The scrappage scheme: Who will be the biggest winners? |
THE EV SCRAPPAGE scheme is good politics. But it might make 2026 a very strange year for the car market.
The headline number is €8,500. The buried number is €50,000. And it’s the second one that will matter more.
When the government announced the ICE2EV scheme this week, a €5,000 scrappage incentive on top of the existing €3,500 EV grant, the reaction was broadly positive. And why wouldn’t it be? On the surface it is a genuinely good idea. You have an old, polluting car. Here is money to help you replace it with something cleaner. Simple. Logical. Good politics. Except politics is exactly what it is.
The fund behind the scheme is €10 million. At €5,000 per car, that is a maximum of 2,000 vehicles. That’s in a country with an overall new car market of around 130,000 units per year.
According to DoneDeal Cars data, approximately 30,000 cars aged 13 or older were traded into garages across Ireland in 2025 alone. The scheme covers fewer than one in 15 of the people who were already in the market for a change. The CSO puts the total number of cars over 13 years old on Irish roads at around 738,000. ICE2EV, in its current form, will reach less than 0.3% of them.
Ireland has a target of 936,000 EVs on Irish roads by 2030. According to Minister Darragh O’Brien’s own announcement, there are 235,000 there today. The EPA’s most recent projections show Ireland could achieve emissions reductions of up to 25% by 2030 against a national target of 51%, with transport among the sectors furthest from its ceiling.
Against that backdrop, a scheme that moves 2,000 cars is a drop in the ocean, which is not a reason not to do it, but it is a reason to do it properly........