The car industry has worried about Brexit then got its continued tariff free access to the EU. It has worried about US tariffs though never faced high ones until now. The industry’s output has more than halved. This has nothing to do with either of these two much discussed developments. It has everything to do with government policy forcing the industry to shut down all its petrol and diesel capacity and build new plant to make battery vehicles.
As some of us have been pointing out most car buyers do not want battery cars and many buyers cannot afford them. No sensible green campaigner would want one. Take it home and plug it in and your vehicle will be charged with electricity burning more gas as there is not normally any spare renewable power waiting.
Honda has left the UK and the EU to consolidate car making in Japan. Ford doesn’t make any cars here anymore. BMW are going to make either most or all their electric Minis abroad with Cowley’s future bleak. The UK has watched as China has built a dominant position in making batteries and affordable battery cars. The UK has insufficient battery capacity.
It is sad to see the fast collapse of car making in the UK. It is disastrous that government and industry are locked together with a policy that is doing so much damage.
2017 UK car production. 1.7 million
2024 UK car production 0.78 million
March 29, 2025
It is deliberately engineerd destruction based on zealotry and ignorance. The ignorance of a government who have never run a whelk stall between them.
In todays UK we suffer the illusion that we live in a democracy, utter fantasy. Lazy ignorant politicians have over the last 30 years at least, subcontracted the running of the UK to a myriad of unelected quangos. It is they who run the UK. We had the embarassment yesterday of a legal quango defining how sentencing for crime should be conducted without reference to Parliament. The only positive was 2TK standing with his knickers round his ankles, realising the enormaty of what had happened and trying to avoid saying anything productive.
The real question for us all is, how much longer can we afford the luxury of watching this Fred Carnos circus destroy the UK as we knew it. Wake up and smell the decay of the destruction of democracy.
March 29, 2025
agricola, it is the result of a flawed ideology as you say.
The real question that should be asked of the car industry is why they never challenged the net-zero policy lunacy? They did plenty of shouting during Brexit and now with the USA tariffs but silence on the rules stopping them sell ICE cars. Why?
March 29, 2025
Some of the industry bosses seem to ve signed up to the green and woke zealotry. The jag boss has produced an electric car painted pink that looks like Lady Penelope’s chauffeur should be driving it. Ford’s boss cancelled their best sellers, the Fiesta and Focus to make expensive bigger cars, which haven’t sold well.
But there is growth in other areas. Mad Ed’s department now has 6780 civil servants.
March 29, 2025
I believe that the Car makers thought that the could produce EVs that would be cheaper and require less warranty repairs that IC-engined models and would therefore make more profits.
They obviously miscalculated the the cost of batteries and it has placed them at a huge disdadvantage to China. We will see several European manufacturers go under, unless the policy is changed to extend ther lime of IC-engined cars well past 2035.
This will not be a problem to the Americans as their vast distances will make it impossible for a majority of the population to go electric. EV purchases will largely be limited to the Democrats and liberals that live in the big cities like New York and San Francisco.
March 29, 2025
The sentencing council rejection of making changes to their recommendations tells us that Parliament is no longer supreme.
Parliament, the voice of the people, elected by the people for the people, having over the years outsourced its authority to various unelected and unaccountable Quangos, the Supreme and foreign Courts actually seems no longer to represent the people who elected its members into office.
The future looks bleak indeed.
March 29, 2025
For them!
March 29, 2025
@agricola – so very true. The Anti UK brigade has infested the State, its Parliament, its Legislators
March 29, 2025
Exactly:- It is imdeed deliberately engineered destruction based on zealotry, ignorance and a mad religion that sees CO2 plant food as the devil. The ignorance of a government who have never run a whelk stall (and MPs who are nearly all scientifically and wngineeringly and economically illiterate.
