---
title: "Noted on 1 Sep 2026"
author: Marc Roberts
date: 2026-09-01
url: https://www.marcroberts.info/notes/2026-09-01-zev-mandate-review-consultation/
---

# Noted on 1 Sep 2026

I've been reading through DfT's ZEV mandate review consultation, which opened recently and runs until 23 October. I have opinions.

The headline numbers are genuinely good news: more than one in four new cars sold are now electric, there are over two million EVs on UK roads, and home charging saves drivers around £1,400 a year.

That last figure is worth shedding some more light on.

It's a home-charging number. It assumes off-street parking, a home charger, and a preferential electricity tariff (EV specific or time-of-use). Millions of UK households have none of those. For them the transition looks completely different: public charging at several times the unit cost, or no transition at all.

Shared fleets have always been the mechanism that covers that gap. Car club vehicles are newer, cleaner and overwhelmingly low-emission. They can give a household without a driveway access to an EV without needing anywhere to put one.

So what's happened to that mechanism? It's lost almost half of its national fleet with Zipcar's exit at the beginning of the year. And CoMoUK's latest data shows the EV share within remaining car club fleets has fallen for two years running now, as operators facing rising permit, insurance and energy costs buy the cheaper vehicle instead.

The shared-fleet route to EV access is contracting at exactly the time when the policy needs it most.

The consultation is aimed at manufacturers, suppliers, charge point operators and dealers (the usual suspects). Shared transport doesn't appear in that list. It SHOULD because the households furthest from an EV are the ones a car club reaches and a purchase incentive doesn't.

If you work in shared mobility, this is worth twenty minutes before 23 October. It's one of the few moments the sector gets asked directly. Are you responding?