"Misinformation" is what the recent House of Lords report on the UK’s bungled EV strategy called some of the mainstream media reporting about electric cars.

“Several witnesses told us that media coverage of EVs was inaccurate and portrayed EVs in a disproportionately negative light - noting that even when corrected, fact checks often do not reach as wide an audience as the original article,” it read. 

The report highlighted articles from the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Telegraph as examples of this and quoted Ford as saying a “vocal anti-EV campaign” had emerged in early 2023.

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The boss of the UK’s biggest-selling car maker, the Volkswagen Group, isn't one for such statements. Alex Smith has instead said that such reporting simply makes him more determined to counter such reporting with facts.

“If I read something which is obviously misleading, then it just makes me and the team here even more determined to ensure that we provide great information and products to consumers,” he told me in the VW Group’s UK boardroom on the day the Lords’ report was published. 

Smith is feeling buoyed by the VW Group’s progress in selling EVs – something that it, like all car makers, has to do in increasing numbers in 2024 after the introduction of the ZEV mandate, which dictates that 22% of any car maker’s UK sales must be electric.

While EV sales grew 18% across the total market in 2023, at VW Group, the growth was closer to 50%.

“There has been massive media coverage on electric vehicles from many different angles, but it all comes back to compelling products,” Smith said. “If you have them and have compelling and constant new products, then there is the consumer interest.”

Still, Smith believes that incentives are needed to further stimulate demand and also called for binding targets for the infrastructure rollout to be set in the same way that car makers have been in the government dictating the amount of EVs car makers must grow each year.

Intriguingly, Smith said the ZEV mandate itself would be reviewed in a couple of years, leaving the door open to a softening of the sliding scale of EV sales. At present, firms must get to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. 

“We know that there is provision for review of the zero emission [vehicle] mandate in a couple of years' time," he said. "This will allow everybody to take stock and then figure out exactly what might be necessary in order to continue to drive the transition in the second half of the decade.”