Introduce a 15% EV quota for car manufacturers, says charity

The government should enforce a 15% electric vehicle (EV) quota for car manufacturers, says charity Global Action Plan (GAP).

Currently, less than 1% (under 100,000) of the 32 million cars on the road in the UK are fully electric. 

Consumer choice and ‘range anxiety’ is often blamed for the lack of uptake of EV vehicles, however, new research by GAP and the FIA Foundation has shown that millions of second cars could be fully electric without causing any hindrance to lifestyle. 

59% of two-car families have off-road parking for easy charging and admit that they never drive their second car more than 50 miles.

If this same 59% converted to EV’s there would be approximately 5.7 million more electric cars on the road. 

The research also revealed that the majority of households want the government to do more to encourage the uptake of EV’s. 

90% agreed that it should be a priority for central and local government to regulate car companies to force them to sell more affordable low-emission vehicles and 69% said that they dislike causing air pollution and wish for manufacturer-led technology to stop exhaust emissions. 

Based on this research, Global Action Plan is calling for car manufacturers to be issued with at least 15% EV quotas in order to meet the earliest phase-out date. 

Chris Large, Co-CEO, Global Action Plan, said: ‘The car industry often cites the long family holiday and availability of public charge points as a major reason that drivers won’t go electric.

‘But the facts are that for 1 in 6 cars on the road — the ‘second’ car in 5.7m households — these are not problems and electric cars are the perfect vehicle.

‘If the car industry had spent the last decade producing Nissan Leaf-type cars, instead of spending billions on marketing SUVs, we would be doing far better than the current level of 1 in 99 cars on the road being fully electric.

‘The government must not allow this corporate failure to persist and must regulate the market. The car companies that made $600bn profit from selling diesel and petrol cars in the last decade, must be made to focus on mass-producing zero-emission vehicles in this decade.’

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