The Business Secretary has raised the alarm about job losses if a new Government edict insisting that 22% of new cars sold by manufacturers will need to be electric vehicles comes into force in January. The Telegraph has more.
Car manufacturers are warning they will not be able to hit a requirement that 22% of new vehicles they sell in 2024 must be zero emission models that are completely electric.
A manufacturer will be fined £15,000 for every polluting car sold over the limit, unless they can somehow buy in extra allowances from another company.
Mrs. Badenoch is understood to be concerned about the requirement, known as the zero emissions vehicle (Zev) mandate.
A spokesman for Mrs. Badenoch said: “If major car companies employing thousands of people are saying that there’s a problem, then it’s her job to look at ways to ease that problem.”
Net Zero has become a central issue for both the Conservatives and Labour, with Rishi Sunak under mounting pressure to delay the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles.
Last week, the Telegraph revealed that Honda and Toyota were publicly urging a softening of the rules amid fears that they would be breached if implemented as planned.
Mrs Badenoch’s spokesman was also quoted saying “Honda and Toyota are not the only manufacturers who have raised concerns” and “Kemi has been raising their concerns with colleagues in the Cabinet”.
The accuracy of the remarks, first reported by the Politico website, was not disputed by the Business Department.
The Telegraph understands that government ministers are looking at new “flexibilities” to help with the crunch, but are committed to the introduction of the quota.
Despite the rules coming into force in just five months, the Transport Department has still not revealed its full approach of how it will oversee the scheme.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Mail is reporting that U.K. car giants are warning of a potential investment exodus over the proposed £15,000 fines for car manufacturers failing to meet EV quotas.
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“Softening of the rules?”
The whole lot wants dropping altogether not softening! Let evs compete on equal terms without aid or subsidies,.. they’d be ditched within a year!
When this rule was announced I had a hard job not laughing. The government, EU, any of them have no idea how long it takes to design, develop a car, and get it into production, let alone all the other stuff that goes with supporting that production and its subsequent products. It is going to get very interesting in the near future as each political dream turns into a nightmare.
They already have. We do not have enough electricity to charge these cars anyway, and have avoided a problem so far by restarting coal power stations, paying large users not to operate, and running open cycle gas turbine stations to compensate. The costs of all this are why your bills are so high.It is not high fuel prices (oil now cheaper than before Covid, gas not different) that is the problem, it is the policies from the Government and the 25% Green levy to subsidise the whole scam! It isn’t working, but they cannot admit it is stupid, after all who would elect the fools? Neithr main party is capable of any sense. Germany is back to coal in huge quantity, but they were stupid enough to shut down nuclear too!
Only a collectivist could come up with a rule like that. You can’t force consumers to change their preferences by fining the producers for failing to sell into a market that doesn’t want enough dodgy electric vehicles.
It reminds me very much of Atlas Shrugged in that period when the bureaucrats and politicians took over before the economic collapse.
Yes, I’ve said this before. Ayn Rand also foresaw stakeholder capitalism in the book, where businesses basically either decided or were ordered not to prioritise profits. We’re living in a world where the Orren Boyles and James Taggarts are running things. It’s astonishing just how prophetic Atlas Shrugged was and it explains why the progressive left is still paranoiacally obsessed with her!
Yes I was warded away from it for 35 years before I shifted to Libertarianism later in life. I remember the stink that surrounded her and her books throughout my social and educational life.
Its a great book, more so now than ever.
Pity it was never turned into a decent film. But we know why that is.
Isn’t stakeholder capitalism just a Klaus Schwab euphemism for corporatism?
She set out exactly what happens when the political class jump into bed with the corporations – rampant, democracy and freedom destroying corporatism.
This is totally ABSURD. Even Tony Blair who gave us the Climate Change Act (2008 Miliband) said this week that nothing the UK does will impact global climate very much. So why are we doing all of this stuff at break neck speed like there was no tomorrow? Why are we in the UK trying to save the planet harder and faster than everyone else —-Here is clue, it isn’t about the climate and NEVER was. Climate Change is the greatest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated on a brainwashed public.
Because there is no tomorrow. The people behind this must get their plans forced through now because the window of opportunity for this is closing and they know this. Twenty years ago, snow in winter in Germany was a rare and very fleeting occurence. People have long since become accustomed to weeks of snow again and it’s going to be months next. In the current summer-without-summer, we would have been afraid of famine in winter due to crop failures as it’s much too wet for anything to ripen outside in former times. Absolutely not what the narrative of heat record followed by heat record calls for.
But they cannot admit cold, because they have made so much of heat. However the temperature doesn’t change although the weather might. See here:
Real-time Global Temperature
(updated every 1-2 minutes)
57.46°F / 14.14°C
Deviation: 0.26°F / 0.14°C
Stations processed last hour: 32077
Last station processed: St Johns, Antigua and Barbuda
For source/info see:
https://temperature.global
There just like last year and the year before etc! Weather patterns move, as they have always done. Germany is having it’s 1963 period. We are fractionally warmer. So What?
