France and the UK Were Level in June. By September, France Was 42% Electric

In June, France and the UK were level. France registered 29.6% battery-electric cars that month; the UK registered 30.0%. Across the whole second quarter the two were within half a point of each other.

Then France pulled away. July went to 35%, August to 38%, and in September 41.7% of new cars sold in France were fully electric: 65,243 of 156,629, more than double the electric volume of a year earlier, in a market that grew 11.6%. The UK's September came in at 28.3%, leaving France 13.4points ahead. That lead is in share only: the UK's market is more than twice the size, so it still registered more electric cars, 99,199 against 65,243.

This is the first stop on The Road to Norway, our six-part series on the markets further along the road to an all-electric new-car market than the UK, and what got each of them there. It runs until 23 October, when the government's consultation on weakening the UK's zero emission vehicle mandate closes, because each of these markets has already faced the question that consultation is asking. We start one step ahead of the UK and finish in Norway, where 98% of new cars are now electric, taking one lesson from each. France's is the most direct, because the UK has already built half of what France did.

How much of September will last

Some of September's jump will fade. It started in July, the month France's social leasing scheme reopened: a capped round of 50,000 electric cars on subsidised leases for lower-income households, open from 16 July. Those cars are being delivered now, and they flatter the summer months in the chart below. When the allocation is used up, some of that volume goes with it.

So the fairer comparison is the first half of the year, before the relaunch. France ran at 28.2% from January to June, already ahead of the UK's 25.0% for the same months. The leasing round added roughly ten points on top of a market that was already moving faster than ours.

The plateau France escaped

France spent two years stuck. Its electric share was 16.8% in 2023 and 16.9% in 2024, flat while its bonus was narrowed and cut: from December 2023 only cars that passed a new environmental score qualified, and in February 2024 the top rate for most households fell from €5,000 to €4,000. The UK had its own stall a year earlier, 16.6% in 2022 and 16.5% in 2023. Both markets first passed 5% in 2020 and climbed almost in step until 2023. Then France stalled for longer, the UK pulled ahead in 2024 and 2025, and France only overtook this year.

France broke out of its plateau without a sales mandate. It has no national quota like the UK's ZEV mandate, and its carmakers answer only to the EU-wide fleet CO2 rules. What changed was who the money reaches, in two steps.

Lever one: a bonus that rises as income falls

On 1 July 2025 France replaced its state purchase bonus with the coup de pouce, paid for through the energy-saving certificate scheme. Energy suppliers have legal targets to fund energy savings, and helping a household swap a petrol car for an electric one now counts, which puts the cost on suppliers instead of the state budget.

In 2026 it pays €3,500 for most households, €4,700 for modest incomes and €5,700 for the poorest, plus up to €2,000 more when the battery is made in Europe. It applies only to new electric cars under €47,000 and 2,400 kg. After the switch, France's share rose to 20% for 2025 and set a then-record 24% in October 2025.

Take a Renault 5 Evolution with the 40 kWh battery, which lists at €28,490 in France. The French bonus takes 12.3% off for a typical household and 20.0% for the lowest incomes. The 40 kWh car does not get the European-battery top-up; the 52 kWh versions do, for up to €7,650 in total. In the UK the same trim lists at £22,995 and the Electric Car Grant takes off £1,500, or 6.5%, whoever is buying it. The 52 kWh Techno+ gets the full £3,750, 13.5% of its £27,695 price, so both countries pay more towards the bigger-battery car than the smaller one.

Lever two: a lease for households with no savings

The second step reaches households with no savings, which a purchase grant never does. France's social leasing, now in its third round, opened on 16 July 2026 with 50,000 cars. Like the bonus, it is paid for through the energy-supplier certificates, from a €401 million budget, about €8,000 a car. The terms:

• No more than €200 a month, and at least a quarter of each leasing company's offers must be under €140.
• No deposit, a three-year minimum term and at least 15,000 km a year included.
• Taxable income under €16,880 per household share.
• The car must be needed for work: home more than 10 km from the job, or more than 8,000 km a year of driving for work.
• New electric cars only, and only models that pass the government's environmental score.

It is aimed squarely at people who have to drive to work and could never stretch to a €25,000 car, however generous the grant. In September, sales to private buyers rose 27.5% on the year, to 89,291 cars and 57% of the whole market.

