will take some time.
> The problem is that large swathes of the population are outside of that and you're making their lives miserable by punishing ICE cars ownership.
It's obviously not ideal to have an EV if you can't regularly charge at home or at work, but "making their lives miserable" seems like a bit of a stretch. Instead of spending 5 minutes a week filling up at the gas station, you'll spent 30 minutes a week at an EV charging station.
Eh. A new EV can drive 400-700km on one charge. It takes 20-60 minutes to charge on public chargers depending on the charger. Except that charging on public charges is more expensive than charging at home I don't really see the practical issue. I know many people without charging options at home that will never go back to ICE.
Except availability of chargers is spotty in most of the country, and charging prices so high that the running expenses are considerably higher. Not even considering insurance, which is also a killer. Been there.
Second hand EVs devaluation is not a product of anecdote. It reflects the current state of the market.
They are a different product and they're great at what they do. In fact, for those in the market for them, "nudging" (state coercion) is not necessary at all.
Unfortunately, because the number of imports is restricted they'll likely be about as expensive as the competition. They have no strong incentive to undercut the market when they can take a fat margin and still sell out anyway.
Unlike the EU and the US, the UK doesn't have any major car companies anymore, so there's less of an incentive for them to apply tariffs on Chinese imports.
It's a shame that the UK isn't making their own EVs. It's a nation with a long tradition of manufacturing and a working class hungry for opportunities.
Both Labour and the Conservative parties seem to have resigned the nation to only being a financial hub.
I don't know, Stephen King couldn't write anything that matches the horror that was the management of UK car companies in the second half of the 20th century. British Leyland was a disaster from start to finish.
Meanwhile Ford’s CEO said that if Chinese EVs are allowed into USA it will destroy the US automakers.
He is not even hiding the fact US automakers make a more expensive inferior product, but that US consumers should not be allowed have the superior one.
From what I've seen, I have no reason to expect that a cheap new Chinese EV sold in the U.S. would be meaningfully lower quality than a cheap new American car.
"thanks to Chinese competition". More like anti-competitive practices. They can force down Chinese wages to keep labor costs down. They can require companies involved in component technologies to share their IP in order to do business in China, then replicate it and subsidize the hell out of it to push them not just out of China, but out of business globally. Then subsidize the whole final vertically integrated manufacturing of the end product so it's all cheaper and harder to compete with.
Not very free market. It's basically military and intelligence budget combined. If you can hurt auto manufacturing, you further consolidate manufacturing inside China. Then if you can get people to pay for you to spy on them through their own cars, that's well spent intelligence budget. If you reduce the portion of global manufacturing outside of China, you reduce the amount of manufacturing that can quickly pivot to wartime production like we saw during World War 2.
I'm glad that we still have sane enough people in the US that we ban these obvious and transparently bad things. It wasn't that hard to see free trade died.
Hopefully people don't still think that China's green energy initiatives are about the climate. Whatever you think about those initiatives, don't let that blind you to the legitimate questions around China's motivations.
Not quite. The UK govt has a rolling target of how many EVs are sold as a proportion of all vehicles. The manufacturers get "fined" £15k per ICE car sold over the target. The targets are ramping up rapidly - 22% in 2024, 28% in 2025, 33% in 2026, etc, reaching 80% (AFIAK, keeps changing) in 2030. There's various trading mechanisms in place and what not so it's a bit more complicated than this.
So it's far better to sell EV below cost (Chinese or not) to get more sold than have to a pay £15k for an ICE car.
The Chinese manufacturers are arguably at double advantage here as they have more BEV to sell so it's far easier for them meet the targets, and they can 'sell' the excess to the Western manufacturers (and further subsidise their EVs!).
I'm not personally against it, I got a brand new EV on a lease recently for close to free after all the tax advantages, and it's not like the Western manufacturers didn't have time to prepare...?
The goal is to migrate everyone to EVs, and it sounds like the government incentive mechanism is working, albeit in a roundabout way.
The problem is that there is not enough infrastructure for EVs. If you can't charge at home (e.g. you live in a flat), it is hard to live with an EV and it's much more expensive than the ICE.
