From Climate Scepticism

By Jit

We’re winning so hard, it hurts

Just a quick one from me. I got to wondering, now that we have a Zero-Emissions Vehicle Mandate, has this changed how many cars different manufacturers are selling? There are an increasing number of EVs on the road around these parts, and some of them are from manufacturers I’d never heard of until last year at the earliest. One might suspect that, thanks to the ZEV mandate, manufacturers who only make EVs would be caning it right now. What is happening to the legacy car makers? [Calling them “legacy” almost makes it seem as if they are already written out of the script, but what I meant was manufacturers that didn’t just appear last week.]

To investigate this question, I got the data on vehicle registration, stratified by cars (noting at this point that there are plenty of errors in the “official” data table, and that a very small number are old vehicles imported or re-registered), and tallied up the cars registered in the most recent available quarter – Q2 2025 – compared with the same quarter a decade ago, in 2015. (The table, df_VEH0160_UK, only goes back to Q3 2014. No doubt older data is available somewhere.) The figure shows the change in the number of registrations between the two quarters, a decade apart, for each manufacturer with at least a thousand cars in one or both quarters. Which manufacturers sell more than before, and which sell fewer?

The biggest winner is MG, selling 17k more in a quarter than ten years ago. The biggest loser is Ford, selling 57k fewer in a quarter than a decade ago.

Caveat: this says nothing about profitability. It just shows the number of cars registered. Some might note particular characteristics of the growing and shrinking manufacturers, too. I should probably mention that some of the winners did not sell a single car in the UK in 2015. Also, that Cupra is a Seat. So the gain in one and the loss in the other do not really tell a tale on net.

Also available is manufacturing data from the SMMT. The version I have goes back to 2019. Looking at the above figure I wondered whether the proportion of cars registered in the UK, and manufactured here, might be declining.

This figure shows UK car production, for the domestic market, as a percentage of overall registrations, averaged for the year as a whole. In 2019, domestic production was 10.5% of registrations; in 2024, 8.8%. This year (first six months only) it is 8.4%. [It isn’t. The “SA” means “seasonally adjusted” by the boffins at ONS. Nevertheless, this is their smoothed number.]

The final figure shows the total car production in the UK, as reported by the SMMT, whether for domestic supply or export, by month. I think I see a trend there. If you put a line through the data since the ZEV began, the slope is -6500 cars per month per year. That puts the UK car industry as extinct by 2035.

Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate? Or Zero Vehicle mandate?

[Image: Ford workers postcard, c.1918. The following one, “a single day’s output,” is probably cooler:]