The UK just eliminated its EV rebate incentive

The UK government has ended its plug-in car grant program effective immediately, it announced. The scheme first launched in 2011 with grants up to £5,000 ($6,089) or 25 percent of the cost of the car, but were gradually reduced to £1,500 ($1,827) where they sat until today. The grant ends on future sales, but will still be honored for any buyers that already applied for it. 

The program had achieved its goal of kickstarting the UK’s electric revolution, the Department for Transport (DfT) said in a press release. It noted that sales of EVs increased from less than 1,000 in 2011 to nearly 100,000 in the first five months of this year alone. It added that EVs now offer “significant savings” over ICE vehicles due to the high cost of gasoline and diesel, and that owners can still get tax and other incentives. 

“The government has always been clear the plug-in car grant was temporary and previously confirmed funding until 2022-23,” the government said. “Successive reductions in the size of the grant, and the number of models it covers, have had little effect on rapidly accelerating sales or on the continuously growing range of models being manufactured.”

The DfT now plans to focus on charging stations, but didn’t say if it planned to boost the £1.6 billion budget it had already set aside. It also pledged £300 million ($365 million) toward incentives on plug-in taxis, motorcycles, vans, trucks and wheelchair-accessible vehicles.

The UK promised to eliminate ICE vehicles by 2040 as part of its Road to Zero strategy designed to cut harmful emissions. However, some EU countries like Sweden or Ireland have more ambitious plans to hit that goal by 2030 and even earlier. 

After the maximum rebate was cut from £2,500 to £1,500 just six months ago and restricted to eligible EVs to models under £32,000, the plug-in car grant program appeared to be on life support. Critics decried the reduction at the time and are likely to be scathing toward the grant’s complete elimination. Potential EV buyers motivated by record gasoline prices are also likely to be unhappy about the decision.

“We need to move the market even faster… which means we should be doubling down on incentives,” an industry rep told Autocar late last year. “Other global markets are already doing so whereas we are cutting, expecting the industry to subsidize the transition, and putting up prices for customers. UK drivers risk being left behind on the transition to zero-emission motoring.”

Lightyear’s very pricey solar-powered car will go into production in late 2022

EV startup Lightyear debuted its first solar-powered vehicle this week, a sleek sedan called the Lightyear 0. The company gave us a peek at a production prototype of Lightyear 0 in 2019, and at first glance, not much has changed. The car is essentially an unconventional hybrid equipped with both a conventional 60-kilowatt-hour EV battery pack and solar panels on its roof, hood and hatch. The solar panels on the Lightyear 0 will charge automatically whenever the car is exposed to the sun — it doesn’t matter if it’s parked or driving.

The Lightyear 0 isn’t as much solar-powered as solar-assisted. In order to drive for long distances, the vehicle has to tap into its battery reserve. The car’s solar panels can provide 44 miles of range per day in a sunny climate, whereas its EV range is 388 miles. But for drivers with exceptionally short commutes or those who need their vehicle infrequently, the Lightyear 0 could allow them to no longer spend money on gas or charging. The company claims that those with a daily commute of 22 miles can drive the Lightyear 0 for two straight months in the Netherlands summer without needing to charge. Drivers in sunnier climates can go for longer. Lightyear claims that the sun can provide the Lightyear 0 with anywhere between 3,700 to 6,800 miles of range annually.

It’s important to note that Lightyear 0 owners will need to drive for a significantly long time in order to justify the vehicle’s purchase as a cost-saving measure. The Lightyear 0 will cost €250,000 (which amounts to roughly $263,262 USD), and the company only plans on making 946 units. But a more reasonably-priced vehicle is on the way. Lightyear recently also unveiled a prototype of a $33,000 solar-powered car, which is scheduled to go into production by 2025.

NHTSA deepens its probe into Tesla collisions with stationary emergency vehicles

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has deepened (PDF) its investigation into a series of Tesla crashes involving first responders to an engineering analysis. As The Washington Post explains, that’s the last stage of an investigation, and the agency typically decides within a year if a vehicle should be recalled or if the probe should be closed. In addition to upgrading the probe’s status, the investigation now covers 830,000 units, or almost all the Tesla Model Y, Model X, Model S and Model 3 vehicles the company has sold since 2014.

This development expands upon the investigation the NHTSA initiated back in 2021 following 11 collisions of Tesla vehicles with parked emergency responders and trucks. Since then, the agency has identified and added six more incidents that occurred over the past couple of years. In most of those crashes, Autopilot gave up vehicle control less than one second before impact, though Automatic Emergency Braking intervened in at least half of them. 

The NHTSA also found that the first responders on the road would’ve been visible to the drivers at an average of eight seconds before impact. Plus, forensic data showed no driver took evasive action between 2 to 5 seconds prior to impact even though they all had their hands on the wheel. Apparently, nine of the 11 vehicles originally involved in the investigation exhibited no driver engagement visual or chime alerts until the last minute before the collision. Four of them didn’t exhibit any engagement visual or chime alert at all. 

The NHTSA also looked into 191 crashes not limited to incidents involving first responders. In 53 of those collisions, the agency found that the driver was “insufficiently responsive” as evidenced by them not intervening when needed. All these suggest that while drivers are complying with Tesla’s instructions to make sure they have their hands on the wheel at all times, they’re not necessarily paying attention to their environment. 

That said, the NHTSA noted in its report that “a driver’s use or misuse of vehicle components, or operation of a vehicle in an unintended manner does not necessarily preclude a system defect.” As University of South Carolina law professor Bryant Walker Smith told The Post, monitoring the position of a driver’s hands isn’t effective enough, because it doesn’t ensure a driver’s capability to respond to what they encounter on the road. 

In addition, the NHTSA noted that the ways a driver may interact with the system is an important design consideration for Level 2 autonomous driving technologies. These systems still aren’t full autonomous and still mostly depend on the human driver, after all. “As such, ensuring the system facilitates the driver’s effective performance of this supervisory driving task presents an important safety consideration,” the agency wrote.