Changes we'd like to see in the motor industry

What's wrong with the motor industry and how would we change it?

TL;DR: What changes does the motor industry need to make?

From electric vehicle (EV) adoption to workplace equality, there's plenty holding the industry back from being as good as it could be. Here's what we think needs to change:

• Making EV incentives easier to find and understand
• Being upfront about the true cost of running an EV
• Cleaning up the ethics behind EV battery production
• Closing the gender gap still holding the industry back

What's holding the motor industry back?

The motor industry has a reputation problem – and it goes far beyond emissions.

From EV adoption barriers to gender gaps and outdated stereotypes... We’d love to see the day when these problems are in our rearview mirror.

But in order to do that, we need to face them head on.

So let’s jump in.

Electric vehicles

The switch to electric has been one of the most significant shifts the motor industry has seen in decades, but the transition hasn't been a smooth road.

For every step forward on EV adoption, there's a barrier that's still holding drivers back, and most of them come down to cost, clarity or confidence.

Cost to charge

Charging at home is the cheapest way to power an EV, so if you can't install a home charger, you'll pay more to charge in public.

Public charging prices have risen over the past year, and rapid chargers in particular can eat into the savings EVs are supposed to offer.

It's not that charging an EV is expensive by nature – it's still often cheaper than petrol or diesel – but the gap between charging at home and charging on the road is bigger than it should be.

That gap falls hardest on exactly the drivers who could benefit most from switching.

Incentive-awareness gap

It's not that the incentives don't exist, it's that most drivers don't know they're there.

Over seven in 10 UK drivers say financial incentives would influence them to switch to electric, yet fewer than a third feel they understand what's currently on offer.

That gap is even starker among those who haven't driven an EV, where the vast majority say they're not aware of what could help fund the switch.

The Electric Car Grant, worth up to £3,750 off a new EV, is applied at the point of lease with no separate application needed, and yet awareness of it remains patchy.

The same goes for charging support.

Renters and flat owners can claim towards the cost of a home charger, landlords can claim per socket for properties they let out, and there's a dedicated grant for drivers who only have access to on-street parking.

None of this requires a driveway or home ownership.

New builds are changing the picture too.

Since building regulations changed, most new homes and workplaces now have to include EV chargepoints as standard, meaning the charging infrastructure gap is quietly closing at a structural level, not just through one-off grants.

It's a change worth more attention than it gets.

If the industry wants EV adoption to keep climbing, closing the awareness gap matters as much as the incentives themselves.

A grant nobody knows about won't move the needle.

Honest cost of ownership

To get EVs off the ground, the industry leaned hard on affordability: £0 road tax, cheaper to charge, generous grants. All designed to sell people on making the switch.

Fast forward a couple of years and the picture has shifted.

EVs now pay road tax, a new eVED is on its way, and there's an Expensive Car Supplement to factor in too.

Road tax costs £10 in the first year, then the standard rate (£200) each year after. It's still cheaper than the equivalent for petrol or diesel cars, but worth knowing it's no longer free.

eVED is new territory: A mile-based tax for EVs and hybrids arriving in 2028, at 3p a mile for EVs and 1.5p a mile for hybrids.

It's designed to replace the fuel duty the Treasury loses out on as more drivers go electric. For a driver doing 8,000 miles a year, that works out at an extra £240 annually, still less than the equivalent fuel duty on a petrol car doing the same mileage.

Then there's the Expensive Car Supplement, an additional VED surcharge for higher-value cars, charged annually for five years from the second year of ownership.

For petrol, diesel and hybrid cars, it applies above a £40,000 list price.

For EVs, the threshold was raised to £50,000 for cars registered from April 2025, acknowledging that the average EV price sits close to, or above, the old cutoff.

None of this makes EVs a worse deal than petrol or diesel, they generally still come out ahead. But the affordability narrative that helped drive early adoption doesn't hold up anymore, and honesty about that matters more than clinging to an outdated pitch.

ZEV mandate

The ZEV mandate sets targets for how many EVs manufacturers have to sell each year, ramping up incrementally until 2030, when the ban on new petrol and diesel sales takes effect and the market moves to 100% electric.

The mandate is currently under review, with a government consultation open until 23 October 2026.

