The UK government will end subsidies for new electric vehicles, saying the market is now “mature” enough to go unsupported.
The Department for Transport will now shift funding towards public charging and supporting plug-in taxis, motorcycles, vans and trucks and wheelchair accessible vehicles.
It said these were now the “main barriers to the EV transition” and will receive £300mln of grant funding.
The government has already committed £1.6bn to building the network of public charging points as part of a commitment to install 10 times more on-street chargers by 2030.
All existing applications for the grant will continue to be honoured and where a car has been sold in the two working days before the announcement, but an application for the grant from dealerships has not yet been made, the sale will also still qualify for the grant.
The plug-in car grant provided over £1.4bn and supported the sale of nearly half a million electric cars.
Sales of battery and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs) making up more than half of all new cars sold in the last monthly figures, the DfT said, although full battery EVs only represented 12.4% of new cars registered in the past month.
For the whole of last year, just under 19% of UK car sales were battery EVs or plug-in hybrid EVs.
Amid the surging price of oil this year, an acceleration in sales led to petrol vehicles accounting for 45.6% of sales in May 2022, though if also including diesel, ‘mild hybrid’ and non-plug-in hybrid vehicles, there were still almost 82% of cars reliant on petrol.