What happens if the consumer decides not to buy an EV?

It is this confusion that is partly being blamed for the slow-motion car crash now unfolding in EV sales, with industry figures published on Monday showing that their market share slipped from 19.7pc in December to just 14.7pc in January.

That was after annual figures showed the proportion of car sales that were electric slipped from 16.6pc in 2022 to 16.5pc in 2023, the first time the EV segment has gone into reverse.

The next stage is massive fines - as much as £15,000 per vehicle in fact:

This requires 22pc of new cars sold this year to be ZEVs, rising to 28pc in 2025, 52pc in 2028 and 80pc by 2030. Manufacturers who fail to meet the targets must pay fines or cover shortfalls through an emissions trading scheme.

The poor old manufacturers are left pushing on a string.

The background logic here is what is stupid. We don’t have to go far to find someone who’ll tell us that what we buy is all determined by the Big Corporations. It’s advertisin’, innit? They brainwash us, right?

That near all advertising is not “Buy this!” but is “Buy my this!” seems to escape. But here we’ve actually got a test. Do consumers rule or producers?

We’ve also gone through this before. Producers were forced to lower the average CO2 emissions of their fleets. Rolls Royce, embedded within BMW, could do this. Bentley, within VW, as well. Aston Martin, selling only those sporting beasts, could not. Which is what gave us the Cygnet, about as silly a motoring idea as ever saw light of day and about as successful as the Ford Edsel.

Which is where our stupidity diagnosis comes in. Those Rolls Royce minds in Whitehall have designed a grand plan To Save The Planet. And they’ve done it on the most basic misdiagnosis of who is the decision maker in an economy. It isn’t the producers who shepherd the consumer sheep into buying whatever it is that is produced. It’s the consumer making the decision. And if the consumer says no then that’s that.

This entire plan for EVs is based upon producer sovereignty. But that’s not how the world works - consumer sovereignty is. And basing your grand plan To Save All Of Humanity on an incorrect piece of sub-Marxist wibble, well, that’s really pretty stupid, isn’t it.