Back in 2009 the then UK Government put into place an ambitious and well funded initiative to accelerate the adoption of plug-in vehicles. Over £400million was earmarked to advance the market from both the supply and demand side. Of this mammoth figure, £230 million alone was allocated for a consumer incentive grant that would knock off between 2 and 5 thousand pounds of the sticker price of a new plug-in vehicle. The current incumbent Government decided to support this initiative and the consumer incentive was introduced to the market at the start of this year. The timing was chosen to coincide with the introduction of EVs into the mass market so that all potential early adopters would benefit.
6 months on and we can look back and review the “success” of the grant measured by its level of uptake. As of last week the incentive grant has been allocated a total of 680 times meaning (assuming the full £5000 was allocated on each occasion) £3.4million has thus far been distributed. To me this doesn’t seem like a huge figure and (again if we assume that the sales have been evenly distributed) it only equates to an average of 113 plug-in vehicles being sold per month. Clearly this is better than nothing, but when you compare the first 6 months figures with the total budget allocated for this initiative you begin to think the UK Government was rather ambitious in their expectations for market uptake.
