LAST UPDATE | 1 Jul

THE GOVERNMENT’S NEW pilot scheme for trading in old cars for electric vehicle grants reached its applications limit within 75 minutes of coming online, despite a 10-minute period when the site went down due to high demand. 

The new €10 million pilot EV scrappage scheme aims to encourage drivers to make the switch to electric vehicles.

The €5,000 grant is in addition to the existing €3,500 EV purchase grant, which drivers can already avail of. It will only be available on fully electric vehicles and does not apply to second-hand cars.

The pilot got off to a shaky start though, and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) confirmed the application system crashed this morning.

The SEAI said the scheme “has successfully reached its target of 2,000 applications and is now closed”.

“The system which opened for applications at 9am was temporarily offline for all dealers for 10 mins with the initial unprecedented volume of dealer logins on the system,” it said.

The SEAI said the system was back online within 10 minutes “and all dealers had immediate access, after which time the system operated as normal”.

It said “all offers were committed within 75 minutes of the scheme opening for business at 9am today, with the rural allocation going in half that time”. 

The pilot scheme was designed to encourage people to switch to fully electric vehicles.

In 2019, the government set itself a target of getting one million EVs on Irish roads by 2023, although it has been revised now and essentially dropped.