New car registrations drove through the million mark in the first half of the year for the first time since 2019, while sales of electric vehicles hit their highest proportion of the market in 2024 so far.
However, the latest monthly figures for the sector indicated a general slowdown in June, while sales of plug-in hybrids and hybrid electric vehicles that operate with a petrol engine outpaced those of fully electric cars.
The market is also being affected by a conspicuous fall in private buyers. These now make up a historically low 38 per cent as fleets and business users take advantage of fiscal incentives and subsidies to invest in lower-emission vehicles.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the industry body that collates the figures, hailed the continued recovery in the market after the industrial and economic dislocations of Covid-19, but he warned: “This belies the bigger challenge ahead. The private consumer market continues to shrink against a difficult economic backdrop, but with the right policies in place the next government can re-energise the market and deliver a faster, fairer zero-emissions transition.
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“All parties are agreed on the need to cut carbon and replacing older, fossil fuel-based technologies with new, electrified powertrains is the essential step to achieving that goal.”
In June, 179,263 new vehicles were registered. That was up 1 per cent on the same month in 2023. In the year to date, new car sales rose to 1,006,763, up 6 per cent on the same period last year but still down by 20.7 per cent compared with 2019.
Petrol engine-only vehicles remain the dominant technology, but their share of the market fell in June to 50.9 per cent.
Sales of battery electric cars rose by 7.4 per cent in the month to 34,034 to account for 19 per cent of the market. For the first half of the year, the 167,096 new battery electric cars on the road accounted for 16.6 per cent of the market, only marginally ahead of the 16.1 per cent share recorded in the first six months of 2023.
The figures suggest that buyers are opting for lower-emission vehicles, but remain wary of making the pure electric plunge. June’s sales of plug-in hybrid electric cars, whose batteries need to be recharged by a cable connection, soared by 30 per cent to 16,604 to take their share of the market to more than 9 per cent. Sales of hybrids, whose batteries are recharged by the vehicle’s petrol engine but which have a much lower zero-emissions range, also were up strongly, rising 27 per cent to 26,702 for a market share just short of 15 per cent.
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The market is being skewed, too, by some of the traditionally largest brands cutting back on supplies of petrol vehicles to boost their proportion of electric car sales. Ford and Stellantis, the Vauxhall group, have said that they are holding back their pipelines of petrol vehicles in an effort to avoid fines under the zero-emissions vehicle mandate introduced at the start of the year, which stipulates that 22 per cent of each manufacturer’s deliveries must be electric in 2024. They face penalties of £15,000 for every non-all-electric vehicle sold that falls short of the target.
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Sales by Ford, which for five decades was the dominant player in the British market, fell by 42 per cent for a market share of 8.3 per cent. Vauxhall, for many years the UK’s second largest player, dropped 37 per cent for a market share of 5.6 per cent. The market-leading brand Volkswagen, with 8.5 per cent of all sales, has several more all-electric options.
The electric car market has not been helped by the drop in sales at Tesla, which has been Britain’s most popular electric marque by far. Its sales in the year to date have declined by nearly 12 per cent.
That has been offset by the influx of other electric cars made in China. MG, owned by Shanghai Automotive, much of whose volumes are zero-emission, took nearly 4.3 per cent of the total market and is hard on the heels of Hyundai and Kia, the South Korean manufacturers, which also sell large proportions of electric vehicles. Sales of BYD, the emerging Chinese force in electric cars, rose to 2,900 vehicles in the year to date.
