Peter McDonald
The Ohme man says things are hotting up in car showrooms – and he doesn’t just mean the recent weather
At the time of writing, the EV sales for the first half of 2025 have just been announced and they are nearly 35% (34.6%) above 2024. In fact, the rise in sales means that one in every five new cars sold has been solely battery-powered – compared to one in six for the same period last year.
Longer-range plug-in hybrids are also enjoying a resurgence too, with sales of those up 31% and taking a market share of more than 10% on their own. Together, it means that EVs and PHEVs account for an incredible 31% of new car sales.
While the current EV sales rate is still some way short of the government-mandated 28% for EVs for this year, it’s easy to forget that those figures are still a great achievement – second only to China globally on a rolling 12-month basis. By comparison, take a look back to July 2010 – the first month that diesel sales overtook petrol in the UK, with an astonishingly high 50.6% market share. For 2025, diesels won’t even manage to take a 6% market share – a statement that would have been unthinkable in 2010.
That shift to EVs hasn’t come about easily, but it’s been achieved through a number of different factors. The first is the ease of charging publicly as the network grows and adapts to meet demand. We’ve seen a huge expansion in charging hubs and improvements in the network, along with legislation to ensure that public chargers are easier to access, more reliable and also have more transparent pricing.
The same is true domestically, where getting a home charger such as those from Ohme is a simple and straightforward process. Alongside that, car manufacturers are doing more and more package deals whereby a charger is included in the price of a new car, helping drivers to make that initial first step to EV motoring.
Then there’s the wide availability of favourable energy tariffs, making it easy to charge at off-peak periods for a fraction of charging at a public charger. The latest reduction in the Standard Variable Tariff rate of electricity on 1 July this year to 25.73p/kWh meant that a typical driver could run an EV for a year for £437.41. On a smart energy tariff that could be as low as £119. By comparison, a petrol car would cost more than £1,000, so the savings are obvious.
While the current EV sales rate is still some way short of the Government-mandated 28% for EVs for this year, it’s easy to forget that those figures are still a great achievement
On a fleet-specific front, there’s also cheap servicing and reduced downtime with less need for maintenance, making your fleet more cost efficient compared with ICE vehicles. Provide home charging for your drivers as well and the charging costs plummet compared to rapid charging on a public charger.
At a recent event, I watched a very interesting presentation about Austrian Post as a great real-world example of these savings in action. More than half of the logistics and postal services provider’s fleet turned electric earlier this year, having taken delivery of its 5,000th electric vehicle. The company is purchasing more than 1,000 extra electric vehicles every year with a goal of achieving nationwide CO₂-free last mile deliveries by 2030. It’s now the largest electric vehicle fleet in Austria.
However, as well as those savings on servicing and general running costs, Austrian Post has found another major benefit too – longevity. Put simply, because of all those factors mentioned, Austrian Post is holding onto the electric vehicles on its fleet for more time than it traditionally has with equivalent ICE vehicles – and also for longer than even it itself had originally forecast. The result is that its costs are further lowered, helping the business case even more.
The lessons learned from Austrian Post are excellent food for thought from a large fleet that has ‘been there and done that’ already, especially where vans are concerned and many fleets have yet to embrace EVs compared to their car-only counterparts.
Overall, it’s very easy to criticise the UK for being behind the government-stipulated goal for EV sales, or for the public charging network to be weak in specific localised areas or on particular hotspots in the calendar, but the reality is that it’s easy to forget the huge distance we’ve come and the incredible achievements that we’ve already made. And if you don’t believe me, jump in a time machine back to 2010 and chat to those diesel-loving new car buyers. If you told them what we know now about 2025, they simply wouldn’t believe you.
Peter McDonald is mobility director at Ohme. Prior to his current role, he spent two decades working for automotive manufacturers including Nissan, SEAT and the wider Volkswagen Group.
