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Hi, David here. We're doing a new thing with the Briefing Room podcast, which is we're packaging

up some bits you may have heard before on other programmes, which are still very relevant,

so they can explain specific things that are going on in the world. In today's Briefing Room

explainer, electric vehicles

or EVs, what has the government been doing to encourage the change to EVs and where are we

with car sales? I'm joined by Ginny Buckley, editor-in-chief and founder of electrifying.com.

Ginny Buckley, when was the first electric vehicle sold in the UK?

Well, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it might have been fairly recently and it might

have been a Tesla, but we're going to cast our minds back to 1884.

So there was an English inventor called Thomas Parker.

He was the inventor behind the electrification of the London Underground and of the trams in Blackpool.

And he built the first production electric car in Wolverhampton. Take us through what's happened to electric vehicle or EVs, as everybody calls it, sales since then.

The first mainstream electric car, EV EV went on sale in 2011.

Again, not a Tesla, as many people might expect,

it was the very humble Nissan Leaf.

In 2013, we saw the BMW I3, the Kia Soul, the Renault,

and they were the first breed of real mainstream electric cars.

And then Tesla did end to the market in the UK in 2014.

And that was when we really started to see the growth, because what happened with Tesla

was that not only did they bring the cars, but they brought the infrastructure.

And the infrastructure, of course, is so key to electric vehicle uptake. And it gave

...