- eVED dominates Westminster EV group meeting
- 200 Vertu GMs lobby MPs over ZEV Mandate
- First composites for Omoda Jaecoo show 1.8% RoS
- FLA submits DCA redress consultation
- JLR: ‘We did not fire Gerry McGovern’
- WEEK AHEAD: UK unemployment
- HMRC still failing to deliver
- Graduates will be worse off from the Budget
- Renault axes Mobilize car-sharing division
- China resumes talks on EU EV minimum price
- OPINION: Pay-per-click under a fragmented AI market
eVED dominates Westminster EV group meeting
The government’s recently-proposed eVED pay-per-mile charge for electric cars dominated proceedings at a meeting of the Electric Vehicle All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) this week.
Led by Perran Moon MP, the meeting covered a wide range of topics focusing on aspects of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ November Budget that impacted the automotive retail industry, including the ZEV Mandate, used car pricing, battery health and the eVED consultation. The EV APPG will feed back views to government.
Auto Sunday was the only retail sector publication present at the APPG meeting and was able to voice subscribers’ views.
During the meeting, there was near-unanimous condemnation for the timing of the eVED announcement and the impact it had on consumer confidence toward adopting electric cars.
Speaking after the meeting, Cox Automotive’s insight director, Philip Nothard, one of the participants, said: “The growing case for reviewing the current requirements of the ZEV mandate is becoming hard to ignore, especially as 2025 has shaped up to be one of the most challenging years for the automotive industry.
200 Vertu GMs lobby MPs over ZEV Mandate
Vertu’s 200 general managers are writing to their local MPs to protest against the ZEV Mandate and the impact it is having, and will have, on both the auto retail sector and car and van manufacturers in the UK.
The letters have been spurred on by Vertu CEO Robert Forrester who has been a vocal critic of the ZEV Mandate.
Speaking to Auto Sunday, Forrester said: “The ZEV Mandate is the most important issue facing the sector. The government will have to change the mandate or risk further damaging the automotive industry in this country.”
The move comes as the European Union looks set to row back on its 2035 deadline to ban internal combustion engined cars.
First composites for Omoda Jaecoo show 1.8% RoS
Omoda Jaecoo retailers are seeing a network average return on sales running at 1.8%, according to Gary Lan who heads the two brands, plus Chery, in the UK.
Speaking exclusively to Auto Sunday, Lan said the manufacturer had just started seeing composites for the network and the figure was for the past few months.
FLA submits DCA redress consultation
The Finance & Leasing Association, in its submission to the FCA’s consultation on its proposed DCA redress scheme, has called for a “fair, targeted and workable solution.
“While lenders fully support a robust and credible redress programme for customers who have suffered loss, the FLA warns that the scheme as drafted cannot deliver the fairness, simplicity, finality, efficiency or certainty the FCA set out as its own guiding principles.”
The FLA wants the FCA to recalibrate the scheme so it identifies and compensates only those who have actually suffered loss, avoids awarding regress where no unfair relationship arose, and is operationally deliverable within a “realistic” implementation period.
JLR: ‘We did not fire Gerry McGovern’
In a surprise update, JLR has announced it did not fire chief designer Gerry McGovern. “It is untrue that we have terminated Gerry McGovern’s employment and we do not intent to further comment on speculative stories,” the firm said in a statement.
It declined to tell Automotive News whether McGovern still worked for the firm.
WEEK AHEAD
Tuesday, UK unemployment
Wednesday, CPI and RPI
Thursday, Bank of England interest rate minutes
Friday, UK retail sales
Friday, GfK consumer confidence
* Have an event or announcement coming up? Let us know and we will include it for FREE
DATA INSIGHT
HMRC still failing to deliver
553 years: Time taxpayers spent on the phone to HMRC between October 2025 and September 2025, according to UHY Hacker Young. Taxpayers regularly wait an hour on hold to speak to an advisor – and accountants are being told not to chase HMRC over outstanding tax queries, reports The Sunday Times.
Graduates will be worse off from the Budget
£24,500: Extra amount graduates will pay as a result of a triple whammy of measures in the Autumn Budget. Frozen loan repayment and income tax thresholds, and changes to salary sacrifice schemes, will all cost graduates. Before the general election, Labour told graduate voters they would pay less under its leadership, reports The Sunday Times.
GLOBAL AUTO
Renault axes Mobilize car-sharing division
Renault Group is axing its Mobilize car sharing and microcar programs, citing a lack of profitability. Car sharing services in Madrid and Milan – under the Zity name – will end shortly and production of the Duo – a Renault Twizy successor – will stop.
The Mobilize brand will still be used for the group’s financial services offerings.
China resumes talks on EU EV minimum price
China has restarted negotiations with the EU over minimum price plans for Chinese-built electric cars, reports Automotive News. Tariffs of up to 45.3% on Chinese EVs were agreed in October 2024 following an EC investigation into unfair subsidies.
Despite the subsidies, Chinese OEMs have doubled their market share in Europe, by shifting sales to plug-in hybrids and ICE cars that are not subject to the tariffs.
OPINION
Pay-per-click under a fragmented AI market
Currently just 0.5% of Autotrader’s users come from AI large language models, such as ChatGPT, according to data revealed by classified site this week.
Autotrader, a listed company, believes recent share price falls are due to unfounded links to other classified businesses warning about the impact AI will have on their operations.
Consumers bypassing Autotrader and using AI to find their next car is what the stock market fears. However, the company itself argues it will be safe from AI disruption because their data is proprietary and that its 400,000-plus car ads refresh every 30 days, so AI would not be able to scrape the information reliably.
With AI helping top-of-funnel activity, it could evolve like Google’s search has; with monetisation ramping up over time with paid placements.
While Autotrader isn’t yet working with any AI platforms in this respect, it hasn’t ruled it out. But it has imagined one future where AI becomes the de facto place everyone visits for information – effectively replacing old-school internet search engines.
In this scenario, pay-per-click becomes far more nuanced because unlike in search, where Google is dominant and retailers know where to spend their budgets, in AI there are far more choices. In the UK, ChatGPT is the market leader, with just over twice the traffic of Google’s Gemini, but there are also other significant players such as Copilot and Perplexity.
The question for retailers is how they spread their marketing across this field.
Here, the retailer mindset will be brutally pragmatic. AI may feel novel, but marketing budgets are not elastic, and any shift will be judged on one thing: whether it moves metal.
Dealers already live in a world of performance trade-offs. Every pound diverted into AI-driven discovery is a pound not spent elsewhere. The early test for AI platforms will not be traffic volumes or engagement metrics, but whether they can demonstrate intent and conversion at a cost that stacks up against well-understood channels.
Any AI platform asking for budget will need to offer the same commercial clarity.
Fragmentation also matters. Unlike search, where Google’s dominance simplifies decision-making, the AI landscape risks becoming messy very quickly. Retailers are unlikely to spray small sums across multiple models just to hedge their bets. More likely is a wait-and-see approach, with spend flowing only to the one or two platforms that can prove scale, consistency and measurable outcomes.
In that context, the real question may not be whether AI eats into classified spend, but who controls the transaction layer. If AI remains a guide rather than a marketplace, retailers may still default to trusted platforms when it comes to closing the sale. If, however, AI can shorten the journey from recommendation to enquiry in a way that is cheaper or more effective, budgets will follow.
For now, dealers will watch the data, not the hype. AI may reshape how consumers start their car-buying journey, but retailers will judge its value the same way they always have: by where the last click came from, how much it cost, and whether it helped shift another car off the forecourt.
Tristan Young
Editorial Director
Get in touch: tristan@autosunday.co.uk
ISSN 2977-6597