Is the market about to overtake the Mandate?
It's June and we know the Departments for Transport and for Business and Trade are under pressure to bring further flexibilities to the ZEV Mandate, influenced by recent evidence from JLR, Ford and the SMMT to the Business and Trade Select Committee.
But is it the ZEV mandate posing "significant risks to the UK automotive sector”, or is the data telling an early success story?
Five stats that show it's time to double down, not slow down, and maintain the UK as a leading EV market:
1. Manufacturers over-complied against the 2024 ZEV mandate targets, using the extra flexibilities gained just last year, and banked an additional 3.7% in allowances for future years.
2. March 2026 was a new record for EV registrations: 86,120 new BEVs, up 24.2% year-on-year, in what the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) called the “best month ever”.
3. Autotrader reports that "3-5 year-old EVs were the fastest selling of any fuel type [in 2025].”
4. Zapmap notes almost 6% of the c.34m cars on UK roads are now fully electric.
5. And as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in his article on the "unstoppable" global electric car takeover in The Telegraph, quoting Kingsmill Bond:
"Once you reach 5pc or 10pc, it takes off. The next stop is 30pc and suddenly you are on the way to 80pc."
Insights.
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