Free chargers and 20% discounts: the great electric car sell-off

One in ten electric cars are being sold for a discount of 20 per cent — and carmakers are so desperate that they are about to start offering free chargers worth £1,000 too.

A Honda that cost £37,052 a year ago is selling for £29,656, a reduction of 20 per cent, according to the marketplace Auto Trader.

Manufacturers are under pressure because rules that came into force in January mean they will be fined if 22 per cent of their car sales this year are not electric. The penalty is £15,000 per vehicle, although they can soften the impact by buying credits from rivals such as Tesla or if they exceed the quota in future years.

The government benchmark is intended to ensure that all new cars and vans will emit zero greenhouse gases from 2035. The quota gets tougher every year: by 2028 it will be 52 per cent.

Andy Palmer, chief executive of the charging company PodPoint, said some carmakers would start giving them away with new purchases in the next month. He is in talks with brands including BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia, Mazda and Nissan.

He predicts that similar giveaways will become widespread as the industry struggles to meet its quotas.

Between January and March this year, fully electric cars accounted for 15.2 per cent of new sales, far short of the 22 per cent required under the zero emission vehicles mandate, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Palmer, who has been called the “grandfather of EVs” because he helped lead the 2010 launch of the Nissan Leaf, the first mainstream electric car, said the industry was under severe strain.

The list price of electric cars is, on average, 33 per cent higher than their petrol or diesel counterparts, according to Auto Trader. Only two electric models sold new in Britain cost less than £20,000, compared with 23 petrol-driven models.

Among mainstream brands, it found that the price for the BMW iX was down 18.9 per cent year on year, the Peugeot E-2008 was down 18.6 per cent, Volvo’s XC 40 down 17.4 per cent and Citroën’s ë-C4 down 16.5 per cent.

Home charging was viable for about two thirds of buyers who have driveways or other off-street parking, Palmer said, and they could expect significant savings compared with petrol or diesel.

Palmer said: “For the majority of motorists if they have a home charger and they can pre-set it to charge overnight they will pay between 7p and 10p per kWh, which is a fraction of the cost of fuel for an internal combustion engine.”

Ultra-rapid chargers, typically found on motorways and trunk roads, cost about 80p per kWh, equating to 24p per mile, but he said motorists with home chargers only need resort to them for a tiny fraction of their driving.