According to a recent report out of the United Kingdom, increasingly desperate eclectic vehicle dealers have slashed the prices of their vehicles in an attempt to boost sales by massively ratcheting up discount deals. The attempt to stimulate sales comes despite massive government efforts to boost interest in EVs and limit sales of combustion-powered vehicles.

Such is what the UK financial website This Is Money reported in a recent expose on the state of the EV industry in the UK. According to its report, which cited market analysis by What Car?, dealerships have increased the average discount on an EV by a whopping 204 percent since January of 2023. The reason for those immensely steepened discounts has been sluggish sales.

According to that report, the discount on the average EV rose from 2.4 percent in January of 2023 to a massive 7.5 percent in January of 2024. That data came from What Car?’s New Car Deals service, and comes amidst a warning from a committee in the UK’s House of Lords that a “combination of higher purchase costs, insufficient charging infrastructure and mixed messaging” risks slowing EV adoption in Great Britain.

Commenting on what the committee found after extensive interviews, Baroness Parminter said, “The evidence we received shows the Government must do more to get people to adopt EVs. If it fails to heed our recommendations the UK won’t reap the significant benefits of better air quality and will lag in the slow lane for tackling climate change.”

In any case, the general impression from the report is that people are still more interested in combustion-powered vehicles than EVs. That appears to be confirmed by What Car? data showing that the aforementioned discounts on EVs have far outpaced the average discount for gas, diesel, and hybrid vehicles. Among those, the average discount rose by just 3.6 percent.