Emission controls will start to bite

It looks like a tough year ahead for some long-established manufacturers as electric-vehicle sales targets kick in. Andrew English explains

After much toing and froing, the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate starts in the new year. The scheme will gradually mandate car makers to build and sell zero tailpipe emissions vehicles in increasing totals to 80 per cent in 2030 and a total ban on new combustion engines in 2035.

In 2024, car makers will have to sell 22 per cent of their total sales of new cars as ZEVs, which effectively means they’ll be battery electric vehicles (BEVS) or fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) – this new environmental world is rather full of acronyms. Vans have a similar but slightly slower-starting scheme, with a 10 per cent target for next year rising to 70 per cent by 2030 and a ban in 2035.

Failure to comply means a fine of £15,000 for every non-compliant car and £9,000 for every non-compliant van, which rises to £18,000 in 2025. Sell 1,000 non-compliant passenger cars into the market next year and a car maker could be looking at a fine of £1.5 million, which, given the meagre profits in car-making at the moment, would hurt.

The scheme will work as a set of nonZEV targets given to each manufacturer, which will represent a proportion of their fleet. It means that the rest of their new-car sales will have to be made up of ZEVs.

Even in the first year, this is going to be a tough call. Figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers show that, in 2022, BEVs as a proportion of all newcar sales were 16.6 per cent, falling to 16 per cent for the first half of 2023 – and some car makers are far behind those percentages.

According to Fleet News magazine, only 11 car makers exceeded the proposed 22 per cent target in the first half of this year, and a third of all new EVs sold came from just three car makers.

Electric car makers are clearly ahead of the game here, and as the ZEV scheme is tradable at least in the first years, they will gain even further as legacy car makers “borrow” ZEV allowances from them. They are also almost all either Chinese-owned or building their cars in China, such as car companies BYD, GWM ORA, MG, Polestar, Smart and Tesla. There’s also the implication that this “borrowing” process will further feed the EV market leadership of these companies as they use the fees they receive to fuel a price war that is happening already.

Registration figures at the middle of this year showed that legacy car makers with near-to compliant sales included Jaguar, Porsche, Volvo, Cupra and BMW. The Japanese brands with few EV sales could be in trouble – as is Ford, which had just two per cent EV sales in the first half of 2023 as it struggled to get its VW-based Explorer on sale in Europe.

Some non-compliant companies such as Land Rover, Alfa Romeo, Seat and Dacia should be able to offset their petrol and diesel sales against other marques within their ownership groups.

This is supply-side economics, driven by environmental concerns, pushed on the market at 100mph, with little idea as to whether there is real demand for the battery electric cars that have to be sold, particularly at the small and cheaper end of the market where BEVs struggle to be price competitive. For fleets and small businesses, there are generous fiscal and operating incentives to buy EVs, which are generally a lot more expensive. But the benefits for private buyers are more questionable, especially if they can’t access cheap off-road charging and are forced to charge at the roadside where prices per kWh can make battery cars more expensive to run than petrol or diesel vehicles.

There’s hardly time and space for more and indeed ZEV will dominate the industry for years to come, but at least the EU has managed to swerve away from the cliff-edge of post-Brexit rules-of-origin taxes, which would have added a 10 per cent tax hit on UK-produced vehicles sold in the EU mainly from Vauxhall, Toyota and Nissan.

In other news, my Triumph GT6 will finally get its new engine, which is clearly a very exciting development that I will be writing about when it happens.

Anyway, happy new year to you all in what sounds like a turbulent 12 months ahead.

QI bought my Suzuki Ignis 1.2 Dualjet automatic new in June 2018. It’s only done 7,000 miles, but my local mechanic has told me that the flywheel has failed. I have an extended warranty, but the mechanic is not sure if the flywheel is covered. Is this a known problem with this type of automatic?

– LB

AThe AGS gearbox in your Ignis works in a slightly different way to a “normal” automatic. In fact, if you were to take your gearbox apart and peer into it, you’d find it looks much like a manual gearbox – except instead of having a clutch pedal and a manual gearstick, the gearbox activates the clutch and changes gear for you.

Suzuki used the AGS gearbox as the automatic option on the Ignis from its launch in 2017 until the model was facelifted in 2020, when it was replaced with a continuously variable transmission, or CVT – which works in a completely different way to the AGS.

This change may have taken place because there is a known problem with the Suzuki AGS gearbox – the main symptom of which is a shudder when pulling away – and the cause is indeed the flywheel. The good news is that I believe Suzuki is aware of the issue, and has come up with a kit in order to carry out a fix to it.

That being the case, and on the assumption you had kept your car maintained on schedule at the Suzuki dealer, I suggested that you should take the car back to the dealer to see if they would carry out the fix and repair your car free of charge.

Suzuki is normally pretty good about this sort of thing – it’s why they have such a good reputation as far as customer care is concerned. So I was hopeful that they would honour the warranty you paid for, or if the flywheel was not covered, would carry out the repair on a goodwill basis.

You got back in touch with me to tell me that they had indeed offered to carry out the fix free of charge as a gesture of goodwill. Good on them.