Full EV cars save no CO2, Plug in Hybrid cars likewise when you account for manufacturing of the short lived batteries, charge stations, the source of the electricity, the extra complexity amd weight…
If you you plug in a plug in hybrid and travel a typical daily trip you might “save” about 30p a day over petrol or diesel. Bit not really the extra cost of charge stations, the car, the extra weight, complexity, depreciation especially of battery and insurance cost will probably be £2 a day. And anyway it is only a “saving” as far more tax on petrol and diesel and they will soon charge that anyway.
Keep your old cas as long as possible is the rational thing to do. Cheaper, better for CO2 if that bothers you, less depreciation, more practical. Unless you are a virtue signaller with more money than sense who likes waiting for the car to charge and pissing money down the drain. They get through far more expensive tyres too.
March 29, 2025
Why do nearly all new cars have low profile tyres and alloy wheels and low bit of plastic at the front. The typical real world use they are a very expensive pain with all the potholes and kerbs. I assume it is to make more money for the dealers. The state stop systems are a waste of time and money too. Can be £500 for the new batter just for this after 6 years! Might save £30 in fuel in six years perhaps?
March 29, 2025
Start -Stop also puts an extra strain on Timing Chains or Cam belts, as well as the actual starter motor.
Interesting bit of film on line from a breakers yard showing many engines scrapped after relatively low milage due to Timing Chain fatigue/breakage.
March 29, 2025
Admittedly my hybrid is not a plug in, but the battery is guaranteed for 15 years. That’s Toyota for you.
A good few years ago my local Toyota showroom had loads of posters that asked ‘Are you worried about buying a hybrid – worried about this ‘new technology’, worried its unproven … ‘ etc. Next to each poster was another one which said ‘Toyota hand sold over 5 million hybrid cars …’.
And, as I said, that was some years ago. The battery technology in Toyota hybrids is well proven and most definitely not ‘short lived’. As ant taxi driver in his 300,000 mile Prius will tell you.
March 30, 2025
Plug in hybrid batteries last less long than fully EV batteries as they get more charge discharge on a smaller battery of perhaps 1/8 of the capacity 6 years is typical. When you look at battery warranties look at the small print too!
March 30, 2025
The problem faced by our car industry is that the Brexiters have wrecked it. They had a guaranteed market of 450 million buyers – now all lost. Mr Redwood tells us about continued tariff free access to the EU. Like all Brexiters, he has never heard of non tariff barriers (safety checks, inspections to ensure local standards are met, etc) which did not exist for our carmakers in the EU but after Brexit cause huge red tape and have led to our carmakers being excluded from supply chains within the EU. So yes, the car industry is suffering because of government policy – the catastrophic policy of the Conservatives to pull us out of our natural political and economic home, the EU, and leave us at the mercy of Trump
Reply What nonsense. Our car industry is being destroyed by government policy to ban all the cars we make here in 2030, closing our diesel and petrol car plants.
March 29, 2025
Science is a continuous line of self-correcting mistakes. Labour fails to correct its own mistakes until market forces destroy its misuse of power.
March 29, 2025
At the end of the day Physics and Economic will win out over our deluded government alas Zealot Miliband will piss many £billions down the drain first?
As Feynman put it in his report after they exploded those teachers in Challenger disaster (a largely pointless waste of money and vanity project any even had it not failed) – “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman.
A lesson deluded art graduate MPs almost never learn. Getting it wrong hugely on energy, schools, heat pumps, universities, EVs, healthcare, Covid lockdowns, the duff massive net harm Covid vaccines, the clearly lab gain of function at the still dispute…
March 29, 2025
Well not very “self correcting” when driven by politicians money and say big Pharma. Can we have some admission of the gain of function experiments that gave us covid from the lab, the net harm lockdown, the vast net harm covid “vaccines” and the Net Zero scam please. After all these have caused 10million deaths and far more injuries. Quite some industrial accident yet they do not even admit it yet!
March 30, 2025
Nature dicates how physics and chemistry operate. Scientists can interpret what they regard as its laws, and update when more becomes known. Actions from bozo-type decisions Ed Miliband takes have some effect, but only a ripple for a while.
