(Bloomberg) -- The UK government has vowed to change rules that force the car industry to ramp up sales of electric vehicles after a chorus of complaints from the industry.
A steadily growing proportion of the cars and vans sold by each manufacturer need to be EVs under the country’s zero-emission vehicle mandate, rising to 100% by 2035. Weak demand for EVs means the industry has been struggling to meet the targets.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds offered the concessions hours after Stellantis NV said it would close a van factory north of London that’s produced Vauxhall brand vehicles for 120 years. The government will now offer the industry more support and consult with manufacturers on making adjustments to the mandate before year-end.
What is the UK’s ZEV mandate?
The government has set targets for 22% of the new cars and 10% of the new vans that each manufacturer sells this year to be ZEVs.
The requirements will ratchet up each year to 80% for cars and 70% for vans by the end of the decade. The goal is for all light vehicles sold to be ZEVs by 2035.
How does the mandate work?
The UK’s rules were going to be challenging to meet, and the government offered a range of options for manufacturers to avoid penalties of £15,000 ($19,000) per car and £9,000 per van sold in excess of the limits.
Automakers that exceed the mandated sales levels — such as Tesla Inc., which only sells EVs — earn credits that can be sold to those that fall short of the targets.
In the first year of the regulation, car manufacturers can also “borrow” allowances from future years for as much as 75% of their ZEV target. The cap on allowance borrowing for vans is set higher, at 90% for 2024.
But there’s a catch: Any allowance a manufacturer borrows must be “paid back” through over-compliance in future years, so they’ll have to hit even higher targets years from now.
What is the origin of the mandate?
The UK’s ZEV mandate shares similarities with a policy that’s been in place for decades in California, which implemented its own vehicle regulations due to the public-health crisis stemming from extreme smog in the 1960s.
Other states across the US have adopted California’s standards in recent years. China has put in place similar policies that boosted ZEV sales, as have the Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia.
So what’s the problem?
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which represents Britain’s automakers, has said the industry isn’t going to reach the headline 2024 targets despite an estimated £4 billion ($5.1 billion) worth of EV discounts.
During the first 10 months of the year, just over 18% of cars and 5.6% of vans were battery-electric. Many individual manufacturers are further off track than the overall industry.
Carmakers are blaming a lack of demand, driven partly by concern among drivers about insufficient charging infrastructure that would leave them stranded on the road with an empty battery.
Stellantis, for instance, suggested the mandate is one reason why it decided to close its van-making factory in Luton, England. The owner of the Citroën, Peugeot, Fiat and Jeep brands is burning through billions of euros of cash and is under pressure from its investors to rein in costs across its global operations.
What does the industry want?
Automakers insist they’re still committed to decarbonizing road transport, and point to the billions of pounds they’ve invested to retool their factories to produce EVs. There are, after all, now more than 125 zero-emission car models and 30 van types on the market, with dozens more on the way.
Their concern is the large sums of money they’ll need to spend until underlying demand — the number of drivers who actually want to buy an EV — catches up with the targets laid out in the mandate. Until then, automakers either need to offer promotional incentives or discounts to boost sales, or miss the targets, which means paying penalties to the government or buying credits from competitors, most of which manufacture outside the UK. The SMMT has called for the mandate to be made more “workable,” without publicly offering specifics.
Stellantis has gone into more detail, saying it wants the passenger car and van targets to be merged, and for the government to incentivize UK production of ZEVs by allowing exported vehicles to count toward the mandate.
What’s likely to change?
The government hasn’t said much yet about what exactly it’s going to do.
Reynolds said on Nov. 26 that he and Transport Secretary Louise Haigh had heard the industry “loud and clear” on the need for support to make the transition a success. He announced a fast-tracked consultation with carmakers on changing the mandate so that companies have clarity before the new year.
Moving the mandated annual percentages around seems improbable, as the government still wants to phase out sales of new cars powered solely by combustion engines before the end of the decade.
It’s more likely that the carmakers will get even more flexibility — even if just in the initial years of the mandate — that would lower their compliance costs, and perhaps a temporary tax cut that would entice more consumers to purchase an EV.
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