09/02/2026
🔋SMMT Car Sales Data Monthly Analysis: Dry January
January 2026 continues the trend towards PHEVs with significant growth (47%) and ordinary Hybrids (4.8%), while full EV sales stall and combustion cars continue to decline. Is there any good news here?
Well, yes, some, but it's meagre. Some of this is a hangover from the push to meet the 28% ZEV mandate at the end of 2025. And some is due to the industry successfully having lobbied the UK to weaken its ZEV mandate in April 2025, which led to a surge in Plug-in Hybrids. It's not because people secretly love them, it's because manufacturers were liberated to promote them.
Yet, as has been repeatedly pointed out, real-world PHEV emissions are about as high as self-charging hybrids. Therefore, at some point the government will have to address the discrepancy between claims and reality or they'll be hit with another and a loss of confidence in EVs.
All of this means January could be a bit of an anomaly. This month sees the first month since July 2025, where combustion vehicles attained more than 50%, though their 53.2% share is still 3.3% lower YoY, in relative and absolute terms; with Diesel continuing its endless collapse. Encouragingly, this means that despite the circumstances for this January, the electrified segments are still eating into Petrol and Diesel.
One interesting factor is to calculate the net emissions of this month's vehicle sales. Helpfully, the difference between New Automotive's breakdown of sales and SMMT's allows us to calculate the proportion of Mild Hybrids:
📊 For January 2026, YoY emissions will have relatively fallen by a modest 1.7%, but because car sales rose by 3.4%, in fact this represents a 1.6% rise. Still, this should not be taken as an indication of an overall rise in emissions, since by and large these new cars will be displacing 14-year-old cars at the end of their lifecycles.
Finally, our brief look at the second-user market shows that the available 41,000 cars represents a noticeable uptick to 9.5% of the market. And this means more choice and lower prices for second-user buyers…
Follow along for more insights next month
Julian Skidmore
Do you think this data points to a short-term anomaly or a structural shift in how the UK market is responding to the ZEV mandate?