March 29, 2025
@Agricola. Yes, democracy has ended. It will take a Trumpian-scale revolution to actually have the long-promised, never-delivered, “bonfire of the quangos”. Same goes for Europe, only worse, as it slips into technocratic totalitarianism.
In terms of car production, though, Germany’s decline is not as bad as ours: 2017, 5.65m units, 2024 4.1m units. Their de-industrialisation is likely to continue under the new, green-blackmailed government.
March 29, 2025
But Germany has lost as many units output as we made in 2017.
March 29, 2025
Why do we need a car industry?
The WEF, supported by Labour, LibDems and the Not-a-Conservative-Party (and the King) has declared that “the peasants” will not be allowed to own a car. They are to be corralled in 15 minute cities and restricted to (inconvenient or non-existent) public transport.
There’s no point producing cars which people won’t be allowed to own or use. It’s as pointless as digging a hole and then refilling it or stuffing CO2 in a hole in the ground.
When the Westminster Uni-Party committed us to the Net Zero SCAM they were declaring that the UK will be de-industrialised; our living standard would be forcibly reduced and we would live controlled and restricted lives. So far they’ve destroyed the aluminium industry; the ceramics industry; the chemicals industry; the oil and gas industries; the oil refinery industry and the steel industry. Now they’re targeting the farming and car-making industries.
It is all deliberate.
March 29, 2025
Yeah, but the politicians will still need cars to visit the 15 minute cities when it is time for a symbolic election.
March 29, 2025
Donna :
Correct.
March 29, 2025
I went on a guided tour (2 Hours duration) around BMW’s Mini Factory at Cowley a couple of weeks ago.
Good value at £19.00, it lasts a couple of hours.
Interesting to see first hand the robots now doing jobs that tens of thousands or workers used to do decades ago.
During my engineering apprenticeship visited many manufacturing facilities during the 1960’s, including,
Ford at Dagenham, Vauxhall at Luton, Roots Pressed Steel Fisher at Acton, Firestone at Brentford, Battersea Power Station, Heathrow Airport, Hendon Airport, Alfred Herbert at Birmingham, Smiths Industries in North London, etc etc.
The only one still going, and still on its original site is Heathrow !.
How times have changed !
March 29, 2025
Just thought of a few more past apprenticeship visits.
Tilbury Docks, Enfield Rolling Mills, Timex Watches (still going but probably not in the same location at Cricklewood), Lucas Electrics at Acton.
In addition we then had a countless number of factories move to Government funded Development area’s in South Wales, many of which failed after a few years due to the lack of the relevant skilled and semi skilled labour.
March 29, 2025
Very interesting. I must admit I really like factory tours – some of the machinery is fascinating.
I wonder how much it would cost, and how long it would take, to pack up the production line and move it to Germany – of Hungary or Slovakia.
Years ago I got involved with a company called Vanguard (used to be next to the A40 just before Hangar Lane. They used to do amazing things like remove an 80’ long printing press from Fleet Street on a Friday evening and have it set up and working in Germany a couple of days later. I bet they could move the production line at Crowley and have it set up somewhere else in a couple of weeks.
March 29, 2025
Vanguard will be making a bomb moving machinery out of Germany! There is no energy in Germany, did you miss that? Nordstream, blowing up of 6 year old coal power station, closing of last nuclear power station etc?
March 29, 2025
Some years ago I joined a JLR on line consumer panel intended to provide feedback on proposed changes to its products. At one point the idea to focus on BEVs came up. My response that as a strategy it was like going up the creek without a paddle. JLR is spending billions on the transition to BEVs. The UK, where net zero zealotry is at its most extreme, accounts for a small share of its total sales. Other markets still take ICE vehicles. Trump’s decision to impose 25% tariffs on cars and their components will have dire consequences for such a tightly integrated, globalised industry operating just in time systems. When JLR decided to expand outside the UK, it chose Slovakia, not the USA, as it’s location to expand and build the new Defender. This may prove to be a fateful choice.
March 29, 2025
JLR has an interesting record for reliability. Why anyone buys one puzzles me.
