06-08-2025
EV Mandates have sucked the joy out of motoring
You are held up by roadworks, you will get towed if you park illegally for a few seconds, and torrential rain or may well make it impossible to see anything beyond the windscreen. Driving across Britain has always, to put it mildly, presented a few challenges.
And yet, at least there was always this: on a glorious August day, you could take the top down, pull down your shades, blast some music out of the speakers, and let the open road take you wherever it wanted to. There is just one snag. Electric vehicle mandates have destroyed the convertible. In reality, state control has made cars not just expensive, but hopelessly uncool as well – and we will all be poorer for that.
For a country with unreliable weather, Britain used to be the global centre for the convertible. Open topped cars were more popular in this country than most other major markets; they hit their peak in the 1990s when celebrities such as Princess Diana or George Michael could be regularly photographed with the hood of their car down.
They were aspirational, and a lot of fun to drive. Fast-forward a quarter of a century, however, and they are in steep decline. From a peak of 94,000 sales in 2004, by last year only 12,000 new convertible cars were sold in Britain, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders.
Even if you do want one for what remains of the holiday season, there are not even many left to choose from. There are only 16 models on sale, and whereas 70 per cent of marques used to offer a convertible in their range, now it is only 20 per cent. You are more likely to find a free parking space in Cornwall than you are to see a car with the hood down on Britain's roads this summer.
It is not hard to work out why. Sure, fashions change, and the ubiquitous SUV has become the vehicle of choice for most families. But it is not hard to identify the real villain. The mandates forcing us all to switch from petrol to electric vehicles are the real reason for the demise of the convertible.
There are a handful of EVs on sale that allow you to take the hood down, such as the Fiat 500e, and the upcoming MG Cyberstar has the look of a car that would get the Top Gear crowd excited. But they are very rare compared with the combustion engine industry, where for much of the 1990s and 2000s it was standard to produce a convertible version of all the main models alongside convertible-only models such as the best-selling Mazda MX-5.
The reason is simple. A folding roof adds significantly to the weight of a car, and batteries are already so heavy that makes them impractical, while the relatively small size of the market means it is rarely viable to produce niche versions of existing models.
There is a bigger issue here than just the demise of fun and exciting cars that add some pleasure to life, though that is not to be dismissed. The automotive industry has essentially been taken over by top-down state planning. Instead of having a free market, with lots of choice of affordable and reliable cars depending on what you wanted to drive, we now have a market that is controlled by targets, quotas, and subsidies.
Manufacturers are instructed to sell certain types of government approved vehicles, and drivers are offered bungs for buying them. The result? Cars are not only far more expensive than they need to be, and cost far more to insure as well. They are also far less cool. In reality, EVs have sucked the joy out of driving – and that is clearer on a sunny August afternoon than at any other time of the year.
