The UK Government’s plug-in van grant could be having the unintended effect of keeping prices of the vehicles high, it has been argued.
Per Vogerl, CEO of United Rental Group, said that incentives would be better directed towards the used electric van market, which has seen remarketers struggle to generate demand.
Speaking at the BVRLA’s Industry Outlook Conference, Vogerl (pictured) said: “My personal opinion is that some of the OEM incentives are counter-productive. I think that the plug-in van grant potentially could even risk that van prices are not coming down.
“If I’m an OEM and I know the first £5,000 [of an electric van’s purchase price] is paid by the government, there’s no need for me to become more competitive, and we’ve seen that EV car prices came down despite the plug-in grant for cars being terminated.
“So I think we really need to look at the second stage, we need to look at support for used vehicles, we need to look at support for people buying those vehicles.”
Also speaking at the conference, Cap HPI senior editor for commercial vehicles and motorcycles Dionne Hanlon said that 2024 had been a tough year for used LCV values generally, let alone for EVs specifically.
She said: “There’s no doubt it’s been a difficult year for LCVs. The 25% drop that we’ve seen in values coming into the end of this year was nothing that we imagined it would be like at the beginning of the year.
“It has steadied off in the last quarter, we’re not seeing as much dramatic falls – but that’s the sector as a whole. When it comes to BEVs, it’s such a difficult marketplace, there’s no second-hand market for these BEVs, so while fleet operators are pumping the EV route because that’s what they need to do, there’s nowhere for the second-hand ones to go.
“So, as Per said earlier, there needs to be more incentives from the government to help that second-hand market.”
