Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) sales have once again seen a significant increase, with a jump of 441.3% recorded last month when compared to May 2020.

The latest figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) show that 13,120 BEVs were registered in May 2021 compared to 2,424 the same month a year prior.

However, despite the jump in sales, BEVs held only 8.4% of the market in May 2021 compared to 12% in 2020. The SMMT suggested this was partly due to the May 2020 performance being distorted by the COVID-19 lockdowns as new cars could only be purchased through click and collect or delivery, giving rise to variable purchasing patterns.

The lockdowns also had a marked effect on petrol and diesel sales, plummeting -97.3% in April 2020 to allow for BEVs to scoop a 31.8% share of the market.

Looking at 2021 as a whole, 54,051 BEVs have been sold compared to 22,054 in the same period in 2020, representing a 145.1% change and 7.5% of the market compared to 4.3% in 2020.

Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said: “Demand for electrified vehicles is helping encourage people into showrooms, but for these technologies to surpass their fossil-fuelled equivalents, a long term strategy for market transition and infrastructure investment is required.”

The SMMT figures come on the same day as separate statistics looking into electric vehicle (EV) sales were released from New AutoMotive, which instead found that there were 11,769 sales of BEVs in May 2021 compared to 2,224 in May 2020. This puts the market share at 8.36% compared to 12.29% for May 2020.

Tesla led sales in the month, with 1,648 purchases, followed by Volkswagen with 1,560 and Hyundai with 1,065.

When it comes to the percentage of a manufacturer’s total registrations, however, Porsche held the top spot, with 37% of all new Porsches being fully electric. Other brands to have solid sales were Renault, Hyundai and Nissan, with 26%, 19% and 16% of their new car sales being fully electric.

Meanwhile, geographically, New Automotive found sales of new EVs are growing fastest in North East England and Oxfordshire where sales have jumped from 4% of the market to 11% and from 8% to 19% in the last year respectively.

In May, it was announced that Oxford will be the home of Europe’s most powerful EV charging hub, with a range of 300kW, 250kW, 7kW and 22kW chargers to be installed at the site, which is the first of 40 such Superhubs to be created by Pivot Power.

Read more: CURRENT

It’s Time to Go Green!

If you would like to know more about Solar Panels and the PowerBanx range of home battery systems, and get a free instant quote, please complete our online form:

I know, you probably haven’t even driven one yet, let alone seriously contemplated buying one, so the prediction may sound a bit bold, but bear with me.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in motoring since Henry Ford’s first production line started turning back in 1913.

And it is likely to happen much more quickly than you imagine.

Many industry observers believe we have already passed the tipping point where sales of electric vehicles (EVs) will very rapidly overwhelm petrol and diesel cars.

It is certainly what the world’s big car makers think.

Jaguar plans to sell only electric cars from 2025, Volvo from 2030 and last week the British sportscar company Lotus said it would follow suit, selling only electric models from 2028.

And it isn’t just premium brands.

General Motors says it will make only electric vehicles by 2035, Ford says all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030 and VW says 70% of its sales will be electric by 2030.

This isn’t a fad, this isn’t greenwashing.

Yes, the fact many governments around the world are setting targets to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles gives impetus to the process.

But what makes the end of the internal combustion engine inevitable is a technological revolution. And technological revolutions tend to happen very quickly.

This revolution will be electric
Look at the internet.

By my reckoning, the EV market is about where the internet was around the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Back then, there was a big buzz about this new thing with computers talking to each other.

Jeff Bezos had set up Amazon, and Google was beginning to take over from the likes of Altavista, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. Some of the companies involved had racked up eye-popping valuations.

For those who hadn’t yet logged on it all seemed exciting and interesting but irrelevant – how useful could communicating by computer be? After all, we’ve got phones!

But the internet, like all successful new technologies, did not follow a linear path to world domination. It didn’t gradually evolve, giving us all time to plan ahead.

Its growth was explosive and disruptive, crushing existing businesses and changing the way we do almost everything. And it followed a familiar pattern, known to technologists as an S-curve.

Riding the internet S-curve
It’s actually an elongated S.

The idea is that innovations start slowly, of interest only to the very nerdiest of nerds. EVs are on the shallow sloping bottom end of the S here.

For the internet, the graph begins at 22:30 on 29 October 1969. That’s when a computer at the University of California in LA made contact with another in Stanford University a few hundred miles away.

The researchers typed an L, then an O, then a G. The system crashed before they could complete the word “login”.

Like I said, nerds only.

A decade later there were still only a few hundred computers on the network but the pace of change was accelerating.

In the 1990s the more tech-savvy started buying personal computers.

As the market grew, prices fell rapidly and performance improved in leaps and bounds – encouraging more and more people to log on to the internet.

The S is beginning to sweep upwards here, growth is becoming exponential. By 1995 there were some 16 million people online. By 2001, there were 513 million people.

Now there are more than three billion. What happens next is our S begins to slope back towards the horizontal.

The rate of growth slows as virtually everybody who wants to be is now online.

Read more: BBC

It’s Time to Go Green!

If you would like to know more about Solar Panels and the PowerBanx range of home battery systems, and get a free instant quote, please complete our online form:

The electric car market bucked the downturn in global auto sales in 2020 with growth of 41% and is on track for a “decade of strong expansion”.

But the findings, revealed in a new report by the International Energy Agency, say that critical progress is needed to ensure EVs attain their full potential to mitigate carbon emissions.

The IEA’s Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2021 finds that despite a series of pandemic-induced economic recessions, a record three million new electric cars were registered in 2020; a 41% increase from the previous year. By comparison, the global automobile market contracted 16% in 2020.

And in the first quarter of 2021, EV sales reached nearly two and half times their level in the same period a year earlier.

