The scale and pace of automotive transformation demands an influx of new skills. Upskilling, reskilling, cross-skilling and bringing fresh talent into the workforce are major undertakings for the whole industry. So it was hugely inspiring to kick off National Apprenticeship Week 2025 with SMMT’s annual Automotive Apprentice Showcase at Portcullis House, part of the Parliamentary Estate. […]
Ahead of National Apprenticeship Week, the UK’s most trusted car repair platform, FixMyCar, has investigated barriers to hiring apprentices amongst its large network of garages to identify possible solutions to recruitment struggles. Running a poll with a sample of 112 independent garages on their network, FixMyCar found that interest and enthusiasm for hiring apprentices is […]
Driving up market confidence and economic growth is crucial in 2025 and the latest SMMT figures reflected that this week, with new car and light commercial vehicle registrations declining in January. It was the fourth consecutive monthly decline in the new car market amid difficult economic conditions and weak consumer and business confidence to invest. EVs delivered more positive […]
Growing pains are inevitable as automotive manufacturers ramp up the transition to zero emission vehicles and, with significant retooling underway in UK factories, the publication of SMMT’s annual production figures this week revealed no real surprises. Car production is at its lowest level for some 70 years as manufacturers turn more than £20 billion of EV and […]
It’s often said people are creatures of habit and that certainly bears out in the UK’s new car market with grey proving the most popular car colour for the seventh year. More than a quarter of all new cars registered in Britain last year, some 543,464, were picked in the shade – a higher volume than ever […]
The UK’s automotive industry is inherently global, touching every continent as an export sector. It remains Britain’s largest exporter of goods by value, with many of the products developed here the result of massive investment from overseas businesses. Yet more evidence of that came yesterday with £50 million announced to build a new component manufacturing […]
2024 delivered record levels of EV registrations with almost 382,000 joining UK roads, new data from SMMT this week shows, a fantastic achievement which reflects industry’s unswerving commitment to zero emission mobility. Indeed, with the overall new car market up by 2.6% last year, the very greenest vehicles represented almost one in five deliveries thanks to EV […]
The UK’s new light commercial vehicle (LCV) market rose by 3.0% to surpass 350,000 registrations in 2024, according to the latest figures published today by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). A robust December with 27,221 new LCVs registered rounded off a total of 351,834 new vans, pick-ups and 4x4s across the year […]
The UK’s mission to deliver a zero emission passenger car market continues to get significant attention and rightly so, given the millions of people who rely on these vehicles every day. But just as important to decarbonisation are commercial vehicles. Vans and trucks, as the workhorses of businesses everywhere, tie together our society and economy […]
Public electric vehicle chargepoint installations are currently on track to meet the minimum 300,000 needed across the UK by 2030, but government faces challenges to address the location of chargepoints, their accessibility and wider barriers such as planning rules, according to a new National Audit Office (NAO) report. As of July 2024, 64,632 electric vehicle […]