March 29, 2025
Mine have never given me a minutes downtime. Been driving 58 years this year.
March 30, 2025
I read the owner reliability surveys undertaken by various bodies. When looking at something like the reliability of a car maker, it seems seem a sensible to hear the experiences of thousands of owners rather than a single anecdote.
March 29, 2025
The destruction of vehicle production here in the UK is entirely due to net zero/climate change delusion.
The Green Wokies have created the most expensive energy in the world. Have convinced half-wit politicians that electric cars are better (if you can afford one and have somewhere to plug it in, and there is actually sufficient electricity available)
And along the way have almost destroyed the remnants of British engineering/manufacuring.
There is just time to end this madness, unfortunately there are no politicians willing to do so by challenging the whole net zero/climate change nonsense.
March 29, 2025
The deindustrialisation program known as Net Zero has already taken the UK out of raw steel production, it has forced the offshoring of the bulk of all aluminium manufacturing with zero virgin aluminium smelting in the UK. The agricultural manufacturing industries equipment for farming is all but gone oil production is being closed down along with refining capacity. Gas is no longer being extracted from known sources on our own lands here in the UK. Our energy minister is instead prioritising pouring concrete down exploration wells to prevent them ever being used to extract known gas deposits. Remember those are the cleanest energy options being actively denied to us. The auto industry will cease because the products we are so good at making and marketing are being actively made illegal to sell with mandates placed on manufacturers demanding them to only produce unwanted unpopular impractical battery cars.
It might be argued by the climate change alarmists these measures are necessary to save the world from CO2 production. That argument is immediately rendered false by the fact we are now importing all of the above from countries such as china who use coal as their prime energy option.
Our nation is being destroyed sacrificed on the alter of climate alarmism. No other major developed country not even Germany has been as zealous as we in pursuit of so called green ideology. We blew up our reliable coal fired power stations, the Germans mothballed theirs.
The time has come to rage, rage at the dying of the light, do not go quietly into that dark retreat rage. (HT to Dylan Thomas)
March 29, 2025
I’m afraid it’s a one-way street Rod, with no way back. As these existing industries close down, they will never be re-opened. If you cannot make existing primary assets pay, then you certainly cannot afford to invest in new ones. Why would anyone think of doing so, when there are many other places that are cheaper & more attractive to invest funds in. The so-called “Green Industries” are a pipe-dream that are viable only with subsidies that we can’t afford. The Tories based energy policy on ill thought through (was there actually any thought involved?) ‘Net Zero’ ideas that were clearly going to cause disruption and loss of global competiveness. Labour is busy compounding these issues several times over.
It’s the same with our culture, a steady undermining of family values and national pride until there is very little left to cling onto. A wonan on TV last week made the bald statement that we are no longer a majority Christian country. I was annoyed at the time but on reflection, thought that even if she is not right today, she may well be right in the near future. We have been betrayed and it seems there is little we can do about it. What we called ‘Democracy’ is now labled ‘Popularism’ because (obviously) we cannot be trusted to vote “the right way”
It is very pleasant to dream of a “strong” leader to solve our ills but I worry that I might not like that particular path either….
March 29, 2025
Might it be a kindness for someone to explain to the British people that the likes of the NHS and a welfare state that can designate one in four as in some way disabled was able to be created and in the past sustained only because of the wealth produced by the motor car industry and similar and that the future is now very bleak?
March 29, 2025
Viewed an interesting clip on Social media this morning which showed Margaret Thatchers speech at the 1983 Conservative Party conference.
In summery :
“The Government has no Money of its own, only Taxpayers money, which should be spent carefully and wisely”.
Perhaps Politicians (MP’s) should be forced to view this as a reminder, before they swear the Oath and take responsibility at the start of their term on being elected.
March 29, 2025
‘The Grocer’s Daughter”? Wonderful clips.
March 29, 2025
Most these days though prefer BMW second hand and new as some worn out status symbol.
Fords, vauxhall, Morris ,MG Austin etc were more numerous then.Personally I went to work in the NHS in a Reliant 3 wheeler and as a student on3 buses for my 100 hour week on nights!
