Ireland's €10 Million EV Scrappage Scheme Reaches 2,000 Application Limit in 75 Minutes

Ireland's new €10 million pilot scheme, designed to incentivize the trade-in of older vehicles for electric vehicle (EV) grants, reached its application limit within 75 minutes of its launch. This rapid uptake occurred despite a 10-minute system outage caused by exceptionally high demand.

The scheme offers a €5,000 grant, which supplements the existing €3,500 EV purchase grant already available to drivers. This incentive is exclusively for new, fully electric vehicles and does not extend to second-hand cars.

The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) confirmed that the application system experienced a temporary crash this morning. The SEAI stated, «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 further clarified that the system was restored within 10 minutes, allowing all dealers immediate access, after which it operated normally.

According to the SEAI, «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 scheme successfully met its target of 2,000 applications and is now closed. This pilot initiative aimed to accelerate the transition to fully electric vehicles, a goal that aligns with the government's previously ambitious, though now revised, target of one million EVs on Irish roads by 2023.