UK Car Survey: EV Owners – latest findings July 2024

We’re delighted to publish our latest findings from our UK Car Survey a.k.a. ‘Fossil Fuels v Electric’.

After receiving 14,313 submissions of the survey from 30th November 2023 to 23rd July 2024, we thought it pertinent to showcase the latest data & trends. This survey has currently achieved a 52.9% completion rate.

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

We have decided to split publishing the findings into those from existing EV owners and those from non-EV owners. This feature focuses on EV owners.

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

User Profile

As the survey grows in submissions, we are seeing a more reflective representation of UK car owners in terms of ‘fuel’ with over 75% of respondents driving a petrol or diesel car. We recognise that we are still over-representative of the EV/hybrid market but it’s no surprise given many of the initial responses were from the UK EV community.

Motivation to purchase (multiple answers)

Cost savings & environmental issues are still the biggest motivating factors for drivers switching to an electric car with a 74.9% & 57.9% selection respectively. It’s really 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 29.5% to 33.8%. Clearly, there’s a lot of fun to be had in an EV!

Satisfaction levels

It’s great to see 83.1% of EV owners who’ve taken the survey are ‘Very satisfied’ with the overall experience & driving performance of their EV. This increases to 93.2% 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 72 times (3.1%). 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 & the charging infrastructure will undoubtedly improve in the medium to 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’, 73.4% of you are pretty happy with the range your current EV gives you. 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. 56.7% of responses (up 6.3% 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 16.1% 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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How important was the availability of public charging stations in your decision to purchase an electric vehicle?

We think this is quite a telling response. 81.9% stated that the availability of public charging stations was an important factor in their decision to purchase an electric vehicle.

Yet given the previous question and responses, this feels as though prospective EV owners were overly concerned for public charging availability ahead of purchase and post-purchase it hasn’t mattered as much perhaps as EV owners thought it would.

Cost savings

Given it is the primary motivation for getting an electric car, it’s good to see that 85.7% 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 52.2% of responses have had no problems or concerns with their EV (down 0.2% from the last findings), clearly the public charging infrastructure is the biggest area of concern to-date (30.6%) but possibly lessening given this response is 8.6% lower than previous findings.

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Likelihood of recommending an EV

It is great to see that 72.5% (down from 73.9%) 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 (87.4%) 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, yet.