Post-ridiculous

“We can’t push EVs into the market against demand.” Thus spake the head of Ford’s European operations this week, commenting on the company’s plans to start diverting ICE car deliveries from the UK to the continent. Why? Because the UK has EV sales goals and if carmakers don’t align their business with these goals, they face substantial penalties.

“We are not going to sell EVs at huge losses just to buy compliance. The only alternative is to take our shipments of [engine] vehicles to the UK down and sell these vehicles somewhere else,” the brave man, by the name of Martin Sander, said, speaking at the FT’s Future of the Car conference in London.

Strange words if you have read reports that EV sales were off to a very strong start in the country, with a stunning 100,000 fully electric vehicles sold over the first four months of the year. This was a 10% increase on the year, which, let’s be honest, is rather impressive. What comes next is also impressive but in quite a different way.

Back in January, Bloomberg’s Javier Blas published a column, in which he sounded an alarm for governments willing to listen. I like to flatter myself, whenever I feel such an urge, by thinking I got there before Blas, whom I deeply respect — about a year or so earlier, if I remember correctly. In any case, I do remember wondering publicly here what governments were going to do about fuel duty income replacement if their EV plans panned out.

The reader consensus was that they would have to come up with a way to tax EVs as well — and that this would wound the EV revolution mortally. Well, guess what, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbours? We were right.

We were so right we should form a global government if only to watch our current governments scramble to fill the massive income hole EV incentives have opened up in their budgets. The kicker: to fill that hole, governments would need to start taxing EVs and tax them quite heftily. Because there is no other comparable alternative to the fuel excise duty.