March 29, 2025
We don’t need a car industry any more, and creating cars to export to earn us some money will just delay the inevitable.
We can of course continue to bring in foreign cars until our debt and balance of payments become even more arduous.
Haven’t those that rule our lives made it clear that we should walk or cycle everywhere, or failing that use public transport. After all they have spent small fortunes on walkways and cycle paths that go nowhere, so that we would have somewhere not to go in our small cities.
HMG recognizes that cars will shortly become an irrevelance. They care not about the wasted investment or the lost jobs. Cars will become a luxury that only the very rich can retain.
Cars like freedom of thought belong to an earlier time, in this age they are very outdated
March 29, 2025
I suggest a fundamental step to correct things foolishly put in train by recent Governments would be to ban all imported cars for the next 2 years. Think balance of payments, the economic might the decision would have on car manufacturing – Germany, France, US, the Far East.
The UK has way too many cars already, and most would easily continue to serve us well for 2 more years. The reduction in borrowed money to finance the latest status symbol on wheels would assist hundreds of thousands of families to reasess their budgets.
March 30, 2025
Agreed – we have far too many cars for the amount of road available.
For decades successive governments have subsidised car makers, without increasing road capacity. Blair started it in 1997 by banning any money going on new or improved road systems, diverting that money instead to DEI projects.
The facts are that we have a travel network that has not had a significant upgrade for far too long. It was unfit for use in the 1970’s – it is far worse now.
March 29, 2025
A jockey who criticised the Racing Authorities has been banned for 2 years. The Jockey Club is a law unto itself – a model for Islam.
Everyone agrees that his statements are accurate and have merit, but they can take his income from him just like that! Following the lead of the police in this decadent country.
March 30, 2025
+2
March 29, 2025
An interesting thought Bryan…
I can imagine empty London streets, with just the occasional Zil chauffering a Boss to his fortified Dacha deep in the Surrey countryside. A few really affluent Proles may be able to afford an electric bike but certainly not the electricty required to charge it. They won’t care because they (as the Ministry tells them) “have nothing and are happy”. Secretly of course, they will dream of being a two bike family one day….
March 30, 2025
+1
March 29, 2025
The solution is so simple. Our clown government just needs to do the exact opposite of what they have been doing. Will they? No. More likely that they will continue until they are ejected by a majority of the electorate in four years time.
March 29, 2025
That will not do any good unless all politicians have a change of perspective, get honest and start working for us – the odds on that happening are equal to net0 being overtaken by common sense.
March 29, 2025
Sir John
As you suggest, the woes of the car industry, for that matter all UK Industry is as a result of seemingly malicious punishment handed out by UK Government.
Government and Parliament still haven’t learnt the lesson, you would think somewhere in their isolated sphere of personal gratification they would have noted all the UK’s major competing Nations do not punish their industries.
It is not even a NetZero thing, offshoring production increases emissions. Or is the UK on a different planet to the rest of the World?
March 29, 2025
But its current policy, Miliband, the tories & labour want every vehicle (EV) to be imported ….and all other vehicles banned
March 29, 2025
1.7m = the invisible hand of the free market
0.78m = the heavy hand of the Nuts Zero brigade
March 29, 2025
From today’s Media
Get oil from North Sea rather than foreign regimes, says Scottish Labour
The North Sea could meet almost half of Britain’s oil and gas needs for the next 25 years if Ed Miliband scrapped his ban on new drilling, a report has claimed.
But this Government and the previous(this centuries destruction cabal – in fact), supported by Parliament would sooner dish out malicious punishment to bring forward the ‘Great Reset’ to turn the UK into a basket case so as to fully indoctrinate the people into their new Marxist/Socialist dictatorship.
