Everything Electric TECH opens its latest news round-up with a number that reframes the British car market. Citing a report from the SMMT, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the host says UK consumers bought 516,490 new battery electric vehicles in the 12 months to May 2026, against 54,110 new petrol cars. Read that carefully, because the comparison is narrower than it first looks. The petrol figure covers pure petrol cars, and the video says petrol hybrids are currently the most popular type of car sold in the UK, with their sales flat rather than rising or falling. What has collapsed is the plain combustion car. Diesel, the host says, is effectively already gone from the new car market.
The regulatory backdrop is worth putting next to that figure, because the video does not spend much time on it. The UK operates a zero emission vehicle mandate, a public regulation that sets a rising annual share of zero emission cars each manufacturer must sell, with flexibilities and credits attached. Sales mix in a market like that is not purely a measure of consumer enthusiasm. It also reflects how carmakers choose to price, allocate and discount their own model ranges to hit a target. The second caveat is scope. New registrations are not the same as cars on the road, and the UK's existing fleet remains overwhelmingly combustion powered and will for years. Both things can be true: the new car market can flip decisively while the average car in a supermarket car park stays petrol for another decade. The first number tells you where the industry is going. The second tells you how long the trip takes.
The host's framing of why this happened is openly opinionated, and worth separating from the data. He argues the shift is proceeding regardless of political argument, noting that the proposed 2030 ban on new petrol car sales was introduced by a Conservative government rather than by environmental campaigners, and that carmakers and trade unions lobbying against it have, in his view, backed the wrong horse. He also points out that most British-badged manufacturers are foreign owned and concentrate on expensive luxury cars rather than small affordable ones, which he says leaves them poorly placed to argue about what ordinary buyers want. Those are the host's opinions, not findings in the SMMT report, and the video does not present them as such.
The rest of the episode covers ground worth flagging. The video says Toyota has announced development of a car with 1,200 km of WLTP range, around 750 miles, using what it describes as the first mass-produced solid state battery, with charging in about 10 minutes and possible production starting in 2028. The host's complaint is timing rather than technology: he argues Toyota could have been building smaller, cheaper EVs in the meantime. He also reports Nio announcing a 62.3 percent sales increase year on year at 107,658 cars so far this year, covers a Vancouver company repurposing retired EV packs into commercial scale storage, and closes with a set of battery thefts from trailers outside Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory, which he says local sheriff's records put at 11 incidents this year.
Bottom line: the interesting number is not 516,490. It is 54,110. A new petrol car is now a niche product in Britain, and the hybrid is the compromise absorbing everyone who is not ready yet. That is the real fight for the next three years, EV against hybrid, and nobody lobbying against a 2030 date seems to have noticed the argument moved. If you are waiting for the market to decide before you buy, it has. The remaining question is whether the used market and the public chargers catch up fast enough to make the decision comfortable.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.