Electric car prices slashed to meet sales targets

Electric car sales rose by 24 per cent in October from a year earlier to take more than one fifth of the new vehicle registrations market.
However, industry experts said a 6 per cent drop in total sales of new cars over the month indicated that manufacturers were holding back petrol and diesel vehicles in an attempt to hit the government’s zero-emission targets and avoid large fines.
The latest statistics from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) show that new car registrations fell from 153,000 in October 2023 to 144,000 last month.
Pure electric cars were the only vehicle type showing growth, with the sale of zero-emission cars rising to just shy of 29,000 in October from 24,000 a year earlier to account for 20.7 per cent of the market.
The SMMT said that this was a result of “manufacturers continuing to subsidise the transition with billions of pounds in unsustainable discounting”.
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Price-cutting of electric cars has been the standout trend of autumn car sales, following large-scale discounting in the September, the month that numberplates change. It is estimated that the same electric model is now retailing at 12 per cent less than a year ago.
Dealers have been trying to clear a backlog of unsold electric cars from the summer, while manufacturers scramble to sell battery vehicles to hit targets under the UK’s zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
Those rules state that manufacturers could be fined £15,000 for every electric car under a threshold of 22 per cent of all sales in 2024. While manufacturers are likely to avoid fines this year by rolling over shortfalls into next year, the ZEV mandate gets tougher in 2025 with a target of 28 per cent.
“Electric vehicles are taking a bigger share of the market, thanks to heavy discounting,” said Ian Plummer, commercial director of Auto Trader, the UK’s leading online car sales marketplace.
“Subdued petrol and diesel sales are likely to be driven by the efforts of manufacturers to hit sales targets under the ZEV mandate. Manufacturers are making significant efforts to bridge the price gap to electrics, but the market is still not achieving the volumes needed.”
Dan Caesar, chief executive of Electric Vehicles UK, which represents companies in the supply chain, said: “Confounding the headlines on a weak electric vehicle market, the UK is in fact on track for one in five new cars sold in 2024 being battery electric.
“As a result of the ZEV mandate, the UK is well positioned to be the prime mover in Europe in 2025. With an absence of tariffs, the UK is one of the most attractive markets for electric carmakers around the world.”
The October electric car sales performance was achieved without much help from Tesla, the UK’s best-selling zero-emission car.
After a large quarterly shipment of vehicles inflating electric cars sales in September, Tesla sales were down 63 per cent in October compared with the same month last year, with fewer than 1,000 registrations accounting for only 3 per cent of all electric sales.
According to data from the consultancy New AutoMotive, BMW is following hard on the heels of Tesla. Over the past 12 months in the UK, BMW has sold 33,000 electric cars to Tesla’s 42,000. The German brands Mercedes-Benz and Audi and the Chinese carmaker MG have each sold more than 20,000 electric cars.