Yet this could be a case of smoke and mirrors. Vauxhall registered just 378 EVs in October, the first month of the fourth quarter, which was comfortably its lowest of the year by some margin. Is it holding back EV registrations until 2024, when they will count towards the ZEV mandate? On this evidence, it would seem so, and similar trends at Peugeot (225 EVs in October, compared with 753 in April) and Citroën (117 in October, after 370 in April) gives this argument extra merit.
Stellantis is on record as saying it will comply in 2024 without paying fines or buying credits from elsewhere; it seems it’s going to give itself a nice head start in January.
Similar seems to be occurring at Kia. In October, its EV sales total of 955 was the second lowest of the year (it sold 902 in February). In March and September (admittedly plate-change months), it was around triple that. It was closing in on 22% in September, with an 18% share of EV sales in the month. So we shouldn’t expect to read too much into Kia’s EV sales from Q4.
There are brands that will obviously be deferring their 2024 ZEV mandate requirements to future years, including Toyota. Its first EV, the bZ4X, has bombed, selling just 14 examples in October, and even in the plate-change month of September, it was only 51.
Toyota has several EVs in the works, so it’s banking on their future success, along with likely a complicated formula of trading that can be done to take advantage of an otherwise low-CO2 fleet average for ICE cars to offset lower EV sales.
We will be looking at how this could work in practice – something that also involves trading with separate ZEV credits for vans – in an upcoming Autocar Business feature.
Ford has confirmed that it will defer to future years, when the likes of the Explorer will finally hit the market and it will finally move away from being known as the Fiesta maker. The Mustang Mach-E sells okay compared with some EVs, but it still takes only around 2-3% of Ford’s sales.
Others that are likely to follow a similar deferral path in the mid-market are early EV pioneers Renault and Nissan, which presently don’t have the cars to support a 22% market share but will do soon enough, most notably in Renault’s case with the 5. Keep your eye on the low-cost Dacia Spring to help support the mothership, too.
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Source: www.autocar.co.uk
This notice was published: 2024-01-04 10:59:58
Coach is a weekly British motoring magazine published by Haymarket Media Group. First published in 1895, it bills itself as “the world’s oldest automotive magazine.”