It’s getting better.
https://transportandenergy.com/2026/04/16/42-of-councils-to-...
I had a rental EV while I was there for 6 weeks last summer, it was a pretty low spec jeep model and I stayed at mates places all over England none of which had parking or charging, to tell the truth charging was a bit spotty in town, but if I was just going around the local area the battery was good for a week or more. My take away was I would definitely rent an EV again, but a lot of the older charging infrastructure still sucks, under-provisioned at peak times, and cost 2-3 times what a similar charge would cost here in NZ. I ended up doing most of my charging at the Tesla superchargers on the motorways and at supermarkets in town. I did 2900 miles total and it was about the same cost as petrol in the end, but worth it as the EV was cheaper to rent and was automatic (which renters charge a premium in UK)
Not sure fast charging all the time is good for battery life though. 99% of my driving in NZ is on a normal 10A overnight charge
Local government can quickly change that, if they get their act together. Here in the Hague, there's literally thousands of public chargers available on the city's residential streets. Coupled with the fact that the charging-price is city-mandated at a fixed rate (currently around 35ct/kwh), this gives a perfectly fine solution for most people. (I can charge at home, for 20ct/kwh currently, so that's even nicer)
You can't fill up your gas tank at home or at work, which is presumably where a significant portion of EV drivers charge their cars.
In the UK? Nah.
Electricity is expensive in the UK (~25p/kWh) But not gas car expensive. It is £1.57/L (£5.94/gallon).
The EV infrastructure is also pretty dang far along, especially compared to the US. Remember that everything in the UK is a lot smaller and closer together than it is in the US. Further, the UK has a functional train system for long distance travel. You can go from the top of Dunnet Head to Lizard Point in a 15 hour drive.
People downvoting me, Look up chargers in plugshare to see just how many there are in the UK, it's a lot. And also correct my math if it's wrong. An 80kWh car costs £20 to fill up. A 55L car, which has about the same range, costs £85 to fill up.
Also if you are able to charge at home you can subscribe to a smart tariff that gives you electricity for 4p/kWh overnight. That’s £3.20 to fill an 80kWh battery that on a modern car will take you up to 320 miles.
And that will never change?
> The goal is to migrate everyone to EVs
This won't happen unless they outright ban non-EV vehicles which is unlikely considering how many people are still using old cars and cannot afford new cars, how many car enthusiasts are there, and not to mention potential lobbying from big oil.
So 20 years from now, all the old gas regular people cars have aged out. You’re left with what, 1 or 2% of enthusiasts cars? Seems like success to me, and fairly inevitable
There will undoubtedly be a death spiral of sorts when it comes to gas stations, refineries, etc. where they become fewer and farther between as less people buy fuel. And that makes it more expensive and inconvenient, so more people buy EVs, which in turn...
Death spiral to gas stations? why? EV cars need to charge somewhere (and on long trip it can’t be at home) and people need to take a break and grab a coffee sometime too. They will change, sure, but certainly not die. Refineries will be fewer but we do need another products from them also.
Presumably a lot of people will charge at home which significantly cuts down the number of stations needed or the traffic to those stations.
For example, I have 2 gas stations within a mile of my home. They stay pretty busy because people around me constantly need to fill up. I, on the other hand, basically never visit either of those stations since I switched to an EV. I charge at home.
If everyone around me switched to EVs, those stations could not stay in business. There's a grocery store in the same area which makes anything those stations offer obsolete.
Those are the majority of gas stations that die with a mass switch over to EVs. There's a gas station for my hometown without an attached convenience store with 300 people there. There's no way that station stays in service if a significant portion of the community switches to EVs. It already struggles to be profitable as is (I know the owner).
Chargers can be anywhere. They are at grocery stores, parking lots, restaurants, I can see the need for a dedicated re fuel station to disappear when charging is ubiquitous.
Charging stations will only need to be on highways if cities are sensible and build slow charging infrastructure (aka normal wall sockets) in parking spaces. Urban gas stations will be a thing of the past.
