Many of you will have read with some sense of disbelief the recent announcement from the Government regarding the accelerated commitment of plans to ban carbon-emitting vehicles in the UK from 2030, meaning that we have less than a decade to enjoy new petrol-powered supercars.
Let’s take that in for a moment, with model change cycles on some cars stretching to anywhere between 6 and 10 years on average this could be your last chance to enjoy that factory fresh V8, V10, or V12 before Boris takes the fun away!
Registrations for pure EV in 2020 were up 130% on 2019 with over 200,000 now on our roads. A lot of this has been driven by the tax advantages for business users and this trend is set to continue in 2021, so what does this mean for us petrolheads?
This is not the same change and innovation as before, nowhere close to those of you that still lament the passing of the air-cooled 911 and didn’t see this as progress, or the Ferrari 458 becoming a 488 and gaining turbos. This is the real deal game-changing “new norma” for the automotive world and it takes a real change of mindset to accept that it has already started.
For those of us that are old enough to remember the 70’s and 80’s, our Heroes were 911 Turbos, Testarossas and Countachs emblazoned on our walls, but where are the EV heroes coming from? I honestly can`t see my teenage sons reaching for the Blutak to stick pictures of Teslas and Taycans on their walls. Iit is a new generation and complete change of mindset that is required from here on in.
I drive a Jaguar IPace as a daily driver, it’s fast, comfortable, and quiet, and that`s all I can say really as it has no emotion outside of that description, but that`s the point I suppose. It’s not meant to be exciting, and this has been creeping up on us for quite some time with the manufacturers dropping Halo Hybrid models like the Mclaren P1 and Ferrari La Ferrari on us, slowly getting us used to the idea of the Battery Motor with massive torque being the answer. The newly launched Mclaren Artura being the latest example of how we can extract more performance from a Hybrid with a V6 rather than the previous petrol only V8, this will soon be followed by the new Rimac Supercar that will out-accelerate anything fossil powered that we can throw at it ( 0-60 1.5s) with ease and no emissions to boot, and by the way, Rimac has been acquired by a combination of KIA, Hyundai, and Porsche so watch that space.
Fear not, its not all doom and gloom. I’m sure we will not all disappear into a Mad Max or Demolition Man type demise, scratching around wastelands looking for fuel. It will be some years until we are forced into this quiet and ecofriendly path because there will still be lots of cars available for us to enjoy, and who knows quite a few of us might enjoy doing 0-100 in half a second whilst being driven by the car and eating a sandwich whilst reading your emails, The Drivers Union might even need a new category one day for the silent assassins of the road?
Darren Nash
Darren has been the Director of Planet Leasing for 14 years, previously worked in the Retail motor trade for 16 years and was involved in the implementation of the Hybrid range with Lexus during that time.