So far the Uniparty(Labour, Conservatives & Liberal Democrats) is winning. One party, one Socialist State
The rest of the World? They are getting on with life working for their people and their countries – something Parliament has sort to ban happening in the UK
March 29, 2025
Not entirely off topic, in this Telegraph profile of the UK’s net zero “tsar”:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/29/uk-net-zero-tsar-i-understand-why-people-are-angry/
she boasts that the UK was:
“the first G7 economy to half its emissions; the first to prove you could do it while also growing economically”
but the UK growth rate has more than halved since 2008, from an average of 2.7% a year to only 1.1% a year, so what is likely to happen if we take it further to net zero emissions?
March 29, 2025
She studied classics and has no STEP credentials at all.
That is how woeful our so called ‘influencers’ now are.
March 29, 2025
She was selected to be our Net Zero czar BECAUSE she knows nothing about physics, electrical engineering, genergy or climate.
You cannot reason someone out of something if they have not reasoned themselves into it in the first place.
CAGW and Net Zero is a religion.
March 29, 2025
She claims to understand why people are angry. But the rest of her vapid drivel demonstrates that actually she hasn’t got a scooby-doo …. and she cares even less.
You can’t reason with these people; they are zealots.
March 29, 2025
Mercedes Benz has ceased to make all electric cars.
March 29, 2025
A stunning prompt reversal of its position as articulated only on 25 March this year then where it stated “Furthermore, the recent world premiere of the all-new electric CLA marks the start of a new era, putting the company’s ambition for electrifying its product portfolio on the road in customer hands”.
(Quoted words come from MB’s sustainability update.)
March 29, 2025
Well if we can’t make cars we certainly can’t make tanks and guns.
Starmer had better sit down and shut up.
March 29, 2025
The UK government needs to be more ambitious about how we in the UK can create the British-version of the Volkswagens, Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and Teslas and related technologies instead of just making other people’s cars in our country. That is ridiculous. We are The UK. Not same second rate country. And such cars would hugely boost and diversify and stabilise our economy and really increase productivity and high quality exports abroad.
March 29, 2025
Indeed, we are a third rate country at best.
March 29, 2025
But I’m fed up of people just moaning. Moaning Minnies. Can people please come up with positive ideas about how to make our country great again (in best sense of word ‘great’)!
Including how to persuade others in our country of a different persuasion why they should jump on board making our country great again.
Conversation should ultimately be constructive!
March 29, 2025
Encourage oldsters to look critically at all sides of altmedia and realise some of the wacky theories might be true.
Encourage youngsters to read old school predictive classics and scifi to see how it is becoming reality.
I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 again at the mo.
( I don’t advocate Montags flamethrowering of his boss though )
March 30, 2025
451 – great!
btw, if you like American lit, I highly recommend Lonesome Dove. It’s just brilliant. My cousin who read English Lit at Edinburgh and every book under the sun, read Lonesome Dove, after I recommended it and said one of best books he’s ever read. It takes about 100 pages to get into and then unputdownable (it’s about cowboys in Texas near end of 19th century who go on a sort of Odyssey across America with cattle – with some wonderful salty Dickensian-like personalities – and pathos – and Indians – and poetic, warm and lots of humour!
March 30, 2025
ED M
Its not the people that are destroying our Country and Culture, it is our politicians with their stupid policies, regulations, and desire to redistribute our personal wealth with more and more taxes, to such a degree, that people now are thinking why should I bother to work, invest, or save.
March 30, 2025
I agree a lot with what you say (and I HATE socialism – NOT socialists – too). But it’s not just politicians at fault. The problem is a lot wider / bigger than that.
March 29, 2025
We’d need to import 100% of the steel used in such cars so they wouldn’t really be UK produced.
March 29, 2025
But don’t just make that comment and end it there. That’s just giving up.
So how do we produce more steel? (And how much would it cost to import say Chinese steel to build British brand cars). And how much more would see need for cars?
We need to keep focusing on what the problem is and how to solve it. Not just give up.
March 29, 2025
The solution is not to import steel from China (and what happens when they refuse to supply?) but to cancel Net Zero immediately before even more permanent damage is done.