The filter: how the cars are made

Both French schemes pay out only on cars that pass ADEME's environmental score, which rates the carbon cost of building the car, including where its steel, aluminium and battery come from and how far it is shipped. In practice it shuts out most electric cars built in China. The first list, in December 2023, excluded the Shanghai-built Tesla Model 3, the MG4 and the Dacia Spring, which between them had made up close to a quarter of French electric sales. September's top three show where the money goes now:

Behind the Tesla are two small, European-built Renaults, and together they outsold every other electric car in France except the Model Y. The Twingo is not on sale here yet: Renault is bringing it to the UK in 2027 and is aiming for a starting price below £20,000.

The UK does something very similar. Since July 2025 the Electric Car Grant has also rated cars on their manufacturing emissions: Band 1 cars get £3,750 and Band 2 cars £1,500, and nothing over £37,000 qualifies. On the question of which cars to subsidise, the two countries have landed in almost the same place.

The stick France kept

France also has something the UK lacks, a heavy purchase tax on petrol and diesel cars. In 2026 the CO2 malus starts at 108 g/km and reaches €80,000 above 191 g/km, and a separate weight tax applies to cars over 1,500 kg. Electric cars are exempt from the CO2 malus. That gap at the point of sale is the lever that did most of the work in Norway, and it gets its full treatment at the last stop of this series.

What the UK can take from France

Side by side, the two systems are closer than you might expect. The UK already rates cars by how cleanly they are made and already caps the price. The big difference is that it never asks who is buying.

The UK's grant pays the same to a buyer on £25,000 a year as to one on £125,000, and it only helps people who are buying. The private buyer the UK most needs, the one replacing an old petrol hatchback on a tight budget, is the one France aimed at. Restructuring the existing grant budget towards lower incomes, or piloting a social lease inside it, would copy the part of the French approach that moved the numbers without needing new money.

If you are buying now, the grant is still worth having: our list of the cheapest EVs after the grant ranks cars by the price you actually pay, and the EV Matchmaker finds the electric car closest in size to the petrol or diesel you drive today.

Why this matters for the mandate review

The government is consulting, until 23 October, on cutting the ZEV mandate's 2030 target from 80% of new cars to 70%, 60% or as low as 50%. The case for cutting it is that buyers are not keeping up: the UK is at 26.2% this year against a 33% target. France suggests the shortfall is a demand problem, and that demand can move quickly. It added more than ten points of electric share in a single quarter by aiming money at private buyers, without lowering anything it asks of carmakers.

Weakening the mandate would do the opposite. The mandate is the reason carmakers send electric cars, and the discounts that move them, to the UK rather than to markets with softer rules. Loosen it now and that pressure eases just as UK private demand is starting to respond: private registrations have grown faster than fleet for five months running.

A cut would also undercut the industry being built around the transition. The UK now has a battery plant running at Sunderland (15.8 GWh) and a £4 billion one under construction in Somerset (40 GWh, due in 2027), both sized for an electric market at home. Not every carmaker agrees, and some, Nissan among them, have tied new investment to the 50% pathway. But a target cut is a signal to every investor that the UK's electric market will be smaller than promised.

Air quality would pay for it too. Road transport causes around 80% of nitrogen oxide concentrations at the roadside, and outdoor air pollution is linked to the equivalent of 29,000 to 43,000 adult deaths a year in the UK. An electric car has no exhaust. On a market the size of this year's, cutting the 2030 target from 80% to 50% means roughly 650,000 more combustion-engined cars sold in 2030 alone, each of them on UK roads well into the 2040s.

Our prediction

France stays above 33% battery-electric every month to March 2027, after the social leasing cars have been delivered. If it falls back below 30%, the leasing round was a one-off batch rather than a shift, and we will say so here. We will check it against PFA's monthly figures as they land.

Next stop: Sweden and Germany, Monday 5 October

Next comes the opposite case. Sweden and Germany both withdrew their EV support with a day's notice, at roughly the share the UK is at now, and lost years of progress. They are the closest precedent for what weakening the mandate would do.

Sources: PFA and AAA Data monthly registrations (France); SMMT (UK); French Ministry for the Ecological Transition (coup de pouce and social leasing terms); Renault France price list (August 2026); Department for Transport, ZEV mandate review consultation (2026); UK Health Security Agency (air pollution mortality burden); Defra (roadside nitrogen oxides); our own grant and price data for the UK. France's 2026 monthly figures for January to June are national registrations as published at European level; July to September are PFA's releases.

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