This has already happened in Norway, where 96% of new cars sold are EVs. They didn’t ban combustion but they did support adoption with subsidies and other incentives
New EVs become used EVs that poorer people can afford.
Poor people don't buy new cars. New EVs being expensive is not a poor person problem.
The problem is a 50kWh battery in a car is worth more as a battery than a typical £1500 car.
The lowest end of the market won’t have electric cars unless the batteries are shagged (early Leafs)
And given how insanely cheap petrol is (15p a mile, so £450 for a low mileage runaround) the savings even if electric was free and they weren’t introducing a 3p/mile charge isn’t there.
That's interesting!
Do happen to have a link for how the "brand new EV on a lease recently for close to free after all the tax advantages" works in the UK?
As sibling comment posted, if you run a company you can write off the cost of the lease against corporation tax (25% tax saving), VAT (a further 10% saving if you have personal use, otherwise the full 20% if it's purely business), and you don't have to pay income tax on the money (albeit with a small benefit in kind payment).
If you're in the higher tax brackets this means a £200/month lease (say) ends up more like £90/month.
And because of the "new" £3kish subsidy the govt put in, the car finance companies seem to basically apply that as a big discount to the lease value (or it seems that way?). So you could get a brand new ~£30k EV with no upfront payment and a 2-3 year term for <£100/month including maintenance. Mine even came with a free car charger install at home.
This only works for business leases. The employee sacrifices part of their salary in return for being provided a lease car, and both the employee and employer save tax on that money (up to 45% employee, ~15% employer).
For an ICE car the government claws this money back through hefty "Benefit In Kind" taxes placed on employer-provided vehicles, but as an incentive to drive adoption the rates on EVs are only 3% of the car's nominal purchase price (and you only actually pay up to 45% of that 3%).
It doesn't work out "free," but it's typically as cheap to lease a new EV through this scheme as it is to pay the depreciation on a used ICE.
Not sure what schemes are that good (would be interested to see). My company has one, but I ended up buying a used ICE because it worked out to cost about the same as leasing the equivalent EV model of that car. But that might have been the case for the specific car I was looking at (small Volvo SUV).
check out https://www.leaseloco.com/ (there's other sites - I am assuming you are in the UK), they have a lot of deals on. If you want a really good deal then I don't think you want to look for a specific car, you want instead to see what deals are going on and choose between them. It _seems_ that from time to time the manufacturers do a bit of a firesale via leases.
> And the presence of lower-cost alternatives can force non-Chinese brands to have to compete, rather than sitting on their laurels and gathering profits from expensive land yachts as the competition’s prices are inflated by tariffs. This is why the UK is getting Honda’s super cool Super-N, and the US isn’t.
The Honda Super-N EV will also be released in Australia, New Zealand, and other countries in Southeast Asia that were also British colonies: this decision has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with left-hand-drive vs. right-hand-drive.
Is it really that hard to produce an opposite-handed version? That sounds more like a convenient excuse.
No no, that's obviously wrong. It's because the sun rises in the East much earlier than the west, it only seems like like they're getting it earlier but it's only because of the way the planet works. And the sun never sets on the British empire is why they'll be getting it.
The treatment of our betters regarding "nudged" electrification is borderline misanthropic.
For people with a garage or a driveway who can charge at home, EVs are overwhelmingly a better option. The problem is that large swathes of the population are outside of that and you're making their lives miserable by punishing ICE car ownership.
Meanwhile, adoption numbers are thrown about ignoring that for those in optimal conditions, adoption is already very high and cannot grow much more. While for those particularly misaligned with the strengths of EVs, it will often be so painful to own one they will resist with everything they have, and in many cases they will have to admit defeat and stop driving altogether. Which I guess the government will also be content with. But it will take some time.
*typo
> The problem is that large swathes of the population are outside of that and you're making their lives miserable by punishing ICE cars ownership.
It's obviously not ideal to have an EV if you can't regularly charge at home or at work, but "making their lives miserable" seems like a bit of a stretch. Instead of spending 5 minutes a week filling up at the gas station, you'll spent 30 minutes a week at an EV charging station.
