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Another week, another massive media bust up over Net Zero, only this time it isn’t actually about Net Zero. The announcement by the iconic British car marque Jaguar Land Rover that it was cutting 4000 jobs threw plenty of fuel on the culture war fire, with clarion calls to abolish Net Zero and, in particular, the Government’s EV mandate.

All of this noisy fury conveniently ignored the fact JLR did not mention energy costs or the EV mandate in its press release. Instead they cited Trump’s tariffs, competition from China and the difficulty of transitioning to electric drive trains. The tariff situation is outside the scope of this blog, but let’s look at the other two.

“Competition from China” – China mainly produces EVs and hybrids, so the EV mandate cannot be a problem. And we have to remember China is (or was) a massive market for Western car sales, including JLR, but the market share for EVs in China leapt from 33% to 44% in just the 12 months to July 2026. So the ICE market in China is shrinking faster than the UK’s (EV mandate or no EV mandate) – stats show JLR is losing out there.

“Difficulty of Transitioning” – JLR only has one EV in its range with another premium model, a £150k Range Rover, launching this month. Transition takes time and money – you have to shut the production line for at least 6 months to retool, producing zero cars/revenue while you do so, and you have to source sufficient EV components for the new vehicles. Any new model typically takes 5-10 years from concept to showroom and EVs are no different.

There’s a parallel with the electricity system where, as discussed with NESTA’s Andrew Simmons on the pod,  investment is required to break free from an expensive legacy system – the savings come later. It’s like one of those chemistry experiments at school where you have to apply some heat to get the reaction to start, but then it sustains itself and emits more heat than the activation energy you put in.

This jump with a twist is the big challenge for car manufacturers – revenues are falling due to an overall decline in car sales and the challenge from EVs, and yet fixing that slide requires capital investment, a pause in revenues during shutdown, and faith that the new EV model will sell. That’s a huge ask, but the alternative to taking the leap is decline and possibly fall of the entire business.

The Chinese EV brands (and Tesla, Polestar etc) don’t have this legacy problem. They’ve only ever produced EVs so they don’t have to write off an old technology; they simply have to ramp up production to meet market demand. Industrial history is littered with established brands destroyed by such new entrants bearing new technology. Netflix (et al) killed off Blockbuster, digital photography killed off Kodak, the transistor manufacturers killed off the old electronic valve manufacturers. It will be sink or swim, and to swim you have to let go of the side of the swimming pool.