Controversial people and products enjoying lucrative comebacks at the minute include Oasis, the band, and diesel, the fuel. This is not some sort of conjecture on my part. Sales of factory-fresh, diesel-powered light commercial vehicles (LCVs) are up this year. Derv-head LCV buyers aren’t disappearing anytime soon.
They like their diesel car-derived vans, pick-ups, 4x4s and traditional LCVs of the small, medium, large and XL variety way too much. Happy buyers/users include taxi and minibus firms, builders, farmers, collection/delivery drivers, utility companies and countless others who mainly need such vehicles as essential work tools. And in the case of the growing number of people priced out of the housing market, they’re tiny temporary or permanent homes.
Sales and market share for this wide array of new diesel LCVs have increased this year, with more than 200,000 registered up until the end of August. Comparing like with like over the same period last year, the number of registrations and slice of the pie for small/light 100 per cent-electric versions shrunk, with just 11,000 private owners, businesses or local/national governments and other state agencies signing up for them.
That’s bad. But it gets worse. Demand for up-to-4.25-tonne electric vans between January and August 2024 plummeted by almost 40 per cent compared with the same period in 2023. Only 566 have been bought in Britain this year. Last month, fewer than one a day was sold, representing an unsustainable 85 per cent slump (vs August 2023).
