The scrappage scheme has given an
astonishing boost to Hyundai and Kia’s sales, with the former
reporting a year-on-year jump of 323 percent in new car
registrations for August.
At the Motor Finance
roundtable (see supplement with this issue), one senior
figure from a captive finance house said that dealers who also have
a Kia franchise have reported that many scrappage scheme customers
walk into showrooms and ask, “what is your cheapest new car?”, and
walk out again as the proud owner of a new Kia Picanto, retailing
at around £4,200.
Go deeper with GlobalData
There are loud calls from the motor
industry for the scheme to be extended once the current round of
funding runs out – although business secretary Lord Mandelson has
given verbal assurance that once it’s over, it’s over – to the
chagrin of the RMIF and SMMT (see The end is nigh).
The trend for scrappage
scheme-bought cars to be of the smallest and cheapest kind has
burnished the scheme’s environmental credentials. But in the long
term, how green will cars need to be in order to satisfy the desire
of millions of potential drivers in developing countries to own
their own vehicle?
Tony Blair recently announced that
it is “completely unrealistic to say to people you can't
have a car, you can’t use a motorbike” – and it is hard to
disagree. He reiterated the familiar cry for more investment in
building low-emission cars – whether hydrogen or electric – which
have a minimal environmental impact.
It is heartening to see that
manufacturers are rising to the challenge of building electric
cars, with the Frankfurt Motor Show having shone a spotlight on a
cornucopia of EVs – some of them more practical than others.
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By GlobalDataBut what of that other great hope
for cleaner propulsion systems, namely liquefied petroleum gas
(LPG)-fuelled vehicles, which were once heralded as the next big
thing for fleets?
Our cover story (A growing
appetite?) looks at LPG, and finds they might not be as
obsolete as some assume.
So, Magna and Sberbank have been
successful in their bid to buy Opel from General Motors (GM). It
appears that, as part of the deal, over a thousand jobs at GM
Europe’s UK factories will be cut, along with 11,000 across Europe
as a whole.
But almost simultaneously comes the
news that Tata has received a £10 million loan from the UK
government to speed the inception of its electric car project in
the UK, with the Indian carmaker to invest £25 million.
It is hoped that the end result will
be hundreds of new jobs – as well as a low-cost, mass-produced car,
the Indica Vista, which will find a place in the car-buying
public’s heart. The market for EVs is heating up – are motor
financiers keeping pace?
And finally, as Trevor McDonald used
to say, Motor Finance’s favourite name for an EV, launched
at Frankfurt. What exactly were the people at Citroën thinking when
they decided to call one of their new hybrid models the REVOLTe?
(below) Did they not talk to any native English speakers
before plumping for that particular name?
I don’t envy their British marketing
department, should the REVOLTe ever make it to UK showrooms.
