In this episode of the podcast, I discuss the evolution of government grants for electric vehicles in the UK, reflecting on past incentives and their impact on consumer behaviour.

I explore the current landscape of grants available for individuals and businesses, including specific programs in Scotland that provide additional support for EV adoption.

This conversation emphasises the importance of these incentives in facilitating the transition to electric mobility and highlights the various options available for potential EV buyers and renters.

Takeaways:

• Government grants have evolved to support EV adoption.
• Incentives are crucial for changing consumer behavior.
• The plug-in car grant has been reintroduced with new criteria.
• Grants are available for both individuals and businesses.
• Scottish Government offers additional support for EVs.
• Grants can cover installation costs for home chargers.
• Commercial vehicles also benefit from substantial grants.
• Sustainability criteria are important for grant eligibility.
• The EV market is supported by various government initiatives.
• There is a growing recognition of the need for EV infrastructure.

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Links in the show notes:

• OZEV Grants for Vans
• Scottish EV grants & loans

(C) 2019-2026 Gary Comerford

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I got my first EV in 2019. At the time, there was a government grant available for people buying an electric car. It was £7,000. Now the good thing is this also applied to people leasing a car, which is what I was doing. So I spoke to the leasing company, told them what I wanted, and they ordered it, got the grant on my behalf, and used that.

in the calculations to determine what my monthly repayment was going to be.

Three years later, I sent that car back, went back to the lease company, and ordered another car on lease. Again, there was a grant to buy the car, although it was withdrawn almost immediately after I signed my contract. The government had decided that they'd spent more than enough money paying people to buy EVs. So they cut the grant. And this was called the PICG, the Plug-in Car Grant.

At the same time, they also had a grant that allowed you to offset the cost of installing chargers at home. I had a Zappi installed, and the government paid for, I think, £350 towards that. That grant was also retired shortly afterwards.

Those were the days, right? Government helped to meet government set targets. But things have moved on. So where are we with grants in the EV world?

I'm Gary, and this is Eevee Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. Thanks for watching or listening to this episode. Why not like, subscribe or comment, please? Cost you nothing, it's really easy to do.

The EV Music's podcast is sponsored by ZapMap, the go to app for EV drivers to find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Now I look back on nostalgia with days such as that day in 2018 when I got my first TV, a government grant to help purchase, or in my case, lease it, a government grant to provide a charger for it, cheap electricity to charge in public. As I said before, this was also the time when we could have public charge in at nine pence a kilowatt hour without a subscription. Wow. Unfortunately, those days are gone. Well, some of them are. The plug-in car grant is back, and there are still other grants that you can get.

To help you buy and run an electric vehicle. And today we're looking at what these are, where they apply, and how you can take advantage of them. But let's look at why we need grants in the first place. There is a school of thought out there that says that if EVs were any good, you wouldn't need to pay people to buy them. But that's not what the grants are doing. Remember, this is part of a government mandate.

To move public over to electric cars in a relatively short period of time. Anytime the government wants people to do things, it usually has to incentivize them. These incentives can take the form of tax breaks, loans, or grants. A cash in mind back to when the government wanted people to go to diesel. They offered scrappage schemes to people who would hand in their old car and get paid to move to diesel. Does this mean that diesels were so unpopular they needed people

To pay to use them? Absolutely not. It meant that to get people to make the move from the older car they were probably using, to move them to a diesel, they offer cash to make the move easier. The Mayor of London offered a similar scheme when he extended the ULEZ zone to include larger parts of the capital. So grants are used to change behaviour quicker. It's the same reason we had things like the renewable heat incentive, later replaced with the heat pump grant.

It was a way of incentivising people to get off coal and gas-fired heat and into other forms that were better for the environment. If you moved to a heat pump, the government paid you to help offset the cost.

Likewise, solar panels used to come with a feed-in tariff, which meant that every kilowatt hour of energy you generated from your roof would pay you often quite a lot, 75 pence a kilowatt hour in early cases. You were also paid if you sent that energy back to the grid rather than use it, although at a much lower 5.25 pence a kilowatt hour. So if they were so good at changing behaviour, why did the initial grant stop? Well, to quote one of the many former prime ministers we've had in the government over the last ten years.

There is no magical money tree. At some point, the government has to say enough is enough. In the case of the plug-in car grant, they allocated a certain amount of money to kick start the rollout of electric cars. This was apportioned out in £7,000 chunks, and once that allocation was done, the grant was stopped. But if there's no magical money tree, then why did the gr that grant come back? Well, that's an interesting question. In the case of the electric car grant,

£3,750 for qualifying cars. This was a direct result of the implementation of the ZEV mandate. Even though vehicle manufacturers had flexibilities built into the mandate at their own request, the government elected to make it easier for customers to buy EVs and head off claims from the manufacturers that they weren't doing enough to help them. Stares hard at the camera with a raised eyebrow.

So let's look at the grants that are available for people wanting an electric vehicle in the UK. If you're a private individual wanting to buy or lease a new electric car, there's not a great deal, unfortunately. The new electric car grant is more limited than the older plug-in car grant. The $2 billion scheme offers up to £3,750 off a qualifying new electric car with 18 models eligible for the full amount at the time of recording.

