On December 23, 2024, the Government extended by Royal Decree the Moves III Plan, due to its imminent end at the end of that same year. The extension allowed the deadline to obtain these electric car purchase subsidies to be extended until June 30, 2025. Many buyers, in December 2024, rushed to dealerships with renewed confidence that they would receive the subsidy.
But that Royal Decree, in addition to extending the Moves III Program, included other additional measures, such as extending the deadline to request aid for the DANA in Valencia, halting evictions of vulnerable families, direct aid to Ceuta to guarantee the protection of unaccompanied foreign minors, a general increase in pensions, and the transfer of the Paris mansion to the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV).
What happened with this omnibus Royal Decree? That the Congress of Deputies rejected it on January 23, 2025, with the votes of PP, Vox, and Junts, so the aid that was to be granted under that extension of the Moves III Plan was left in limbo. To solve this, the Government issued a new Royal Decree in April 2025: it reinstated the Plan with retroactive effect, meaning that everyone who had purchased their car from January 1, 2025, onward would be entitled to the aid. The problem shifted to all those who acquired one between December 23 and 31, 2024, since the retroactive effect did not cover those dates. Thus, even if the paperwork was submitted in 2025, if the car was purchased in that last week of 2024, there is no right to aid, despite being within the deadline.
This is the case for 2,700 affected people, including Iván Ponce: “I bought my Tesla for 36,000 euros on December 23, 2024, seeing that the aid was extended. I needed an electric car to move around the centers of large cities without problems. I scrapped my diesel car on December 30 to qualify for more money. The paperwork was submitted in January 2025, and they denied me the aid. Now I have lost the 7,000-euro aid and my previous car,” he laments in conversation with EL MUNDO. For passenger cars, the aid ranges from 2,500 to 4,500 € (without scrapping) and rises from 5,000 to 7,000 € if an old vehicle is scrapped. For vans, the subsidy reaches up to 9,000 € with scrapping.
For Ponce, “the rules were changed after the game was played.” For this reason, he manages a Telegram group of all affected people who join every day. Also, he has not received a response to the compensation claim he filed, so the next step is to go to court in September, with the law firm Administrativando Abogados, an expert legal firm in proceedings against the Administration. His case is handled there by Alicia Ibáñez: “If you bought the car in 2024, with the Moves plan fully in effect, and you request the aid in January, you think you had until June 30, 2025. But they tell you that the subsidizable actions do not correspond,” the lawyer summarizes to this newspaper, adding that in September they will go to the administrative court “with individualized complaints.”
Additionally, Ibáñez states that although the Moves III Plan is managed by the autonomous communities, the problem comes directly from that repealed Royal Decree and the subsequent retroactive one passed by the Government, which did not consider purchases in the last week of December 2024.
The failure to obtain this aid is causing some affected people to be forced to take out loans to meet payments. Laura Manzanero fears this will happen to her: “I bought an electric Kia because I work as a social psychologist and visit minors in foster homes at their residences. I travel all over Navarra and, since I am from Ávila, sometimes I make intermediate stops in Madrid, but my car polluted too much, and we decided to make the change.”
She bought her car on December 30, 2024, and the documentation was submitted on January 20, 2025. She had just had her second daughter, “another reason to acquire a new car.” In May 2025, they denied her the aid, and she sees no way to pay for her electric vehicle: “My partner and I calculated everything down to the last detail counting on the aid. In 2027, I have to pay the last 19,000 euros of the car, and I can’t afford it. If they don’t grant me the nearly 8,000 euros they owe me, I will have to take out a loan, and it will cost me even more,” she resigns.
Also, Manzanero scrapped her previous vehicle to be able to receive a higher amount of aid, even though her neighbors had asked if it was for sale: “I could have sold it for 3,000 euros, but the aid was more money. Well, in the end, neither one thing nor the other,” she concludes.
In this situation, the only autonomous community that took action to remedy this error was the Balearic Islands, which approved a call for subsidies with its own regional funds of up to 340,000 euros for the years 2025 and 2026, to which applicants affected by the repeal of the 2024 Royal Decree can apply.
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