The House | The war in Iran lends new urgency to the UK’s Electric Vehicle transition

6 min read37 min

The timing could hardly be more fitting. As the crisis in the Middle East drives up prices at the petrol pumps, growing numbers of motorists are contemplating going electric – with every EV on the road helping to shield its owner from rising energy prices and bolster the UK’s energy security.

For motorists in my constituency of Camborne, Redruth & Hayle– as well as for the more than the one in ten of my constituents who rely on heating oil to keep their warms home – the war in Iran has created immediate, and very painful, consequences. The RAC Foundation has estimated that since the war began the cost of petrol has jumped by 12 pence per litre and diesel by 25 pence – with British motorists forking out an additional £300 million to keep their cars on the road in less than a month. We are experiencing the second great energy supply shock this decade, Britons are learning all over again how our dependence on imported fossil fuels leaves us acutely vulnerable to global forces beyond our control.

The conflict in the Middle East is vindicating this Labour government’s commitment to getting the UK off the fossil fuels rollercoaster and onto homegrown renewables. And it’s also proving why the Government was right to resist the Conservatives’ calls last year to scrap the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, as well as the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

In fact, the war in Iran lends new urgency to the UK’s Electric Vehicle transition. It’s really quite simple: no matter where the fuel that powers your car was dug up – whether in the North Sea or the Middle East – its price will always be dictated by global markets. That means, in times of war or crisis, British motorists are left paying the price for decisions made in Trump’s White House and Putin’s Kremlin. Every EV we get on the road – increasingly powered by homegrown British renewables – is therefore a vital step forwards in reducing our dependence on oil, and establishing the UK’s long-term energy security. And the more of these EVs that we can build in the UK, with batteries put together in Somerset using lithium mined in Cornwall and processed on Teesside, the better for all the jobs and communities that our car industry sustains.

The EV transition is especially important for those motorists who were hit hardest by the last energy transition. Outside London, around eight in ten households own a car. And while we often wrongly characterise car ownership as a sign of affluence, in much of Cornwall, the opposite is true: here, in rural areas where public transport is now limited, cars are a vital lifeline, helping to connect some of our most vulnerable communities with essential public services and economic opportunities. It’s these drivers who have been hit hardest by soaring prices on our petrol forecourts – and who stand to benefit the most from ditching their petrol and diesel cars and going electric.

For many of these drivers, EVs are becoming an increasingly attractive and affordable alternative to petrol and diesel cars. The Government’s Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate is driving down the costs of new EVs, as manufacturers compete to sell more EVs to hit their EV sales targets. Meanwhile, EVs coming into the used car market are reaching price parity with their petrol and diesel competitors, with second-hand EV sales increasing by 48 per cent in 2025.

And as more renewables come online, and with ongoing geopolitical tensions all but certain to continue to drive instability in international energy markets, the lifetime savings that come with driving an EV will only continue to grow. Before the conflict in Iran began, a typical EV driver was already saving on average £850 a year charging an EV over fuelling a petrol car. With petrol passing 1.50 a litre, those savings have jumped to over £1000 a year. Were a barrel of oil to hit $120, petrol could hit £1.70, those savings would increase to almost £1,200 a year. If oil were to hit $150 a barrel, petrol could pass £1.90, and the savings that can come from running an EV would jump to almost £1400.

Clearly, the government’s efforts to support the EV transition are working. Manufacturers are defying the naysayers by hitting their EV targets under the ZEV mandate in every year of the scheme’s existence, and 2025 marking a record year for EV sales – with nearly one in four cars sold being electric. This is why I feel that the calls we’re hearing from some quarters for the ZEV Mandate to be weakened are so ill-timed. With Autotrader reporting an 28 percent increase in EV enquiries, and Octopus Electric Vehicles reporting an 89 per cent increase in orders, interest in EVs has increased significantly since the conflict in Iran began – a conflict that has made it abundantly clear that the UK needs to make the switch away from cars that are powered by foreign oil, to cars that are powered by domestic renewables. Now is the moment to accelerate the UK’s EV transition, not to slow it down.

But it’s also clear that if we’re protecting British motorists from global volatility in the long-term, there’s more that we need to do. That includes making it easier for people in terraced houses to charge their vehicles from home, building out the country’s EV charging infrastructure, particularly in rural areas, and looking at how to ensure that drivers who rely on public chargers get a fair deal.

We also need to see more concerted efforts to tackle what the Department for Transport has described as the “concerted campaign of misinformation” surrounding the EV transition. In 2024, the House of Lords’ Environment and Climate Change Committee identified misinformation as being a key barrier to EV uptake and called on the government to show “commensurate urgency” in “tackling misinformation and raising awareness about the benefits of EVs with the public”. More than two years on, as the Commons Transport Select Committee heard this week, misinformation continues to be concerningly widespread.

Knowing that you have all the facts to hand is essential before committing to a major purchase like a car. But as, new polling published this month has found, the majority of drivers of non-EVs scored just two or less out of ten in an EV knowledge test – with, for instance, almost half of respondents wrongly believing that EVs are more likely to catch fire than petrol or diesel cars when in fact the opposite is true. Unsurprisingly, the polling found that those with such a poor understanding of EVs are significantly less likely to want their next car to be an EV than those who scored well. That’s the result of this “campaign of misinformation” at work.

It’s sobering that so many people are now worse off because misleading information put them off switching to EVs. The more government, the media and industry act together to tackle this and improve public understanding, the better.