Ford Puma Gen-E becomes first car to qualify for full £3750 electric car grant

The Ford Puma Gen-E officially qualifies for the £3750 government Electric Car Grant (ECG), making it the first car on sale to secure the full amount.

Also eligible for the full grant is the Ford E-Tourneo Courier, the American brand’s five-seat electric van-based MPV.

The discount means that the Puma Gen-E is now cheaper than its petrol counterpart to buy, with a list price of £24,745 with the grant applied. It now also undercuts the rival Renault 4 by a few hundred pounds.

The E-Tourneo now starts at £28,440 – just £120 more than the combustion-engined equivalent. Indeed, you’ll now pay less for an E-Tourneo than a rival Citroën ë-Berlingo.

So far, every other model to have qualified for the EV grant has only qualified for the level two £1500 discount. Eligibility criteria requires models to be priced below £37,000 and meet certain CO2 emission standards within their production chains, but specific details of the latter haven’t been fully revealed.

It’s expected that the criteria will reward models which carry out part of their production process in the UK. The Puma Gen-E and the E-Tourneo are built alongside their petrol equivalents in Romania, though some of their electric components are produced at Ford’s Halewood facility in Liverpool.

Similarly, it’s anticipated that the new Nissan Leaf, which will be produced at the firm’s Sunderland plant, will also qualify for the full grant when it arrives later this year.

The grant was introduced in an attempt to accelerate EV sales to meet government targets, which the UK is currently lagging behind. The Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate states that electric cars must account for 28% of all new car sales this year. However, EVs currently account for just 21.3% of the market according to data from the SMMT, meaning the UK has a long way to go if it wants to meet that goal.

When the ECG was introduced in July, the lack of information surrounding eligibility criteria caused stagnant EV sales as buyers waited to find out if they could save on a new model. This led to a number of brands, including Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Hyundai and MG introducing their own manufacturer's discounts in order to keep buyers in the market for their electric models.

Ford is also offering its Power Promise on sales of new EVs, which provides a free home charger with installation, five years of free servicing and roadside assistance and up to 10,000 miles of home charging credit.

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