Rishi Sunak isn’t coming for your car… yet

Relax, petrol-heads: the ban on new gas-guzzlers was probably never going to hit you. But don’t despair, electric-fans: you can still save the planet – but for some time yet, it might cost you the earth, writes Sean O’Grady

Rishi Sunak refuels at a petrol station in south-east London (HM Treasury)

Before we get under the bonnet of the new Sunak Fuel-Injected Popular GTI (formerly the Sunak Greenster-e, and before that the Borismobile), we should set reset a few automotive facts.

First of all, petrol- and diesel-powered cars, and their hybrid counterparts with internal combustion engines and electric motors, are not going to be “banned” in 2030, 2025, or probably ever.

For many years, you’ll be able to buy, sell and run one, because there is a vast number on the road, and driving them won’t be illegal. It might be more expensive to fuel them, spare parts might eventually get to be an issue, but there’ll be no ban on them. No one is going to take your car off you.

The proposal, whatever date we end up with, is to end the sale of new petrol, diesel and (probably later) hybrid vehicles – and we’re talking about cars and vans here, not lorries (though buses are going increasingly zero-emission). In other words, as with the Ulez controversies, there’s been a good deal of misinformation and scaremongering about the “ban” which isn’t a ban.

Like Ulez, which would only ever affect 10 per cent of drivers, the ban on new cars with internal combustion engines (“Ice” for short) only applies if you purchase or lease a brand new one. And that ain’t most of us, either. If your usual go-to model is a petrol-engined VW Golf, you’ll be able to find one. Easily.

That’s not to say the changes won’t in time be quite radical. Over a period of transition lasting perhaps decades, the cost of motoring will probably be higher than we’ve been used to in the golden age of mass motoring and cheap but serviceable second-hand cars. The safety, fuel economy, reliability, durability and value-for-money of new and used cars has been revolutionised over the last couple of decades. Indeed, that will keep many of the cars on the road today still running around in the 2030s and 2040s.

But gradually, unless there is a radical reduction in the cost of manufacturing battery electric vehicles (BEVs), things will be costlier and more cumbersome.

This is because an electric car only makes much economic sense if you can offset the relatively high purchase premium (currently, say, £5,000 to £10,000 over a petrol equivalent) by the cheaper costs of running it. Plus, if you can’t charge at home (say, if you live in a flat without a car park), it’s inconvenient.

The answer to all of that is incentives for consumers – subsidies for purchase and leasing, cutting VAT on commercial BEV chargers and grants for installing home-charging kits. The obvious issue there is expense to the taxpayer, and the fact that most of the tax breaks have been abolished. BEVs can still make sense of companies because of the way their usage is taxed, but for private buyers, the economics don’t always add up – even if you want to save the planet.

The net effect of the transition to BEVs, eventually, will probably be dearer motoring – but not for many years. Much the same goes for heating our homes and flying away on holiday. There is a price to pay for fighting climate change (and an even bigger one for not doing so). There is a hard truth there that Rishi Sunak implies he wants to tell the British people – that it will need sacrifices in our way of life to save our life on earth. Instead, he seems still addicted to cakeism, suggesting that “proportional” change means he won’t do anything that disrupts our current patterns of living.

The Sunak claim: we can get to net zero by 2050 without disagreeable changes in our lifestyle. The reality: impossible. Hence all the commitments made at Cop26.

What, by the way, does Boris Johnson make of all this? Johnson, a man who once told the UN that Kemit the Frog was wrong and that, in fact, it is “easy, lucrative and right to be green”. Now, Suella Braverman derides his pledges as “arbitrary” and “unrealistic”. Does the former prime minister believe that we will not “save the planet by bankrupting the British people”? I look forward to his column on the subject.

The green transition doesn’t have to be all bad. This morning, I took a delivery of a few sticks of furniture, and they arrived in an electric Maxus van, made in China. I gathered that the vehicle needs a recharge halfway through its shift, but it does the job fine and ought to pay for itself by saving on expensive petrol. So we can have greener, cleaner, cheaper deliveries of an Ikea Billy bookcase (the staple of any modern home) and much else besides. Green energy is generally cheap, once built.

But why aren’t we making these electric delivery vans in Britain? But we are… Stellantis – parent of Peugeot, Citroen, Vauxhall and Fiat – has just started doing so at Ellesmere Port, with government (ie taxpayer) assistance. Collectively, with BMW (Mini), Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and Nissan, they have poured billions into building the production capacity, partly on the assumption that the UK transition to BEVs would be as planned.

Yet now they are told that it won’t be. This is no way to encourage investment. If companies and consumers aren’t being pushed towards electric vehicles, here and indeed abroad, what are they going to do with all their electric production capacity? Who will buy the vans if the mandate is pushed beyond the rainbow?

I recall chatting to someone in the automative industry a few months ago about rumours that governments in the EU had been easing off on the zero-emission mandates. “What does the industry want?” I enquired. A weary pause: “Just stability.” Well, they’ve been disappointed. Again.

You understand the uncertainties that consumers (ie voters) face, and why political leaders tend to bend to them in democratic societies. That’s how it works, after all. In Sunak’s case, he’s facing a potentially – probably – disastrous general election. He is drawing lessons from the Uxbridge by-election and feeling the pressure from the right-wing media, and indeed his own party, which is disturbingly sceptical about the whole climate change phenomenon. He thinks he can turn the next general election into a giant version of the Uxbridge victory (putting it crudely), throwing in other “culture war” issues. He is drawing dividing lines.

Yet I wonder if that will work anyway. Aside from the failure of leadership and resolve, unattractive traits in a premier, the success of a dividing line depends on the Opposition remaining rooted to the spot on the wrong side of the divide. All the evidence suggest that Keir Starmer will not do so.

The recent Labour record on tax, benefit cuts, migration and, indeed, Ulez and their green deal suggest that the party will adjust its stance more or less in line with Sunak. In which case, he will be back where he started, the industrialists will have wasted billions, and we’ll be no closer to saving Earth.