While ministers continue to pull every available lever to push electric cars onto drivers, drivers themselves appear to have other ideas, with the EV market share declining in February compared to the same month last year.
Some 21,840 new EVs were registered last month, and while this was 596 more than were bought in February 2025, as a proportion of the overall market just 24.2% of buyers chose this powertrain type, down from 25.3% in February 2025.
Total registrations were up 7.1% to 90,100 cars last month, with petrol cars holding 46.5% of the market, diesels 4.5% and hybrids 24.7%..
This was the second consecutive month of market-share fall for electric cars, with January seeing it drop to 20.6% compared to 21.3% in the same month 2024, a trajectory opposite to the one demanded by Whitehall.
In 2025 manufacturers were mandated to ensure 28% of the cars they sold were pure EVs (achieved proportion: 23.4%), while for 2026 the figure stands at 33%, a target that will be missed by an even more significant margin if current trends, which see EVs holding just 22% of the year-to-date market, continue.
This is despite both the enormous tax breaks available to business and salary-sacrifice customers who choose an EV, and the £3,750 Electric Car Grant, introduced in July 2025 partly to encourage more private buyers to plump for electric power. Four months later ministers managed to send mixed messages, though, when they told EV and hybrid drivers that from 2028 they will face a new pay-per-mile tax.
Registration figures such as those seen for the first two months of 2026 might give policymakers pause to question both their assumptions about electric cars, and the likelihood of their market interventions succeeding in the face of reluctant consumers. The opposite appears to be the case, however, with those in power wedded to the idea of electrifying everything they can.
At the beginning of 2026 a consultation was opened into proposals to ban sales of new diesel HGVs from 2035/40. While those with a modicum of knowledge of the laws of physics or the road-haulage sector might assume such a consultation would ask how quickly and quietly such a fantastical idea could be ditched, the Department for Transport instead wants the industry to tell it how it can meet these targets, to which it says it is “firmly committed”.
