The UK's multigrain EV market
How the UK's EV transition is being increasingly driven by incumbent carmakers amid Tesla's slow puncture
Happy Wednesday. Tesla’s position as the UK’s leading electric car brand once looked unassailable. No more. Gone are the heady days of 17% market share with a 6 point lead over the nearest challenger. Tesla have sold just over 15,000 electric cars in the UK so far this year, which is about 10% fewer than last year. Falling volumes are one thing. Falling volumes in a market that has a growth rate of 30% a year is quite another story.
Welcome to the latest edition of Electric Car Count, your monthly update on electric car, van, motorbike and HGV sales in the UK - and the most up-to-date, free, comprehensive and detailed publication covering the EV transition in the UK. And, as we have been known to say before, what an update we have for you this month!
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The news
How the UK EV market is going from Mighty White to multigrain
ZEV mandate: might reforms avoid gutting the UK’s EV targets?
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Here is the news
Electric cars took 21.9% of the market in May. That’s up from 17% in May last year, and means that in seven of the last eight months EV registrations have been north of 20%.
Electric vans continue to climb skywards. Battery electric vans are just under 8% over the year, notching up 7.1% in May, up from 4.4% in May 2024.
Bye bye ICE: In May 2024, just under 40% of new cars were conventional petrols. This time round, that had fallen to 29%. Taking petrol and full hybrids (no plug) together, registrations of these vehicles were down an immodest 9% as demand for polluting vehicles melts faster than a Swiss glacier.
An increasingly competitive market
One of the most striking features of 2025 is the consistency with which UK electric car sales have grown, and how little their market share appears to bounce around every month. The volatility we used to see in monthly EV market share was the product of the market’s reliance on Tesla’s new registrations, which were highly sensitive to the quarterly arrival of shipments of new vehicles.
But the EV market in 2025 is less like a slice of Mighty White, and much more like a well-seeded multigrain loaf - textured, varied and considerably more resilient. Where once Tesla's boatload-dependent delivery cadence gave the market its jagged edges, today's EV sales are spread more evenly across a buffet of brands.
Tesla looks likely to lose its place at the top of the New AutoMotive leaderboard next month, as its dominance in the market wanes. You might be wondering what plucky, unheard-of Chinese brand is going to steal Tesla’s crown. Think again. Next month we expect champagne corks to pop in either Bavaria or Lower Saxony, when either BMW or Volkswagen becomes the UK’s biggest selling brand for EVs.
While newspaper headlines often focus on the growth of Chinese brands like BYD, the market data richly repays a close look. There is simply astonishingly fast growth in EV sales among the incumbent car manufacturers, who are going hell for leather after a slice of the UK EV market.
Let’s look at the fastest growing half of the top 20 EV sellers in the UK in 2025. We’ve ranked them below.
Ford (+323%) - Once an EV “also ran”, now a serious EV market contender, Ford has boosted sales from 1,910 at this point in 2024 to 8,090 this year.
Mini (+292%) - This classic UK brand’s small cars are ideal for electrification, and BMW’s investments have taken it from 1,264 EV sales at this point last year to 4,953 today.
BYD (+261%) - The Chinese challenger’s EV sales have grown rapidly from 2,229 to 8,044 this year.
Renault (+245%) - An early leader who has found that innovating to bring new models to market pays off. EV sales up from 1,773 to 6,125.
Volkswagen (+201%) - Impressive growth on an already high figure: rising from 4,798 to 14,465.
Porsche (+186%) - EV sales are up from 1,262 to 3,613.
Polestar (+172%) - The only all-electric brand in this ranking, with sales rising from 2,128 to 5,802.
Skoda (+143%) - Up from 3,481 to 8,452.
Peugeot (+112%) - The popular French brand has posted sales volumes of 9,109, up from 4,302 last year.
Cupra (+106%) - A relatively new brand to many, Cupra’s EV models have proven highly popular, with sales growing from 2,530 to 5,200.
Two things strike us about that list. First, the brands you see there have been mainstays of the UK car market for decades. Second, all of those ten brands have more than doubled their EV sales so far this year. Both speak to the broad-based growth that underpins a wholesale technology transition that is now well underway in the UK.
ZEV Mandate
The headline target in the car ZEV mandate is 28%. But, as regular readers will know, carmakers do not have to meet it. They can effectively reduce that target (down to a floor of 15.4%) by increasing sales of more fuel efficient vehicles which emit less carbon. Estimate each manufacturer’s fuel efficiency improvements, and you get a sense of the battery electric cars they really need to sell to meet the target. Thus we calculate the estimated ‘real ZEV sales target’.
The market-wide estimated real target - essentially a weighted average of those individual manufacturer targets - is 22.04%. It has fallen (again) this month, because the average (median) emissions rating of new non-ZEV cars in the UK is now 126gCO2/km, down from 131gCO2/km in May 2024. The ratings of the cleanest 25% has seen a bigger fall, from 118gCO2/km to 106gCO2/km on the back of rising PHEV sales.
In April, the UK government announced new flexibilities for the ZEV mandate, which included the lowering of the floor on the effective ZEV sales target. In 2025 it will be reduced so low (to 2.8%) as to be effectively abolished.
We haven’t taken this new lower floor into account in our methodology yet because there is too much uncertainty around how the change will be implemented and the impact on the availability of ZEV mandate credits. It is still possible for the government to reform the mandate without significantly oversupplying the scheme with credits, whilst also giving those carmakers who need it a bit more flexibility in how they meet their targets. Want to know how? Drop us a line!
That’s it from us this month. As ever, there’s loads more in the full bulletin - so do click the button above to find out everything about vans, the ZEV mandate for vans, HGVs and motorbikes.
All the best,
Team New AutoMotive
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