The electric car industry was celebrating today after the government unveiled long awaited plans to provide a £5,000 grant to individuals and businesses purchasing plug in vehicles.
The scheme will come into effect from January next year, by which point a range of new electric cars such as Mitsubishi’s iMiev and Nissan’s Leaf are expected to be available.
The initiative will be managed by the Office of Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV), which will provide grants worth 25 per cent of the sale price of an electric vehicle, although each grant will be capped at £5,000.
Significantly, the grants will be available to individuals and businesses, which are regarded by many electric car firms as crucial early adopters of the technology.
“The scheme is open to all businesses and fleets and there is no limit on the number of cars they can purchase,” a spokeswoman for the Department for Transport (DfT)told BusinessGreen.com. “It is the car, rather than the individual, that is eligible for the incentive.”
To support the new scheme the government will also invest £30m in the development of new electric vehicle hubs, designed to help spread the technology beyond its current home in the capital.
The new Plugged-in Places scheme will provide funding to support the rollout of recharging infrastructure in London, Milton Keynes and the North East, ultimately resulting in the installation of 11,000 public recharging points over the next three years.
As well as conventional recharging points, the schemes will also test innovative new infrastructure such as fast charge systems and battery swap stations.
The DfT said that a competition to identify a second wave of electric vehicle hubs would be launched later this year with the West Midlands, Cornwall, Sheffield, the Lake District, Greater Manchester and Northern Ireland all expected to bid for funding. Meanwhile, OLEV is to consult with Highways Agency and Network Rail to investigate installing recharging points along major transport corridors.
“Decarbonising transport isn’t an aspiration, it’s a reality,” said Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis.
“By this time next year, cutting edge motorists will be on the roads with these next-generation cars they’ve purchased because of our help. And thanks to the Plugged-In Places we will have infrastructure in place to support this growing early market.”
The announcement was broadly welcomed by electric car manufacturers, which predicted that the grants would make plug in cars competitive with conventional alternatives.
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Source: businessgreen.com
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