Manufacturers are broadly on track to meet 2026 targets, but the review comes amid pressure from parts of the industry for softer, more achievable annual targets that reflect real-world conditions like supply chain disruption and trade uncertainty.

Others in the sector warn that loosening the mandate now risks undermining the investment confidence that took years to build, particularly among charge point operators who've committed hundreds of millions of pounds on the promise of a steady trajectory.

Battery ethics

EVs are marketed as zero-emission vehicles, and on the road, that's true. But building the battery, and eventually disposing of it, isn't nearly as clean a story.

Battery production relies on materials like lithium and cobalt, both of which come with real environmental and human costs.

Lithium extraction is highly water-intensive, often in regions already short on water.

Cobalt mining, much of it concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been linked to toxic pollution and poor working conditions.

Recycling hasn't caught up either.

Only a small fraction of EV batteries are currently recycled globally, which sits at odds with how the industry likes to talk about circularity.

There are signs of progress; manufacturers are increasingly shifting to LFP batteries, (which cut cobalt out of the equation entirely) and some are investing in second-life schemes that repurpose old EV batteries for other uses rather than sending them to landfill.

But the industry has a long way to go before its supply chain matches the clean image it sells at the point of purchase.

EV technician skills shortage

None of the above matters much if there's nobody qualified to service the cars once they're on the road.

The Institute of the Motor Industry estimates a shortfall of almost 3,000 EV-qualified technicians by 2031, and the gap is already being felt: EV-related repair requests jumped sharply in 2024, yet fewer than a quarter of mechanics are currently trained to work on them.

It's a confidence problem as much as a workforce one.

Drivers are being asked to switch to a technology that not every local garage can yet fix, and that uncertainty doesn’t exactly help adoption.

Closing this gap needs sustained investment in training, not just from manufacturers, but across independent garages too, since most EVs will eventually end up being serviced outside the main dealer network.

The ‘vanishing women’ problem

One of the clearest examples of where the industry loses female talent? Its  been labelled the "vanishing women" phenomenon.

Women take maternity leave and simply don't return, often because coming back feels like starting over from scratch, notpicking up where they left off.

It's a cycle that reinforces itself.

Fewer women stay long enough to reach senior roles, which means fewer role models and mentors for the women coming up behind them. Which in turn makes it harder to build the kind of internal pressure needed to change the culture that caused the problem in the first place.

The fix isn't complicated, even if it takes commitment to follow through.

Structured return-to-work schemes and mentoring have been shown to meaningfully improve retention after maternity leave and other career breaks.

It's a solvable problem, but only if companies treat it as one worth solving.

Outdated stereotypes

The stereotype is a familiar one: women don't know cars, aren't interested in cars, and are somehow the "secondary" decision-maker when it comes to buying one.

It's a lazy assumption that's stuck around far longer than it should have, and it doesn't match reality.

Women are heavily involved in new car purchasing decisions, whether that's as the primary buyer, the joint decision-maker, or the one doing the research before a household commits to a lease.

Yet the industry still designs, markets and sells cars as though the old  stereotype holds true.

Showrooms, marketing campaigns and even car reviews have historically been built around a male customer as the default, leaving half the market treated as an afterthought rather than a genuine audience.

Time for the industry to change gear

None of these problems are unsolvable.

The barriers holding EV adoption back are largely about clarity and confidence rather than the technology itself, and closing the incentive-awareness gap alone would go a long way.

The gender gap won't fix itself either, but the industry already knows what works: Better retention after career breaks, real accountability behind diversity targets, and treating half the market as the core audience it actually is, not an afterthought.

What connects all of it is a willingness to be honest about where the industry still falls short, rather than only celebrating the wins.

Progress on electrification means little if the people building, selling and fixing these cars don't reflect the people buying them. And a "zero-emission" pitch means less if it ignores what happens further up the supply chain.

It's part of why we try to speak to a genuinely broad audience here at Carparison, rather than defaulting to who the industry has traditionally assumed is listening.

Small choices like that won't fix everything on their own, but they're part of the same shift the wider industry needs to make.

We'd rather see these problems solved than swept under the rug.

The motor industry has changed dramatically over the past decade, and it can change again, but only if it's willing to look honestly at what still needs fixing.