We’re delighted to publish the first of our featured summaries from our ‘UK Car Survey’.
After receiving a total of 11,352 submissions up to and including Tuesday 31st October, we thought it pertinent to highlight the key data & findings.
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 car market from both existing & non-EV owners.
Given it’s been just over 3 months since the survey was launched we thought it useful to provide a number of features which illustrate what UK drivers are thinking & doing or not doing when it comes to electric cars. We begin this series by looking at current fuel types from our readers along with what they believe the predominant fuel type will be in 2050 as well as what they’ll be buying next.
UK Car Survey – Have your say NOW!
Type of vehicle currently owned
The UK Car Survey is starting to look more representative of the wider UK car market, albeit there’s still some way to go. Unsurprisingly, we’ve now had over 7,000 out of 11,000+ submission from petrol & diesel owners as when we initially launched the survey, we received a disproportionate amount from EV owners. According to nimblefins.co.uk, in 2022, the breakdown by fuel type of cars on UK roads was as follows: petrol (57%), diesel (34%), all hybrids (6%), fully electric (2%) & gas (1%).
Fuel type of the future
Going anti-clockwise on the chart below, hydrogen is thought to be the main fuel type as of 2050 from 39% of all respondents. We find this very surprising given where the infrastructure and market is at for hydrogen versus electric. However, it does illustrate that a lot people believe there are still major changes to happen over the next 25 years, albeit you’d expect these changes to happen sooner rather than later.
Synthetic fuels gets a fair representation at 19% and you can understand this given there’s now another 12 years before the ban on the sale of new ICE cars, some people think there is time for a solution or two that will allow them to keep driving their current vehicles.
UK Car Survey – Have your say NOW!
Next car
The fuel type of the next car for our respondents is split fairly equally between petrol (31%), diesel (26%) & fully electric (26%). Clearly, many UK drivers are happy with their current ‘fuel type’ and from some of the comments we’ve received in the survey, many don’t want to drive an electric car, ever. Also, there’s another 12 years to go until 2035 and for a lot of people the current economic & political climate isn’t conducive for them to consider alternative fuel types of their next car when people are more concerned about the cost of living etc.
