Elon Musk and Sir Keir Starmer may be doing battle over rioting and the involvement of social media companies such as Twitter/X, but in the coming weeks it will be another part of the tech tycoon’s empire — electric vehicles — that arrives on the prime minister’s worry list.

Labour’s manifesto committed to forcing car manufacturers to stop selling new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030.

It was a bold intervention after the previous government’s repeated U-turns on the target. Boris Johnson first set a 2030 goal when he was prime minister, only for Rishi Sunak to relax the phase-out to 2035 when he took the top job, bringing it into line with the European Union — on the surface, at least.

The carmaking industry