The author Michael Crichton has an interesting observation about media accuracy, which runs as follows: “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well…You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward – reversing cause and effect.
“You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story – and then turn the page to national or international affairs and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate.”
Naturally, for those working in fuel-retailing, this effect can be evident when our field makes mainstream publications. We saw it when Be.EV spoke about the ‘death’ of the sector, and witnessed it with monotonous regularity back when the RAC was circulating press releases criticising operators for their margins.
Now, it’s the turn of a pro-EV think tank named New Automotive, which recently published a report predicting retailers in London would begin to stop selling diesel within four years, with “many” sites across the country having followed suit by 2035. The outfit also predicted that the UK’s fleet of 10m diesel cars would dwindle to just 250,000 in a decade.
This report was covered by countless publications, and while I won’t painstakingly dismantle its claims (not least as the amount of energy required to refute nonsense is always far higher than was needed to produce it), for near enough a million diesel cars to disappear annually from the roads for the next decade would defy years of scrappage patterns, while as for forecourts repurposing their diesel tanks, I have just one word: vans.
New Automotive also proclaims that a “reduction in diesel fuel sold will aid Britain’s energy security situation, as we become less reliant on foreign oil” and that “both for environmental and energy security reasons, the fall in diesel use is hugely beneficial”.
These are highly contentious and contestable opinions being presented as fact, and rather than balance them against the ethical problems surrounding EV battery sourcing; the geopolitical and econimic issues posed by a reliance on electricity rather than oil; or the rise of Chinese and demise of European automotive firms, I thought I would share what I learnt about New Automotive following some cursory research.
The think tank describes itself as having “a mission to support the switch to electric vehicles” and says it does this “using data to tell persuasive stories, informing the public and influencing policy development”. Hence this diesel report, I guess.
New Automotive collaborates with organisations including the Welsh government, and Octopus Energy’s electric-car leasing arm. The think tank says it “may receive referral fees where we direct someone to a supplier of Electric Vehicles”, although it “mainly receive[s] funding from foundations with an interest in climate change”.
New Automotive’s current grant funder is a Dutch charity called European Climate Foundation, which counts as one of its funders Quadrature Climate Foundation, a charitable arm of Quadrature Capital, a London investment firm that since 2019 has committed over $1bn to “promoting sustainable development and advancing climate solutions”, and in 2024 donated £4m to the Labour party.
In December 2025, the same month its death of diesel report was published, New Automotive merged with another climate-based think tank called ‘Ember’.
Ember also receives funding from Quadrature Climate Foundation. The organisation used to be known as ‘Sandbag’, which was founded “to reform the EU carbon market” in 2008 by Bryony Worthington, AKA Baroness Worthington, lead author of the 2008 Climate Change Act. Ember went on to help campaign to increase from €2 to €30 the amount businesses must pay the EU for every tonne of carbon they emit (it’s now nearer €90 a tonne), a cost that is passed on to consumers.
I am not for one moment trying to imply any wrongdoing from any of these organisations, but do consider it interesting how interconnected these matters are.
It’s also notable that rather than letting the merits of EVs speak for themselves, those involved in such messaging feel the need to do down another fuel type as they strive to convince a sceptical audience that the future is unilaterally electric.
Finaly, for diesel to be presented as some kind of bogeyman is ironic given it wasn’t so long ago that governments were promoting diesel cars because they purportedly knew the fuel would improve the climate. This point begs two questions: first, whether Michael Crichton’s observations could extend beyond media and into politics, and second, if so many supposedly smart people got diesel so wrong, why should we believe they’ve got EVs right?