March 29, 2025
You could not invent a series of policies, if you tried, to destroy the car industry more than has been done in the last 20 years. From the switch to road tax based on CO2 output, massive fuel tax, both causing the switch to diesel. Bumping up the cost of vehicle tax on the eve of the 2007 recession making high CO2 vehicles worthless overnight. Then quickly then to deciding diesel is the devil incarnate and creating discriminatory policies that have banned certain citizens, mostly poor, from driving through city centres. The cost to manufacturers of 120 year of R&D input all thrown in the bin and vehicle reliability suffering hugely also.
That would all be bad enough if it stopped there. Now we have banned sales of traditional vehicles with which has taken 120 years of natural infrastructure development. Not only have we banned it with no infrastructure for the alternative but no one has costed it, we don’t have the energy to replace hydrocarbons, the whole grid will need billions if not trillions of pounds to allow the change. To top it off the product that you are having to force people to buy has to be subsidised and powered with energy that has to be subsidised.
I work in the industry and no one I know wants to work on electric vehicles. So you will also have no one to repair the vehicles. I have customers with a family of 5, all with a car and a job. How on earth can they charge 5 vehicles at home at night? The grid can barely cope with one. Customers are scared to buy new cars as they know the Government will change their mind and punish people for their choices. The ZEV will start large inflation shortly in the price of vehicles, as the 20% mandated last year was the easy 20% for all the people that want electric cars and were desperate for them. You really could not have made up a worse set of choices if you tried.
March 29, 2025
+1
March 29, 2025
James : “How on earth can they charge 5 vehicles at home at night? The grid can barely cope with one.”the
Of course they know this. They intend there to be a massive reduction in motorised personal transport. At the moment only 1 house in 7 can have an ev charger because 80% or more of local grids can only supply 1-2KW/household CONTINUOUSLY according to a report to a HoC committee by an electrical engineer. This also knocks on the head heat pumps and ToUTs providing “cheaper” electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines…
March 30, 2025
One car per family (if you’re lucky and can afford one) …. and 4 people who will become “useless eaters” and surplus to requirements.
March 29, 2025
Also, Brexit is a great opportunity to promote British cars like this. We need a think tank devoted to this one topic alone and inviting people from the private sector into this think rank – now.
March 29, 2025
I agree , we are letting China take over . Today in the Telegraph it’s now boats being told to go electric. I have mentioned on previous comments about how electric cars are not efficient, especially in the Winter months. Electric motors still require being much better on mileage , especially on long journeys.
As for climate change why in the UK are we spending so much trying to get to ZERO. I can remember the last eighty years of my life and in the UK the weather has always been unpredictable. Instead of wasting so much money on solar panels etc. we should be spending more on river defensives where we know towns are liable to flooding.
March 29, 2025
It seems we have had a series of governments: Labour, Coalition, Conservative, and now Labour again, who have no idea how to grow the UK economy. The Net Zero religion has blinded our MPs, HoL, Civil Servants, and Quangos to reality. Killing the UK car industry is the latest example of the madness afflicting them all.
Off-topic but serious! Does Rachel Reeves have ( a serious problem ed? ed)? Rachel sees growth where there is none, more prosperous working people when from April, they will all be significantly worse off, is blind to the excessive state spending and tinkers around the edges when we need to seriously cut the size of the state! How much longer can she deny reality?
March 29, 2025
Well the political class are determined to finish off the U.K. indeed the European Globalist political class are determined to finish off Europe in total.
Unsurprisingly the functionaries who run the Corporate motor manufacturers made short term government induced decisions because they considered it impossible for the British motor manufacturing industry to be defeated by the fools who buy cars. No doubt they personally did well out of that sell out.
Meanwhile President Putin has said publicly for the first time that the Russians are prepared and able to ‘finish off’ Ukraine. He was a Security Treaty with Europe so he can concentrate on growing his thriving economy and further increasing the comfort and output of the Russia people.
The need for a heavyweight, competent political party is now beyond urgent. We can no longer afford the delusional nonsense that Farage and Tice or The King will save us.
