Forget the alternatives, electric is the true path to decarbonisation

And here we are, in 2025, in the unique position of having an automotive fuel mix in Europe that literally no one forecast correctly, and a very opaque future. The short answer is that the field looks as crowded and chaotic as the first fence at The Grand National: runners and riders everywhere, losers and injured parties scattered around the field, and some have withdrawn entirely from the race, their backers left scrambling to recover losses.

Just take a look at the landscape in the UK this year, for a sense of context behind these gambles around fuel type: we have fewer private buyers – 200,000 down from 2019, but over 70 brands fighting for position (up from 45 in 2019). So, car brands are fighting for fewer consumers, with more competitors.

Add into that tough commercial environment the government’s Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which this year stipulates that 28 per cent of each car brand’s sales (unless you’re a low-volume brand) must be pure electric. Next year that target rises to 33 per cent, and then it really jumps each year, to 80 per cent in 2030. Et voila, you have what might be euphemistically be termed “a challenge” for retailers and OEMs.

The ZEV mandate sounds like a laudable government plan for decarbonising the footprint of UK PLC, but it’s clearly not achievable right now. The only way car brands managed to hit government ZEV targets last year and avoid punitive fines of £15,000 per car was to borrow forward against future year allocations, borrow backwards against CO2 reductions and buy carbon credits from pure-play electric brands like Tesla.

They also had to discount massively to shift any electric cars to normal people (private sales are stagnant; fleet sales drove take-up last year); the average discount on a new electric car in December 2024 was a whopping 12.8 per cent, according to Auto Trader data. That is unsustainable for retailers, and yet we will see more of it this year from brands to avoid fines.

Which brings us to the central question: are batteries a realistic solution? Is electricity ever going to be the sole fuel for mass motoring, and is it really the long-term objective of the industry? Or, is everyone secretly playing nice with government mandates while waiting for hydrogen to come on stream? And don’t synthetic fuels have a major part in all this?

We can more easily address hydrogen and synthetic fuels. Hydrogen remains a pipe dream (literally) for car brands for the foreseeable future. If we doubted that, the death of Mirai, Toyota’s stab at a hydrogen passenger car, was the nail in the coffin for the fuel. Transporting and storing it has proved too tricky and costly for mass transportation networks to administer.

Its properties mean it’s still a suitable power source, however, for trains, ships, heavy goods vehicles and endurance racing, where both Toyota and Alpine debuted hydrogen race cars in France at the World Endurance Championship last year. Europe has yet to give up on hydrogen, but the EU’s Green Deal paperwork acknowledges that it is best suited to those hard-to-reach parts of the transport network, where recharging a battery isn’t practical.

And what about synthetic fuels and e-fuels? The 2024 Goodwood Revival and the 82^nd Members’ Meeting presented by Audrain Motorsport both ran entirely on sustainable fuels, which is a great decision. Motorsport is a very valuable, ongoing testbed for these fuels because, not only can you develop less carbon-emitting fuels, but you are focused on the power and performance they produce in a way that road-car development never is.

Fuels that are derived from bio-waste ethanol are a great development, as are fuels that capture carbon from the air, thus completing a circular economy of their own. And maybe one day, all this time, money and R&D effort will benefit road cars and mass transportation. But it is prohibitively expensive at the moment, and remains so for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, if a fuel is not affordable, it is not sustainable, because you simply can’t reach critical-mass adoption. Electric car sales have proved that point all too painfully in the past three years.

So, we’re back to electric, because we can’t hold off any more in our efforts to decarbonise the planet. How do we reach mass adoption of this fuel? Partly, I believe, by shutting up about hydrogen and alternative fuels. We are simply confusing the public, which needs a clear sense of direction from the government, the media and the industry.

Most drivers are still struggling to get their head around the transition to electric, and distrust a government which pushed them towards diesel a decade or so ago, then pushed them back towards petrol, and is now telling them to buy a battery. We need a simple, clear path forwards, and the government has mandated that to be electric. We must get on board.

What makes electric the obvious answer, besides a lack of new-car alternative sales past 2030? Well, the price is coming down. A year ago, the cost differential between electric and petrol stood at 33 per cent; now it is 23 per cent. The cost of batteries has plummeted due to cell manufacturing over-capacity and weakening EV sales, which drove prices of lithium-ion battery packs down by 20 per cent in 2024 to a record price of $115 (£86) per kWh, according to Bloomberg NEF.

Pack prices have remained at a stable low since about 2021, but cell prices have gone from $553 (£414) in 2013 to $78 (£48) last year. Add to that the fact that there are now 29 new electric cars on sale in the UK priced at under £30,000, compared with just nine 12 months ago, and you have a nicely developing market of choice, and a great used-car electric market, where three-year-old electric cars have now reached price parity with their non-electric counterparts.

Range is going up, too, and stands at an average 276 miles from all the new electric cars on sale this year. That’s plenty for most people for their week’s needs. And that range will continue to climb, as charging times fall (note BYD’s 1,000kW charger, which does the job in the same time it takes to refuel with petrol, albeit we can’t make use of it in the UK just yet) and charger increases (the public network has now hit 75,000 chargers).

It is all heading in the right direction, and there is no choice: the government is currently consulting the industry on the best way to make the ZEV targets achievable between now and 2030, but it is not going to soften the targets themselves, just how they could be achieved by OEMs.

In other words, like it or lump it, we are all heading down Electric Avenue, and the sooner everyone gets their head round that, and the quicker the industry and government helps consumers to make the switch, the better.