The great electric car lie is a monstrous deception against the British public

Speaking sense: Rowan Atkinson may be right about electric cars

The great electric car revolution is stalling, and the net-zero panjandrums are desperate to find somebody to blame. It must be the fault of fake news, they intimate, or disinformation campaigns, or of nit-picking journalists and their gullible readers, or because Elon Musk has embraced Right-wing ideas: what other possible reasons could there be for consumers refusing to do their duty?

Electric vehicles’ (EVs) share of the UK market has remained stuck at 16 per cent for two years, and 10 out of 11 private buyers are still opting for combustion engines. But instead of seeking to understand the real reasons why even the environmentally conscious continue to patronise petrol-powered cars, green activists are resorting to deranged conspiracy theories.

Some – speaking to a House of Lords committee – even singled out a nuanced article by Rowan Atkinson for having harmed their cause: the actor disclosed that he felt “duped” by electric vehicles, and questioned the claims made by advocates. There is nothing zealots loath more than an apostate.

I wish it were true that a single opinion article could alter the purchasing decisions of millions, but the reality is more prosaic. Consumers are rational, and they aren’t buying electric cars because it doesn’t yet make sense. EVs are prohibitively expensive, their range too short and there aren’t enough charging points: newspaper reports and personal finance desks have done the public a great service by pointing all of this out in great detail.

The blunt truth is that EVs, for now, remain a niche product aimed at affluent consumers with narrow requirements, and are not yet ready for mass adoption. To claim otherwise is a monstrous deception, an attempt at hoodwinking and impoverishing many middle-class motorists.

Top-down attempts by elitist Tory and Labour politicians to deny this reality and to phase out the combustion engine too quickly will cause intolerable hardship, collapse the grid and trigger a political revolution. Even Sunak’s 80 per cent EV target for new cars by 2030 is too strict, and Labour’s 100 per cent ban on pure petrol cars in five years and 10 months’ time is unfathomably stupid.

None of this makes me an opponent of EVs. I am a fan of private cars, and of mass private mobility. I want to build more roads, not fewer; I want car ownership to rise, not drop. In practice, in the UK and most of Europe at least, the only way this will be possible – and the anti-car fanatics and Left-wing urbanists who hold such sway over both parties defeated – is if the environmental cost of motoring can be significantly reduced.

Like Atkinson, I find EVs to be “wonderful mechanisms”, and I’m more optimistic than he is about the environmental benefits of the latest models and battery technology. I strongly suspect that the carbon footprint of construction and disposal will fall further over time. I like EVs’ modern interfaces, the lack of noise, the astonishing acceleration, the absence of stinky exhaust fumes, the decentralised charging and even the feeling of sitting in a giant iPhone.

But while zero-emission vehicles are the future – including possibly those powered by hydrogen – we are very much still in the present, and it makes no financial sense for most people to buy one today. The cheapest petrol-powered Kia costs £13,600, is small but drives well; entry-level electric cars cost some £26,000 and have terrible range. You need to spend at least £30,000 to get a decent electric car, and Teslas start at £40,000.

EVs are thus still orders of magnitude too expensive. The median annual earnings of a full-time UK worker were just shy of £35,000 last year; most people can only afford a few thousand pounds on a second-hand car, if that. Until cheaper models are developed – Tesla promises a compact model next year that could be priced at £25,000, which remains high – they will only appeal to buyers of luxury cars.

The alternative, which is even worse, is that the Chinese flood the market with ultra-subsidised models, bankrupting Western producers and gathering data and private information on drivers.

EVs also appear to depreciate more quickly: the average electric car lost 49.1 per cent of its value after five years, against 38.8 per cent for the average vehicle, according to a US study. One big worry is fast-changing technology; another is battery replacement costs. Electric cars still cost more to insure.

In many countries, these high costs are sweetened by heavy subsidies, but this is no longer true in Britain. A grant worth thousands was largely phased out in July 2022 and EVs will pay vehicle excise duty from April next year.

Labour councils, such as Westminster in London, are ending their cheap electric car parking policy, and Sadiq Khan will start charging the congestion fee on zero-emission vehicles from Christmas 2025 (something the Tories should shout about).

Leasing an electric car via a salary sacrifice scheme remains advantageous, and explains why most EVs are sold to fleets, but this only suits employees in stable jobs. The fact that VAT is charged at just 5 per cent on home recharging does nothing to reduce upfront costs.

The other reason so few consumers are buying EVs is that their range is often too low, and the figures released by manufacturers scandalously unreliable. It is intolerable that we are sold cars that don’t deliver as promised. Range also diminishes in winter, and fast motorway driving drains batteries.

In time, ultra-long range, affordable cars should become available, and hopefully manufacturers will become more honest. For now, however, a higher uptake of EVs would lead to terrible queues for motorway charging points, and daily fights on urban residential streets.

We need millions more charging points, and a massive increase in electricity generation, including in nuclear, for there to be a viable transition to EVs. In the absence of this, the Government’s own targets, were they met, would risk overwhelming the grid, and threaten catastrophic blackouts.

Electric cars today are a superior option for a sizeable minority, especially those with off-street parking and who don’t drive more than 150 miles a day. But most consumers should not be blackmailed emotionally into buying one too soon.

Freedom to choose should be paramount: the Government should allow market forces to dictate adoption, and remove all deadlines and compulsion. EVs are great, but the Government, in its haste, threatens to ruin their promise.

%n

Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day’s agenda from The Telegraph – direct to your inbox seven days a week.