The electric car carnage has only just begun

They are cheaper to run. They can be simpler to manufacture. And of course, they are far better for the environment, playing a crucial role in hitting our targets to cut carbon emissions.

Rewind only a couple of years, and electric cars were the future. Yet this week, it has emerged that Ford will have to dramatically limit the supply of petrol cars to avoid paying huge fines for not selling enough of them. The fear must now be that the electric car carnage has only just begun – with Net Zero turning into a sledgehammer for the deindustrialisation of the West, and China the only clear winner.

As with so much of the legislation passed during the last five years, setting a quota for the percentage of EVs companies had to sell probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Manufacturers now have to ensure that 22pc of the cars they shift off the forecourt are battery powered, rising steadily to 80pc by the end of this decade, and 100pc by 2035. If they don’t hit their quota, the senior executives will get ten years hard labour in Siberia (well, actually it is a fine of up to £15,000 per vehicle, but it nonetheless feels extremely draconian). Like Soviet planners in the 1950s, the architects of this legislation presumably assumed that all you had to do was set a target and everything would fall into place.

The trouble is, quotas don’t work any better in Britain than they did in communist Russia. EVs have some serious problems: the range is not good enough, we have not built enough charging points to power them, the repair bills are expensive, the insurance ruinous, and second hand prices are plummeting. Once all raw materials and transport costs are factored in, they may not be much better for the environment.

Yet the masterminds foisting this legislation on businesses don’t appear to have given much thought to what will happen if the quota isn’t met. Now Ford, one of the biggest auto giants in the world, and still a major manufacturer in Europe, has provided an answer. “We can’t push EVs into the market against demand,” said Martin Sander, the General Manager of Ford Model eEurope, at a conference this week. “We’re not going to pay penalties… The only alternative is to take our shipments of [engine] vehicles to the UK down and sell these vehicles somewhere else.”

In effect, Ford will limit its sales of cars in the UK. If you had your eye on a new model, forget it. You will have to put your name on a waiting list, just as East Germans had to wait years for a Trabant. Heck, we may even see a black market in off-the-books Transit vans. Ford is the first to spell it out in public, but we can be confident all the other manufacturers are thinking the same thing. They can’t absorb huge fines. The only alternative is to limit the sales of petrol cars.

It gets worse. At exactly the same time as Western companies are restricting their output, Chinese EV manufacturers are beginning to dump their wares on the West at artificially low prices, largely thanks to generous support from Beijing. Britain and the rest of Europe are now facing a terrible choice. Either we accept these massive imports – and all the embedded emissions associated with shipping them across the world – and watch as our domestic automotive industry collapses. Or we impose huge tariffs on Chinese imports, and watch the cost of driving rise.

It is not just cars. Energy costs have spiralled because we refuse to develop oil and gas, are too nervous of fracking – even though it has been a huge success in the US (mostly under those, er, far right Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden) – and we rely too heavily on intermittent wind and solar power. Some chemicals and heavy industry firms are abandoning Europe because they can’t afford their power bills any more. We have supply chain rules that are slowly crushing the life out of retail and fashion chains. And we have loaded companies with so many climate targets they are virtually unable to invest any more. Step by step, Europe is deindustrialising itself, handing leadership to China, and making itself poorer in the process.

It is madness. Our approach to Net Zero is turning into the greatest act of economic self harm in generations. It does not need to be this way. Yes, carbon emissions need to be steadily reduced. But that does not mean the laws of supply and demand have been suspended, or that we can simply mandate what products customers want to buy, or ignore whether our industries can remain competitive on the global market. Nor does it make any sense to reduce our emissions ahead of the rest of the world.

Instead, we need to rip up our current climate plan, and start again, and this time make sure we protect living standards and our major companies. In the meantime, get your name down for a new Ford as soon as you can. What used to be an accessible, everyday car will soon be in short supply – and the wait could be a long one.