The financial case for ownership of an electric car is now gathering serious momentum. Whether you feel it’s doing that for the right reasons may depend on your view about whether EV owners should get most of their VAT back when they buy their new car, in addition to dodging fuel tax - which remains an especially touchy subject; at least until the new eVED system comes into force in 2028. But that, in a nutshell, is how the UK government is driving their adoption.
The industry, however, suddenly seems to be doing an awful lot more itself to ‘drive the transition’. The nature of the car market means that EV prices don't - and won’t - slowly decrease by themselves as time goes on, but rather descend in sudden leaps as new products arrive with the latest cost savings priced in. So when one turns up that at once reflects such a leap, but that also qualifies for the biggest ‘ECG’ government subsidy available, it really makes waves.
That’s what the Hyundai Ioniq 3 feels like: a transformational development for UK electric-car buyers - perhaps even for UK car buyers full stop. This isn’t another novel Chinese brand offering an unknown quantity for a necessarily eye-catching tag, after all. It’s one of the best-practiced and -established purveyors of EVs that the UK has yet seen, unrecognisable from the days when it was itself just another obscure Asian budget brand, with an electric model debutant ready to make just about every rival look tawdry, small, short-ranged or expensive. In some cases, all of the above.
Hyundai has had a tough twelve months, but has an ambitious plan to increase total production by 1.3 million by 2030 – a number that requires the launch or facelift of 100 models by 2030. Go big or go home, as they say. A total of 41 of those new releases will be landing on European shores, and this is the latest of them.