I hadn’t appreciated this staggering of the deadline, I’ll need to start thinking about locking in my forever car sooner than later! Petrol car prices are about to go stratospheric.
Looks like another tax adding £15 grand to a car, then straight to the Government coffers to blow on vanity projects! HS2 is a typical example, a number of Engineers have said it can never be finished for various reasons, and the rest say it will never make any money. In fact it will always require a huge subsidy of around £5 Billion a year to pay the interest on the cost. Where will that come from? I suggest the BBC who think taha saving a few minutes is worth everything, and of course it will be electric lessening that available for the rest of us.
When did we vote for this?
No-one voted for it. They have had this planned for a decade or two, and have kept it covered over, and hidden behind all kinds of nonsense, hoping that by the time we noticed, it would be too late for us to stop it.
Isn’t this an implementation of a non-brexit foreign requirement? Encouraging quotas of an all-electric variant of a car is not exactly new. It probably had something to do with BMW mini manufacturing the all-electric version of the Mini in Oxford Cowley, being able to offset the numbers against something else being made elsewhere (which are probably more popular at the high end of the chain). No surprise that Toyota doesn’t like it.
Stop calling ICE cars “polluting” and stop implying EVs are not polluting.
CO2 is not a pollutant but the stuff EVs are made from polluted badly to extract, to process and to dispose of.
Job losses not only in the automotive industry but in every industry. A decline in living standards and quality of life for everyone except the rich and powerful
Yes indeed the motor industry is at the heart of much of our industrial economy. We are fast approaching the time when all this net-zero stuff stops being theoretical and starts to hurt and hurt badly. They need to get real, in my opinion, given current technology and resources we can only hope to replace 10-15% of the UKs ICE cars with conventional car type EVs. Thus if we go ahead with banning ICE cars it will be a huge impoverishing change on the UK public, it wrecks our motor industry and a big chunk of our economy and it wrecks the concept of travel freedom for most people.
The compromise will be that we will be offered these lightweight souped up electric mobility scooters such as the Citroen AMI, ”it’s a car Jim but not as we know it!”.
https://www.citroen.co.uk/ami?gclsrc=aw.ds&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw_aemBhBLEiwAT98FMtbcxSQten2fADlOlP3SdGMP0dSQO2W6J_L8obDAf4WuFw10nuWG9hoCdHUQAvD_BwE
It is worth noting that VW are giving up on electric cars, they are too difficult and expensive to make and don’t sell. I wonder why? Because they are hopelessly impractical for 90% of the population.
It’s all going to go ‘Mad Max’ very quickly if this law really gets instigated. In order to reach the required percentage of EVs, dealers will be forced to cut the number of normal cars they sell, putting many out of business. By 2030s, there will be a vast amount of old car stock on the road, because people won’t be able to afford EVs. Petrol and diesel will become a black market fuel. Cars will be stolen from driveways and cut up for black market spare parts. Meanwhile someone will figure how to drain the charge from EV batteries and sell that charge on the black market.
I’ve mentioned the black market a lot, because when governments go in a totalitarian direction, restricting supplies, the black market always becomes a reality. We saw it in the Soviet Union. If capitalism is banned in the public square, it continues underground.
The only way I can see this ‘working’ is that the car makers build the cost of the fines into the price of their ice cars. If people (quite sensibly) refuse to buy electric vehicles what else can they do?
What they’re supposed to do — cease offering goods for sale people actually want to buy so that they’re forced to buy something similar they don’t really want.
That is not a sustainable business model. Car supplies in the UK will dry up, and clever people will fix old ones for ever as in India. There will be no new vehicle tax revenue, which will not please the Government. They will make it illegal to sell or use cars that are not to the latest “standards” next, seeding armed revolt. They have done this with gas appliances, but the attempt with electrical ones failed dismally because the “standars” were scientificaaly so inept and stupid the public realised! The 500W kettle and toaster did not use less energy, in fact more, but they went ahead! The 3kW heating source for your house (heat pump) will get the same reception very soon. But PPE and Greats were never the source of good ideas. If they even look at the Roman and Greek texts though, they will see descriptions of the fall of great Civilisations, all because of stupid politics!
It’s not obvious how it would be implemented when the sums are done, either the manufacturers supply to the UK, or dealers. If it was the dealers, some would do alright, if they have franchises across a number of different manufacturers, whereas some might collapse, or there could be some free-market restructuring to work around it so as to start in an annual quota. E.g one of the large trading companies deals with Nissan, Renault, Toyota, Honda, Skoda and a few others in my area. Separate showrooms etc, but all one large firm in reality.
Is there a GE next year? Are the Tories down 20% in the polls?
Both Torys and Labour should be at zero with this nonsense. Vote Reform, because we need it, and it is better that not voting. It might well be the shock we need to get back to common sense.