There's a smaller £1,500 grant available to cars that meet certain criteria but not the whole criteria. Currently 46 cars or variants meet that criteria. So what are those criteria? Well, to qualify for the grant, cars must meet clear, consumer-friendly standards laid out by government. The price cap they have to be £37,000 RRP or below, zero exhaust pipe emissions, battery electric only.

The range has to be at least 100 miles WLTP, and it needs a minimum eight-year mile warranty on the traction battery with replacement if capacity falls below 70% in that period, Sustainability plays into this as well. Manufacturers must meet environmental thresholds, including low carbon assembly and verified climate targets, to unlock the higher.

3750 band grant.

If you're a tenant wanting to install a charger at your rental property, there is a grant you can apply for. The grant is available for people who live in a rented property or own a flat with dedicated off-street parking. It gives you £500 towards the cost of the purchase and installation of an electric vehicle charger. Additionally, if you're a landlord and want to install EV infrastructure in a car park that you own, such as the parking for a block of flats, there is an applicable grant.

This grant applies to anyone renting, leasing, or managing a multi-tenancy residential property. Charging infrastructure must be installed to a minimum of five parking spaces with at least one active charger, cabling and charge point installed. You can cable the other slots up for a later charge point installation if required. The landlord can claim up to £30,000 or 75% of the install cost with an amount available.

Per parking space, depending whether this is an active spot, the charger installed, or a passive spot with the cabling only. Furthermore, landlords can apply for an EV charge point grant of up to £500 per charger for installing units at their properties with a limit of one per building. There's also a workplace charging grant of £500 per socket, capped at 40 sockets companies installing charging at their place of business.

It works on a voucher-based system, which means that you apply for and receive a voucher that you can then present to the installer as partial payment.

Let's move on to the bigger grants now. Heavy goods vehicles, while fewer in number than other electric cars, outnumber them in miles travelled per year per vehicle. They're also phenomenally expensive. Electric HGVs can be well over double the price of a diesel equivalent. To help offset the cost of this, the government offers a number of grants. If you're buying a truck, you can claim under the government's Zero Emissions Truck Grant.

the ZETG and this offers various grants towards the purchase of different sorts of trucks according to the weight.

For example, a typical vehicle weighing up to 12 tons will get 20% of the purchase price, up to 16,000 pounds. Up to 18 tons, you can save 60,000 pounds, up to 26 tons, 80,000 pounds. And the big boys, the 18-wheel trucks of 26 tons or over, can claim 120,000 pounds. Now that might sound like a lot, but a DAF electric truck,

Similar to the one in which Liam and I travel from Welsh Group in Duxford recently.

Can cost £270,000. So there's still quite an outlay there. For smaller vehicles, there's the LCV grant, known as the Low Emission Van Grant. It works like the grant for the electric cars in that it applies to eligible vehicles. And for small vans, it's £2,500. And

The larger grant is 5,000, and to be eligible for a grant, the vehicle must weigh between 2,500 kilos and 4,250 gross vehicle weight. Again, produce zero grams of CO2 at the tailpipe, be able to travel 60 miles without any emissions.

And there's actually a huge list of eligible vans between those two sets of criteria. And I'll put a link in the show notes to the government website that shows them all.

Scotland has access to all the same grants that come from the UK government.

In addition, the Scottish Government has created an additional set of grants and incentives to aid the uptake of electric vehicles.

The Scottish Government, rather than continuing the individual vehicle purchase loan programme, is offering £178 million to be used for

improving access to public workplace and home charging, targeted support for rural and island communities, and support for lower income households and households without off street parking, also micro businesses and third sector organisations.

Scottish businesses, however, can access the low carbon transport business loan, which provides interest free loans of up to £150,000 to support the purchase of low and zero emission vehicles, including electric cars, vans, and HGVs.

There's probably other loans and assistance that I've missed out on, and I don't think this was ever going to be a comprehensive guide to everything available. But I think it indicates that there is money available in some shape.

To help people make the move to electric. Looking at things, it's obvious that the Scottish government are looking at this with a slightly different eye to the rest of the UK. But we're always grateful for any help we can get.

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers to find and pay for public charging with confidence. Zapmap is free to download and use, with thousands of public charge points to choose from, live pricing and availability information, and a range of filters to find the right charge for you. Plus, choose subscription models for enhanced features such as using Zapmap in car, on CarPlay, or Android Auto, and discounted charging across thousands of charge points.

And that's the show for this week. I hope you enjoyed listening to it.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com. On the socials, I'm on BlueSky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EV Musings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. Why not follow me there? Many thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon, on a monthly basis, and through coffee.com on an ad hoc one. Regular listeners will know about my two ebooks.

So you've gone electric and so you've gone renewable. They're 99p each or equivalent, and you can get them on Amazon. Check out the links in the show notes for more information, as well as the link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles. Now my stats show that a lot of people watch this on YouTube, but they're not subscribers. So if you're one of those, why not hit that button and the notification bell so you don't miss out? Thank you very much.

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Grant me this, boy. Hashtag if you know you know, nothing else. And thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know he's still annoyed there are no grants for his electric unicycles. Thanks for listening. Bye bye now.