Explainer: Who made the first electric car?
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Hi, David here. We're doing a new thing with the Briefing Room podcast, which is we're packaging up some bits you may have heard before on other programmes which are still very relevant, so they can explain specific things that are going on in the world. In today's Briefing Room explainer, electric vehicles or EVs. What has the government been doing to encourage the change to EVs and where are we with car sales?

I'm joined by Ginny Buckley, editor-in-chief and founder of electrifying.com. Ginny Buckley, when was the first electric vehicle sold in the UK?

Well, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it might have been fairly recently and it might have been a Tesla, but we're going to cast our minds back to 1884, actually. So there was an English inventor called Thomas Parker. He was the inventor behind the electrification of the London Underground and of the trams in Blackpool. And he built the first production electric car in Wolverhampton. Take us through what's happened to electric vehicle or EVs, as everybody calls it, sales since then.

The first mainstream electric car, EV, went on sale in 2011. Again, not a Tesla, as many people might expect. It was the very humble Nissan Leaf. In 2013, we saw the BMW i3, the Kia Soul, the Renault Zoe, and they were the first breed of real mainstream electric cars. And then Tesla did enter the market in the UK in 2014.

And that was when we really started to see the growth, because what happened with Tesla was that not only did they bring the cars, but they brought the infrastructure. And the infrastructure, of course, is so key to electric vehicle uptake. And it gave a lot of owners confidence because they had a very reliable charging infrastructure that was spread around the UK. With those early Tesla cars, you got free charging for life.

Fast forward to today, we've got over 100 models on sale, everything from the cheapest EV in the UK, which at the moment costs about £14,500. That's a Dacia Spring. And we've even got the first electric Rolls-Royce, the Spectre.

We saw steady growth in sales of electric vehicles really since the government introduced the plug-in car grant in January 2011. So this offered car buyers £5,000 off the overall cost of an eligible ultra-low emission car that included plug-in hybrids at the time. That subsidy came out of taxpayers' money. It was a government-backed scheme and it came out of government coffers.

And over the years, that was gradually reduced. Higher price vehicles were excluded. And that finally ended in June 2022. Can you just remind us at this point why the government was so keen to get us into EVs? Quite simply, we will not get to net zero unless we decarbonise transport.

So transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. It contributed around a third of total emissions in 2023. And what targets did the government put in place for the switch to EVs? But what the government did last year was put something in place called the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, the ZEV mandate. And that was to really try and push carmakers into selling more and more increasing numbers of electric vehicles.

So we had a government mandate set in place that basically says 22% of your sales have to be electric in 2024. This was set for car makers. And if they don't hit those sales, they're fined quite heavily, £15,000 per car. That increases to 28% next year, and it ramps up ahead of this target, which was then set at 2035, of a total ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars coming into place. Now,

That is being brought back and reinstated to its previous benchmark of 2030. By the new government? Yeah. So the next question is, are we on course for either of those targets? As of November 2024, electric vehicles accounted for 25.1% of new car registration. So that was a 58% year-on-year increase.

That means there are approximately 1.3 million fully electric cars on UK roads. That's about 3.83% of the total car population, up about 1% from last year. And those figures would show that we are absolutely on target to hit the overall 22% target. What I've raised is not so much private buyers who are buying more EVs, but it's company cars.

I've seen figures that show that as much as 80% of EV sales are going to company car buyers, fleet buyers. These are the people who can take advantage of the low tax breaks that are in place for them. And that actually, throughout 2024, we've seen sales to private buyers go down by almost 10%. One of the things that I have heard, and I have to say this is anecdotal, but on quite a kind of large scale is,

It's not that people are put off so much by the lack of financial incentives, but by what you've called infrastructure. So we used to have an issue with electric cars and something called range anxiety. And that was a fear that the battery on your electric car wouldn't get you as far as you wanted to go. And that was replaced in the last couple of years with charger anxiety.

And that's a fear that you can get to a charger, but the chargers won't work. And I think that was extremely valid. Over the years, I've had some absolutely dreadful experiences. So I've been driving EVs only for about the past seven years now. And I have done my fair share of driving around trying to find a charger that works late at night because the one that I've headed to was offline.

It is much better now. The last 12 months, we've really seen an influx of investment into charging. We've had a record 6,000 public charging points that have been installed in the UK since the start of the year. That's one going in every half an hour now. We've never put them in at this rate before. So the government has set a target of installing 300,000 chargers by 2030. And the industry will say that they are on target for that

However, I think that numbers and this kind of obsession with the numbers going in is actually incorrect. What we need to think about is getting the right chargers at the right speeds into the right locations.

There are currently more charges in Westminster, tiny little Westminster in London than there are in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds combined. So there's two and a half thousand charges in Westminster. The whole of Cornwall has only got 642. Is it your view that actually we're cracking the charging problem or that we're still a long way from it? I do believe we're cracking the charging problem. And genuinely, I've been very vocal about the fact that we really were not doing it. We will be ready by 2030. The charges will be in.

Ginny Buckley. Thanks very much for listening to today's Explainer. We'll be publishing these every week, a new mini-series. So make sure you follow The Briefing Room on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts so that you don't miss an episode when we publish them. And also remember you can go back and listen to any of our recent episodes on BBC Sounds. They're available now. Until the next time, goodbye.

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