UK Car Survey: EV Owners – latest findings (October 2023)

We’re delighted to publish our latest findings from our ‘UK Car Survey’.

After receiving 3,727 submissions of our original survey up to and including Wednesday 4th October, we thought it pertinent to showcase the latest data & trends.

Following a lot of unsubstantiated and clearly biased news articles over the last 6-12 months, Electric Road wanted to get a real snapshot of current opinions on the electric car & wider UK EV market from both existing & non-EV owners.

We will publish the ongoing findings on a regular basis and assess how the responses are changing over time. We have decided to split publishing the findings into those from existing EV owners and those from non-EV owners. Having already focussed on non-EV owners we are going to assess ‘the temperature in the room’ from current EV owners. These set of findings are based on 1,439 completed surveys.

The total number of responses will be different for two questions where we allowed multiple answers. These questions will be indicated below with (unsurprisingly) ‘multiple answers’.

Motivation to purchase (multiple answers)

Cost savings & environmental issues are clearly the biggest motivating factors for drivers switching to an electric car with a 71.8% & 64.2% selection respectively. Both these reasons are up from 32% & 30% from our initial findings in August. It’s great to see how much the environment is a factor in purchasing an EV for many people. Performance and acceleration has become more of a factor since the last set of results too rising from 13% to 29.5%.

UK Car Survey: EV Owners - latest findings (October 2023)

Satisfaction levels

It’s great to see 88% of EV owners who’ve taken the survey are ‘Very satisfied’ with the overall experience & driving performance of their EV. This increases to 95.9% of all responses when you include ‘Somewhat satisfied’. While we recognise not everyone will be happy with their electric car for various reasons, it was great to also see that ‘Very dissatisfied’ was only selected 17 times (1.2%). So far, we have a lot of very satisfied EV owners and that can only bode well for the future as key factors such as technology & charging infrastructure will undoubtedly improve in the long-term.

Driving range

As EV owners know better than anyone, driving range is linked to how you use the car. With 1 being very poor and 5 being very good, 77.9% of you are pretty happy with the range your current EV gives you. This is only 1% down from the previous findings and given these results are from a much larger survey base, it’s a very positive statistic. Clearly, circumstances change and for some, batteries degrade (slightly) overtime but it just goes to prove that EVs are generally fit for purpose.

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Charging infrastructure

Feedback on the availability & reliability of the public charging infrastructure is still very much a mixed bag, unsurprisingly. 50.4% of responses (only slightly down on 51% from the last findings) were ‘Very satisfied’ or ‘Somewhat satisfied’. So the current results are slightly more positive than negative overall but we all know that the charging infrastructure could be better for both availability & reliability.

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Public charging – frequency of use

It is still a minority of EV owners who are using public chargers on a reasonably regular basis. Only 15.7% in total use public chargers ‘Very frequently’ or ‘Somewhat frequently’. The likely conclusion to draw from this is that many of our respondents charge at home via a granny charger or a home charging unit and/or are able to charge at work.

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Cost savings

Given it is the primary motivation for getting an electric car, it’s good to see that 87.5% of responses are ‘Very satisfied’ or ‘Somewhat satisfied’ with the savings they are seeing. With the higher costs of public charging and the price of most new EVs, it’s no surprise that some aren’t as satisfied as others.

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Concerns or problems (multiple answers)

While it’s good to see that 52.4% of responses have had no problems or concerns with their EV (up 10% from the last findings), clearly the public charging infrastructure is the biggest area of concern to-date (39.2%, up 3.2%). While there are only 48 respondents who indicated battery degradation (3.3%), we clearly don’t know the extent of degradation that has occurred and whether it’s a minor or a major concern for the respective owners.

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Likelihood of recommending an EV

It is great to see that 73.9% (down from 79%) of respondents would ‘Very likely’ recommend an EV to others. Like ICE cars, EVs aren’t perfect and things will go wrong but the overall experience for the majority (90.8%) is a wholly positive one.

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While there may not have been many huge surprises in our findings, we do think it’s really encouraging for non-EV owners to see the majority of EV owners are pretty happy with their cars and don’t regret switching to electric. Equally, given the current charging infrastructure & EV market, we readily recognise that EVs aren’t right for everyone. In September, we updated the survey with new questions (thanks to feedback from our audiences) and didn’t want to include these submissions with the original survey. So we will be publishing the results of the new survey soon, covering both EV & non-EV owners.