Here’s what sounds like some excellent news from JLR: global sales of its plug-in hybrids soared 163 per cent in the three months ending in December 2024.
In the world of legislation-driven electrification, however, a spike in growth like this coming as it does so late in the year is less a cause for celebration and more a clanging alarm.
It almost certainly means an important global market decided from the start of the new year to shut the door on some loophole or incentive that, for a while, gave an electrified drivetrain a boost.
And so it proved here.
France, that inveterate hater of big SUVs, had widened the net for its weight-based ‘malus’ tax penalty on heavier cars to include plug-in hybrids.
Car makers scrambled to push out cars before the tax hit and as a result France in December became briefly the largest PHEV market in Europe, with sales up 45 per cent. Land Rover finished second in the PHEV chart, with sales up 600 per cent to 3899 for the month, according to figures from market analyst Dataforce via Automotive News Europe.
The tax change from 1 January adds €18,830 to the price of the best-selling Range Rover Sport P460E plug-in hybrid in France and effectively kills the market for large premium SUVs, which was 90 per cent plug-in hybrid last year according to Dataforce.
France yanking away the football illustrates the perils for the plug-in hybrid in Europe. A similar thing happened in Belgium at the beginning of 2024 when company cars were targeted. The result? One of the biggest PHEV markets in Europe, with over 100,000 sales in 2023, tumbled 33 per cent last year according to figures from European lobby group ACEA.
PHEV sales did increase in the UK last year by 18 per cent to 167,178, led by the Ford Kuga, as car makers squeezed all the flexibilities available within the ZEV mandate (setting the percentage of EVs manufacturers need to sell) to stay compliant. However, it wasn’t enough to grow overall sales across Europe, which fell 3.9 per cent to just under a million, half that of pure EVs.
The drivetrain is billed as a useful bridging technology to electric in that you get a fairly big battery for local EV driving but also a combustion engine to salve those range worries on longer trips.
The way the WLTP emission tests work means that even hefty PHEVs like the Range Rover Sport record far lower carbon dioxide figures than humble hybrid superminis, leading to tax incentives almost as good as those for EVs.
But the European Union is very suspicious of the drivetrain and last year published a report based on data harvested from 2021 PHEVs showing that real-world emissions were on average 3.5 times worse than officially declared.
The green cloak was whipped off, Scooby Doo style, to reveal just another combustion-engined car.
In response the EU has changed the way it measures emissions on PHEVs starting from 1 January this year for newly launched vehicles and a year later for cars already on sale. In effect this doubles the recorded CO2 for PHEVs, risking them straying out of their precious low-impact company-car tax brackets.
The car industry has responded by increasing the size of the battery, so for example the pack in the new VW Tiguan eHybrid jumps to 19.7kWh, nearly doubling the quoted electric range from the old one at 62 miles.
That of course adds cost, meaning the Tiguan PHEV starts at £42,555, over £5000 more than a standard 1.5-litre petrol. It’s also only two grand shy of the long-range electric VW ID. 4.
All this sounds like the plug-in hybrid is on borrowed time. In any case, the official position from both the EU and UK is that the sale of all cars with combustion engines stops from 2035.
But while some company car drivers still have trouble unwrapping the charging cable, the ‘fake EV’ (in the words of one influential green pressure group) remains a very useful introduction to electric motoring to a whole class of EV sceptics worldwide.