Is the push for the electric cars in trouble?

The Briefing Room

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.8 • 731 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Encouraging everyone to make the change to electric vehicles has been a major part of government green and industrial policy for some time now. The government has announced a consultation on how to speed up the transition to electric cars and fade out the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030. The last Government had extended plans to ban of the sale of new petrol cars to 2035. There are targets, there are mandates and there is scepticism about how quickly the transition is really happening.

So, as we enter 2025, what is the state of the country’s move from petrol to electric? How do we compare with other countries and what does it say about the British car industry?

Guests: Ginny Buckley, Editor-in-Chief and founder of electrifying.com Ian Henry, Owner and Managing Director of Auto Analysis and visiting Professor in Automotive Business Strategy at Royal Holloway, University of London David Bailey, Professor of Business Economics at the Birmingham Business School.

Presenter: David Aaronovitch Producers: Charlotte McDonald, Kirsteen Knight and Beth Ashmead Latham Sound engineers: Rod Farquhar Editor: Richard Vadon Production Co-ordinator: Gemma Ashman

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:07.0	Getting us all into electric vehicles has been a major part of government green and industrial policy for some time now.
0:14.8	There are targets, there are mandates, and there's scepticism about how quickly the transition is really happening.
0:22.0	So, as we enter 2025, what is the state of the country's move over from petrol to electric?
0:28.5	And what does it say about the British car industry?
0:31.7	Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out.
0:37.8	First, what has the government been doing to encourage the change to electric cars?
0:42.8	And where are we with car sales?
0:45.2	I'm joined by Ginny Buckley, editor-in-chief and founder of electrifying.com.
0:50.6	Ginny Buckley, when was the first electric vehicle sold in the UK?
0:55.1	Well, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it might have been fairly recently and it might
0:58.6	have been a Tesla, but we're going to cast our minds back to 1884.
1:03.6	Actually, so there was an English inventor called Thomas Parker.
1:08.1	He was the inventor behind the electrification of the London Underground and of the
1:12.7	trams in Blackpool. And he built the first production electric car in Wolverhampton.
1:18.1	Take us through what's happened to electric vehicle or EVs, as everybody calls it, sales since then?
1:24.2	The first mainstream electric car, EV EV went on sale in 2011.
1:29.7	Again, not a Tesla, as many people might expect, it was the very humble Nissan Leaf.
1:34.6	In 2013, we saw the BMW I3, the Kia Soul, the Renault Zoe, and they were the first
1:40.8	breed of real mainstream electric cars.
1:43.8	And then Tesla did end to the market in the UK in 2014.
1:48.1	And that was when we really started to see the growth.
	...

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