10:01 am, March 13, 2024
Motor finance firm Black Horse prides itself on having the right products for all types of cars. But with more dealers selling electric cars, having finance products that are tailored to EVs is crucial.
‘You need the products available that fit the cars,’ says Paul Hyne, Black Horse and Lex Autolease commercial director.
‘We need to make sure that the finance products that we’re offering today – as good as they have been on ICE cars – are matched with extra steps around education, helping customers understand all of the things they need to consider when making the transition to electric.’
The firm, part of the wider Lloyds Banking Group, created a range of bespoke finance packages for EVs in quarter two of 2023, and it has seen a strong take-up of these from dealers.
With falling prices of electric cars seen over the past year, having the right tailored finance package on those vehicles is crucial, and it has made some used electric cars very appealing to both dealers and customers.
It’s not just products that Black Horse is keen to help dealers with, though, but the wider education of consumers around electric vehicles.
Hyne explains: ‘What the finance industry can do in collaboration with their dealer partners and the OEMs is help with the whole education piece around what it’s like to live with an EV – Black Horse can do that in a number of ways.
‘We finance over 200,000 plug-in vehicles – one in five plug-in vehicles registered in the UK in 2023 was funded by Lloyds Banking Group. So, we’ve got lots of customers – we could ask them what their experience is.
‘We also have many renewal customers – so people that have moved into a second or third EV. We can play a bigger part in helping the narrative of myth-busting – if you want to call it that – and helping people understand what it really means to drive an electric vehicle compared to a petrol or diesel.
‘With that in mind, we have recently launched our EV Driving Hub. The hub provides the information customers need to know about used EVs, answering questions around things such as the safety and life of a used EV, alongside busting myths about charging, running costs and battery life.
‘We want the hub to become somewhere that dealers can point their customers to, to help them make well-informed decisions about buying an electric vehicle.
‘Driving and owning an EV may not be right for everybody, but there is no reason it can’t be right for the vast majority of people. We can just expand our remit a bit to help stabilise the market overall and help customers make the right choice for them.’
From an industry perspective, the finance sector can help make the transition to electric cars easier for consumers, believes Black Horse consumer distribution director Preston Rogers.
‘We need to remove those barriers into EV ownership,’ he says. ‘One thing the industry could do is to make it easier to finance EVs. So, for example, comparable terms with ICE vehicles, or changing how old cars can be when they are financed.’
He added: ‘The government landscape is crucial, too. Firstly, charging – it’s growing quickly but it’s not in step with demand and the number of electric cars hitting the road.
‘Incentives are another big one – there is a question on whether we could have incentives on finance products, and incentives on the prices of EVs. That’s probably the two big things that are missing right now.’
Financial incentives would be welcome but what’s really needed is stability and aligned processes to really help get customers behind the wheel of EVs, believes Hyne.
‘Any financial incentive is going to have a positive effect,’ he says, ‘but what I’m really looking for is stability. The chopping and changing of adding and removing grants, changing VAT, changing policy – it’s making it very difficult for customers to make a choice.
‘We would be supportive of an aligned political and policy view between all of the stakeholders – government, OEMs, dealers and the finance companies. We need that sort of stability and alignment between all of those groups so that we can put a consistent message out there to customers of both new and, importantly, used cars.
‘Let’s not forget, it’s all very well talking about new car incentives, but of the eight million car transactions in the UK last year, three-quarters were of used cars.
‘We want to make sure there’s a broad conversation that covers the whole market.’
Along with creating the right products for dealers, Black Horse has undergone a wide restructuring programme recently to ensure it can best assist its dealer and OEM partners. But it also has the customer at the centre of what it does, and Black Horse is driven to assist buyers in their transition to electric cars.
The final word goes to Hyne: ‘We want to make EVs more accessible to all. Lloyds Banking Group’s value is to help Britain prosper. We’ve got a brilliant scale and platform to do that, and that’s exactly what we intend to do.’
Black Horse’s Paul Hyne and Preston Rogers also spoke to Car Dealer about the need for dealers to have strong relationships with suppliers to reap the rewards of a changing market. You can find out more here.