The huge bulk of voters is here, ready and waiting JR.
Nobody can sit out this Battle for Britain, those in high office are ‘overwhelmed’ as admitted by the earth-bound Welby. They are transfixed. They don’t have a single idea of what to do. They MUST GO.
March 29, 2025
Dear Mr. Redwood,
You could drop the word ‘car’ from your headline today as the lunacy that masquerades as government policy affects all sections of industry.
I think ordinary people are beginning to see that Labour and the Conservatives are a mirror-image of one another. Both have driven our once-lovely country to the verge of industrial collapse and economic ruin. Everywhere you look is a shambles. When government introduces a policy, one instinctively knows that the country should be doing the exact opposite. There is no wonder so many believe there is a hidden agenda or a controlling influence behind these decisions that are no longer made in the interests of the British people. It is sad, it is disastrous and it will never change whilst ever the current two-party state is in charge.
Will the last one to leave please turn the light out is an oft-repeated phrase used to describe the UK’s decline. I guess on that day, the wind will not be blowing nor the sun shining.
March 29, 2025
If a car lasts about 15 years – and there are 30 million cars on the road, then, of my arithmetic is correct, we only need about half a million new cars a year. Any more is just pure consumerism.
March 30, 2025
Ah, no, that’s back to front. We’d need 2 million cars a year.
March 29, 2025
Whilst it is logical for politicians and green activists to want to de-industrialise, impoverish and increase control using electrification and smart meters to ration food, heating and transport it is not clear why the motor industry has accepted their demise. Perhaps they’ve been captured into thinking that net zeroing our CO2 emissions will save the planet? Or are they turkeys thinking the transition to far fewer, more expensive, less safe vehicles will enhance their profits? This is the real mystery.
Not only do we need more atmospheric CO2 to further improve crop yields, Shula and Ott have demonstrated that the IPCC’s radiative theory that CO2 causes global warming to be invalid because of a phenomenon known as thermalisation
March 29, 2025
I despair at the incompetence and idiocy of this Labour government. And to think we’ve got four more years of this to look forward to! Is there any way they can be overthrown before they bankrupt us?
March 30, 2025
James: Likely not but it’s some small consolation daily to still see the Petition to Parliament ( number 700143 ) increase each day which perhaps might indicate you are not alone in your thinking. Presently at 3.058.786 individuals having ‘signed’
March 29, 2025
“It is disastrous that government and industry are locked together with a policy that is doing so much damage.”
All done to save the planet.
To quote H.L.Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
March 30, 2025
The European motor industry cannot change direction and go back to building cars people actually want to buy, unless Brussels and our government drop their Canute-like demand that they build more EVs, and enforce it by charging enormous taxes per vehicle if targets are not met.
The lunacy now 4extends to companies holding back the production or importation of IC-engined cars to try and pursuade buyers into unwanted EVs to avoid the penal surcharges. It isn’t working, hence the halving of car sales here.
The lost revenue from VAT on car sales must be enormous. Has Theeves not even noticed ?
March 30, 2025
Good to listen to straight forward talking this a.m. on Camilla Tominey’s programme, speaking with a former M D of Vauxhall Motors. Amongst other things discussed / stated: last year’s ZEV mandate was missed & the 28% ZEV mandate for this year considered impossible. It will entail the doubling of the retail sales rate, that is the purchasing by private customers. The £15.000 fines must be scrapped. The consequences of the mandate are terribly serious & as we know, causing a lot of angst for the UK market and manufacturers. Last year only one in ten of private buyers chose an EV. For many a very expensive proposition, not least considering vehicle costs, cost of insurance, roadside charging costs for those not able to charge on-drive / home e.g. UK car production last year was, it seems, as low as it was in 1964. All this considered to be paralysing the industry. Why is this being done, well, we all know, we’ve already heard it all piecemeal but it makes no sense at all.
March 30, 2025
Germany produces about x 9 more steel than the UK. And Sweden level pegging. These are both greenie countries. So something more going on than the issue you focus on although I agree with you to a degree.