Episode Details

It's EV News Briefly for Tuesday 03 March 2026, everything you need to know in less than 5 minutes if you haven't got time for the full show.

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RENAULT CHIEF ATTACKS "FAKE" PHEVS, EYES RANGE EXTENDERS
Renault CEO François Provost has condemned short-range plug-in hybrids from German and Chinese manufacturers as "fake PHEVs" that discourage regular charging and undermine consumer and regulatory confidence in electrified vehicles. Renault is exploring range-extender EV (EREV) technology for its next-generation electric platform — underpinning models like the Scenic successor — where a combustion engine acts only as a generator for trips up to 1,000km, and Provost is pushing for EREVs to be explicitly permitted for sale in the EU and UK beyond the 2035 all-BEV mandate.

NORWAY'S EV SHARE RECOVERS AND HITS 98%
Norway registered 7,272 new passenger cars in February 2026, with BEVs accounting for 7,127 of them — a 98.01% market share — as the market began to stabilise after a turbulent end to 2025 driven by expiring VAT exemptions. OFV Director Geir Inge Stokke compared the post-surge normalisation to the period following the 2022 VAT reform, with diesel, petrol PHEVs, hybrids, and pure petrol cars dividing up the remaining 2% between them. 

NORWAY PASSES ONE MILLION BATTERY-ELECTRIC VEHICLES
Norway's battery-electric passenger car fleet has crossed one million, with 951,300 BEV passenger cars and 50,300 BEV light commercial vehicles (LCVs) on the road, representing 32.4% of all passenger cars in the country's 2.94 million-strong fleet. Oslo leads with a 48.9% BEV share in its passenger car fleet and is expected to crack 50% before summer, while rural Finnmark trails at 12.2%, and the Norwegian EV Association's Christina Bu says the LCV transition — currently at just 9.7% — urgently needs to accelerate.

UPTAKE SPREADS BEYOND WEALTHIER EARLY ADOPTERS
Research from charging firm char.gy and think tank New Automotive shows that EV adoption in England, once closely tied to wealth as measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation, has spread significantly into poorer areas by Q3 2024–2025, with growth rates converging across most neighbourhoods. Used BEV transactions surged 45.7% in 2025 to a record 274,815 units, lifting used BEV market share to 3.5%, and with more than two million plug-in vehicles now on UK roads, the main remaining challenge is delivering reliable, affordable on-street charging in the most disadvantaged communities. 

QUANTUMSCAPE UNVEILS PRODUCTION LINE IN CALIFORNIA
QuantumScape officially inaugurated its Eagle Line — a highly automated solid-state battery pilot production facility in San Jose, California — on February 4, 2026, designed not for mass production by QuantumScape itself but as a scalable blueprint that licensing partners, including Volkswagen (which has invested over $300 million), can replicate at gigawatt-hour scale in their own plants. With roughly $850 million in liquidity but a history of burning over $100 million annually and Volkswagen having scaled back its involvement in 2023 after missed timelines, QuantumScape's strategy pivot toward licensing means the next 18–24 months are critical for securing a major customer agreement.

KIA UK SETS EV2 FIRST DRIVE WEEKENDS
Kia UK will run First Drive Weekend events for the EV2 across nearly all 190 UK dealers from April 16 to June 27, 2026, offering structured 30-minute accompanied drives ahead of first deliveries expected later in the year. The EV2 is a compact SUV just over four metres long built on the 400V E-GMP platform, supporting 10%–80% DC rapid charging