Welcome back to the podcast. Today, the UK goes pay per mile on EVs. Scoda EVs double their share

and the largest Tesla supercharger opens. Plus stay tuned. Later in the show, I'll tell you why Greenpeace

are walking the walk and practicing what they preach with a new flagship vessel. On EV News, China,

today our spin-off show looking at EVs in the East, we're talking

about neo deliveries and margins improving, Chinese EV factories in the EU, and Lee Auto

slipping into the red. Let's start with this headline news from Britain yesterday.

Electric motoring will stop being tax-free. From April 2028, every mile you drive in

an EV will incur a charge, three pence per mile, in fact, for Bev's and 1.5 pence for plug-in hybrids.

The move aims to fill a hole in fuel duty as petrol and diesel sales fall, but it risks cooling demand for EVs just as the

market matures. Chancellor Rachel Reeves sent out the plan as part of a broad reset of how

Britain tax is driving. The pay per mile levy will come on top of the recent £195 per year.

Vehicle excise duty, we call it road tax, which EV owners already pay,

plus the £400, a EV tax on cars costing more than £40,000, and that isn't a very high

threshold at the moment. The mileage fee will also rise each year with inflation. By 2029, the government's

own Office of Budget Responsibility expects the scheme to bring in £1.4 billion a year. On today's

numbers, a typical driver who does 8,500 miles per year, is paying another £255 in government tax.

The Treasury's own OBR, Office of Budget Responsibility, expects a hit to EVs.

The OBS or OBR forecasts themselves.

440,000 fewer EVs between now and 2031, an extraordinary number. That would make it harder to

hit the government's own zero emission vehicle mandate, and with it, the country's climate targets

for raising, albeit £1.4 billion, that's not a huge amount of money, but it's a huge amount of vehicles

which the government themselves say won't hit the roads because of these new punitive taxes.

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