Is the Electric Car Grant working?

In July 2025 the government launched the Electric Car Grant: money off a new electric car, £650 million committed to 2028/29, and a hard £37,000 price cap aiming the help at the affordable end of the market rather than the executive car park. Its three stated jobs were to make electric cars affordable, to accelerate the switch, and to reward sustainable manufacturing. A year on, the first full quarters of licensing data are in. Before the verdict, it is worth being clear about what the scheme actually covers, because it is narrower than the headlines suggested.

What the money actually buys

The grant pays at two levels, set by how cleanly a car is made: £3,750 off the greenest band, currently including the electric Ford Puma, the electric Mini Countryman, the Renault 4, 5 and Scenic, the Alpine A290, Nissan's new Micra and the Kia EV4, and £1,500 off a longer second band of more than forty models, among them the electric Citroën C3, the Kia EV3, the Škoda Elroq, the Vauxhall Mokka and the Volkswagen ID.3, ID.4 and ID.5. The £37,000 cap does real work: it excludes the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Kia EV6 and Niro and the VW ID.Buzz, all electric, all from eligible brands, all too expensive to qualify. And one line in the rules matters more than any other: no Chinese built car qualifies, on the scheme's manufacturing sustainability test. The excluded brands noticed. MG, Leapmotor, smart and Geely now run their own discounts of £1,500 to £3,750, deliberately shaped to mirror the grant they cannot join.

The trend test

The central question is whether the grant made the eligible cars sell faster than they already were. Cars from the nineteen eligible brands stood at 647,424 pure electrics on the road when the grant launched and stand at 807,593 now, growth of 24.7% in three quarters. In the three quarters before the grant existed, the same brands grew 27.3%. Their quarterly additions did rise, from roughly 46,000 to roughly 53,000, but the whole electric market accelerated by about the same proportion over the window: the eligible brands' slice of each quarter's new electric cars edged from 45% to 46%. If the grant bent their curve, the bend is too small to see at brand level.

The affordable end is growing, but the cause is hard to assign

Eligible models under £37,000 added around 160,000 cars since the baseline, and the affordable models the grant was meant to seed appeared essentially from nothing: the electric Ford Puma up 12,563, the Škoda Elroq 9,330, the Kia EV3 8,098, the Vauxhall Frontera 6,093, the Renault 5 around 8,900. That is exactly the mass market shift the Treasury was paying for. But every one of those cars launched inside this window regardless, and several of the excluded brands were discounting to match. "The grant pulled buyers in" and "cheap new electric cars simply arrived" are indistinguishable in this data.

The cars it excludes are growing fastest

Chinese brand electric cars, which get nothing, grew 49.6% over the grant's three quarters, from 124,000 to 185,500, and here the before and after comparison cuts the other way: in the three quarters before launch they were growing 31.5%. The excluded side of the line sped up; the subsidised side did not. The eligible group still added more cars in absolute terms, 160,000 against 61,500, off a base five times the size. But if one goal was to tilt the field toward approved production, the field is measurably tilting the other way.

So has it worked?

On this evidence: not visibly, yet. And there is a reason not to expect it to be visible. The heavy machinery of Britain's electric transition is not the grant but the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, the rule that since 2024 has required every major manufacturer to make a rising percentage of its UK sales fully electric or pay fines. The mandate compels supply; the grant merely sweetens demand at the cheap end, and it is a fraction of the mandate's force. Read that way, the data says the transition was already accelerating under the mandate and has continued at almost exactly the pace the pre grant trend implied. The affordable models the grant targets are selling well, but they would have launched anyway. The fastest growing electric cars on British roads remain the ones the grant was written to exclude. None of that makes the scheme a failure: most of the money is unspent, and its effect may simply need longer than nine months to surface. But anyone claiming the grant has already transformed the market is reading a headline this data does not support.