Bright Spark

Our resident EV owner and expert, David Wilkins, examines the world of electrification

Next year, the previously unthinkable will happen, at least according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Sales of electric cars are expected to exceed those of diesels in 2022, and by a comfortable margin – 260,000 EVs, to be precise, compared with 221,000 diesels.

Of course, forecasting is always a hazardous game, and with Covid, the chip shortage and other logistical headaches, the motor industry is operating in a much more uncertain environment than usual. But even allowing for all of that, I can’t really see the SMMT’s expectations being confounded, because the momentum behind the EV wave is just so strong now. In fact, EVs have already sometimes outsold diesels in the UK on a monthly basis, so the SMMT’s forecast for 2022 as a whole just confirms the trend.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the prospect of electric overtaking diesel is that it doesn’t even appear to be particularly newsworthy. I first became convinced that electric was the future over a decade ago and often argued the case with friends and in online forums where I was greeted with pretty much universal scepticism, even derision. That scepticism has now almost completely disappeared, and the shift to electric is probably now unstoppable, given the need to clean up the car economy.

And yet, even as a long-standing EV enthusiast, I still think it seems a bit odd that diesel should be starting to bow out at a time when cars that use the black pump are more efficient and cheaper to run than ever. Here’s one not particularly remarkable example; earlier this year, I sold my BMW 1-Series diesel, which averaged approximately 62mpg over four years and fifty thousand miles, and almost cracked 80mpg on one leisurely drive of about 400 miles to Scotland. It only needed servicing twice and nothing broke or fell off. Given that it was also one of the last low-CO2 diesels to qualify for a zero VED rating before this particular tax break was withdrawn in 2017, my overall cost of ownership was probably at bangernomics levels – but with the major advantage that I didn’t actually have to drive a banger to get cheap motoring. That’s what a modern diesel can deliver.

It’s interesting to speculate how much more efficiency might still have been squeezed out of diesels if the manufacturers had continued to develop them at the same rapid rate as they did over the last twenty or thirty years. The big German car makers certainly seemed to think until quite recently that their turbodiesels represented a pretty much unassailable product category, with a long future ahead of it. On the other hand, cleaning up diesels and squeezing yet more fuel economy out of them has been associated with increasing complexity and cost, so perhaps the decades-long process of improvement was always due to come to a natural end fairly soon anyway. Now we will probably never know – I doubt even the biggest carmakers can afford to spend lots of money pushing the envelope in diesels at a time when they’re having to make such big investments in hybrids and electrics, all while keeping their hand in when it comes to technologies such as hydrogen, that might still play a role in powering cars in the future.

I sold my diesel BMW reluctantly. I originally bought it as my last “keep it forever” fossil-fuelled car to be run for the rest of my life alongside whatever electric car I happened to own at the time, but I finally swapped it for a petrol-engined car because I have a feeling that petrols may get off more lightly than diesels in terms of tax and regulation as life is made increasingly uncomfortable for internal combustion engined cars as part of the electric switchover.

My old BMW’s zero VED rating now seems like a relic from another age. That’s the sort of tax break you can only get on an EV these days, which shows just how much official policy has changed. I’ve always been slightly sceptical about how effective tax breaks and subsidies are in driving the take-up of electric vehicles. I think the cars have instead mostly sold themselves with their superior performance and refinement, and if we really do buy 260,000 new electric vehicles next year, the cost of all that financial support is soon going to add up to a pretty big number – and I’m not sure that can last for very long.

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