Governments helped EVs mitigate the downturn by extending existing policy and fiscal support, and augmenting them with stimulus measures in response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Last year’s increase brought the number of electric cars on the world’s roads to more than 10 million, with another roughly one million electric vans, heavy trucks and buses.

And for the first time last year, Europe overtook China as the centre of the global electric car market. Electric car registrations in Europe more than doubled to 1.4 million, while in China they increased 9% to 1.2 million.

Based on current trends and policies, the IEA projects the number of electric cars, vans, heavy trucks and buses on the road worldwide to reach 145 million by 2030.

But it says the global fleet could reach 230 million if governments accelerate efforts to reach international climate and energy goals, as outlined in the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario.

The report outlines that in order for electric vehicles to attain their full potential to mitigate carbon emissions, critical progress is required to decarbonise electricity generation, to integrate electric vehicles in power systems, to build charging infrastructure and to advance sustainable battery manufacturing and their recycling.

“Electric vehicles have an indispensable role to play in reaching net-zero emissions worldwide,’” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. “Current sales trends are very encouraging, but our shared climate and energy goals call for even faster market uptake. Governments should now be doing the essential groundwork to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles by using economic recovery packages to invest in battery manufacturing and the development of widespread and reliable charging infrastructure.”

The IEA added that while electric vehicles have a key role to play in tackling emissions, policymakers should think about global clean energy transitions holistically across sectors to ensure that progress in one area is not being undermined by shortcomings in another.

Read more: fleetworld

It’s Time to Go Green!

If you would like to know more about Solar Panels and the PowerBanx range of home battery systems, and get a free instant quote, please complete our online form:

The government has a “mountain to climb” to reach its goals of phasing out new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and for all new cars to be zero-emission by 2035.

This is according to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which in a new report released today (19 May) criticised the government for lacking a plan to achieve these targets and tackle the consequences of an all-electric car society, including the impact on the future power needs, the impact on the skills and capabilities required to support the changeover and the impact on the government tax-take due to the loss of fuel duties.

While much of the report focused on how to increase uptake among consumers, the PAC also detailed recommendations into charging infrastructure, stating it isn’t convinced that the government has “sufficiently thought through” how this will expand at the pace required to meet the targets.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has made assumptions about the types of journeys people will make and how they charge their car, but not estimated the number of chargepoints required across the country to keep up with the increase in electric vehicles (EVs).

Therefore, the DfT should set out as part of its plan for increasing EV uptake how it intends to address the remaining barriers to expanding the network, for example the availability of chargers where drivers do not have off-street parking.

Having spoke to the DfT for this report, the PAC said the department sees government’s role in developing EV charging infrastructure as spotting market failures and unblocking problems. The DfT said there is to be a shift in focus from funding for home charging to on-street and other publicly available local charging.

The government has doubled investment for the current year for the on-street residential charge scheme, and is to double it to £20 million for the next year too.

However, the National Audit Office has reported that the take-up of funding for local authorities to support on-street residential chargepoints has previously been low, with almost a third of the allocation funding of £8.5 million not used.

In 2018, it was revealed that only five councils across the UK had taken advantage the scheme, prompting ministers to write to local authorities calling for more action and the Local Government Association to respond by claiming cash strapped councils should not be responsible for “replacing petrol stations”.

Then in 2019, transport secretary Grant Shapps penned a separate letter to local authorities calling on them to take better advantage of government grants for deploying EV charging infrastructure.

Alongside the additional work needed on on-street charging, both the DfT and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) also need to work with other departments to consider the practical implications of the transition to zero-emission cars, the PAC said.

In particular, they should set out how they are going to manage the wider societal impacts such as the impact on power generation and transmission and retraining the workforce.

Investments will need to be made in the transmission and distribution networks to ensure they can cope with the additional demand from EVs alongside other demand sources, the PAC said, with BEIS estimating that electricity demand will double by 2050 and that the need for network investment will translate to a 2% increase in energy bills by 2030.

Already the UK distribution network operators (DNOs) are gearing up for the increased demand, with UK Power Networks expecting a 3,000% growth in EVs in its areas by 2030 and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks expecting EVs to increase to over 5 million by 2050 in its areas.

Likewise, Electricity North West is expecting over 3 million EVs in its region by 2050, detailing its plans to support the increased uptake in February.

The PAC also examined the difference in costs between public charging and home charging, citing National Audit Office analysis of public data which suggested that charging at home can cost between 59% and 78% less than charging on the public network. The DfT said that it expects there to be more competition in the market and innovation that could benefit customers in terms of the price paid for electricity, but that it expects rapid charging in public to always be more expensive than charging overnight at home.

Additionally, the PAC asked both the DfT and BEIS about their strategy to avoid ‘not spots’ – areas where the market doesn’t deliver because uptake is insufficient. The DfT responded that the majority of EV owners will charge at home overnight and start their journeys with 100% charge. However, the PAC said that data from the English Housing Survey shows that 33% of households in England don’t have access to off-street parking, with this increasing to 68% for those living in social housing.

Lastly, the PAC asked how the DfT will ensure that charging infrastructure expands in line with its plans for a rapid expansion in EV uptake ahead of 2030, with the department stating it has not set targets for the number and type of charging infrastructure required to support the zero-emission vehicle transition because it expects private investment to drive this.

Meg Hiller, chair of the PAC, said that “once again what we’ve got is a government throwing up a few signs around base camp” while there’s no drop in demand for internal combustion engine vehicles.

“This isn’t about more targets with no plan behind them inevitably getting missed – it’s about averting the real-world challenges that are bearing down on all of us,” Hiller added.

Read more: CURRENT

It’s Time to Go Green!

If you would like to know more about Solar Panels and the PowerBanx range of home battery systems, and get a free instant quote, please complete our online form: