Good news everybody! Sorry, I don’t want to sound like Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth from Futurama… but it IS good news. We had a better September for new car registrations than last year, up 14% overall.
And, at this rate, even though 2022 may still be the worst since the early 1990s, our projection is now thankfully back above 1.5m units for the whole of 2022.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said the total number of “plug-ins” on UK roads now exceeds 1m. We’d agree – we think there’s now around 573k BEV and 427k PHEV. BEV, as you can see from our stunning new graphic, was the 2nd most registered fuel type after petrol in September.
Note though that petrol keeps hanging on in there, up 13% year on year (compared to BEV up 54%). Does this reflect the gap between retail and fleet sales, with fleet fully immersed in the EV pool and retail still just dangling their toes (in other words are retail customers mostly still buying petrols)?
Diesel and PHEV are both down on September 2021 by 46% and 41% respectively. So BEV is way up and PHEV is down, is that caused by supply or does it reflect demand?
As Bender might say to the PHEVs “bite my shiny metal a***”.