Eh. A new EV can drive 400-700km on one charge. It takes 20-60 minutes to charge on public chargers depending on the charger. Except that charging on public charges is more expensive than charging at home I don't really see the practical issue. I know many people without charging options at home that will never go back to ICE.
Except availability of chargers is spotty in most of the country, and charging prices so high that the running expenses are considerably higher. Not even considering insurance, which is also a killer. Been there.
Second hand EVs devaluation is not a product of anecdote. It reflects the current state of the market.
They are a different product and they're great at what they do. In fact, for those in the market for them, "nudging" (state coercion) is not necessary at all.
Coming to Canada soon, though in a limited way:
https://nationalpost.com/news/massive-risk-chinese-evs-are-t...
Hopefully this means competition with the other EV manufacturers in Canada too.
Unfortunately, because the number of imports is restricted they'll likely be about as expensive as the competition. They have no strong incentive to undercut the market when they can take a fat margin and still sell out anyway.
Fantastic. More competition and choice is always, always better for the consumer.
Unlike the EU and the US, the UK doesn't have any major car companies anymore, so there's less of an incentive for them to apply tariffs on Chinese imports.
Same as Australia! The rate of proliferation of Chinese EVs (and gas) there is crazy to see. Free market baby!
(And before the inevitable “but Chinese subsidies” comment - update your talking points, subsidies no longer happens to any meaningful degree)
Same in NZ. Most popular car is Tesla + 15 different Chinese brands: https://evdb.nz/sales
Actually somewhat surprised we still even have legacy auto in top 10.
Did anyone think of the national security implications?
How does the service and support part of this work in countries that have opened the door to Chinese EVs?
Do they operate like Tesla, or can indie garages handle repairs? How long are warranties?
Soon UK will start taxing EVs by distance driven which might offset many EV advantages and make their disadvantages more pronounced.
It's a shame that the UK isn't making their own EVs. It's a nation with a long tradition of manufacturing and a working class hungry for opportunities.
Both Labour and the Conservative parties seem to have resigned the nation to only being a financial hub.
The UK are making an incredible amount in tariffs though
Yeah they sold off pretty much their entire motor industry to the Germans (Mini, Bentley, ..), Chinese (Lotus) and Indians (Jaguar, Land Rover).
Typical case of short sighted capitalism.
I don't know, Stephen King couldn't write anything that matches the horror that was the management of UK car companies in the second half of the 20th century. British Leyland was a disaster from start to finish.
Meanwhile Ford’s CEO said that if Chinese EVs are allowed into USA it will destroy the US automakers.
He is not even hiding the fact US automakers make a more expensive inferior product, but that US consumers should not be allowed have the superior one.
Or at least to have the inferior product at a lower price.
From what I've seen, I have no reason to expect that a cheap new Chinese EV sold in the U.S. would be meaningfully lower quality than a cheap new American car.
Well, the UK no longer has a domestic auto industry
Meanwhile China does hide the fact that they block superior competition of various foreign services via the Great Firewall
"thanks to Chinese competition". More like anti-competitive practices. They can force down Chinese wages to keep labor costs down. They can require companies involved in component technologies to share their IP in order to do business in China, then replicate it and subsidize the hell out of it to push them not just out of China, but out of business globally. Then subsidize the whole final vertically integrated manufacturing of the end product so it's all cheaper and harder to compete with.
Not very free market. It's basically military and intelligence budget combined. If you can hurt auto manufacturing, you further consolidate manufacturing inside China. Then if you can get people to pay for you to spy on them through their own cars, that's well spent intelligence budget. If you reduce the portion of global manufacturing outside of China, you reduce the amount of manufacturing that can quickly pivot to wartime production like we saw during World War 2.
I'm glad that we still have sane enough people in the US that we ban these obvious and transparently bad things. It wasn't that hard to see free trade died.
Hopefully people don't still think that China's green energy initiatives are about the climate. Whatever you think about those initiatives, don't let that blind you to the legitimate questions around China's motivations.