EVs are great if you're wealthy and have the prerequisite 'EV-compatible home' (with garage/driveway for charging)
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
Truly rich people would never buy EV as pleasure car, maybe city workhorse but then, they don’t need a city workhorse. Lamborghini have just cancelled their electric car because of lack of demand. People love the roar of ICE
EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.
> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.
You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.
Bollocks. We live in a flat in London, we have an EV. Charging isn’t cheap like if I was charging on my home tariff, but still cheaper than gas and there’s lots of options around me. I get a discount as a local resident too.
Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.
Didn't work so well in my experience: it's about as expensive as petrol (on top of the car being more expensive) and it takes longer than a grocery shop for a charge. You really don't get much benefit unless you can charge at home.
In my (generally affluent) zone 4 neighborhood in London, the number of green plate EVs had multiplied like rabbits over the past few years, but few houses have off-street parking. A huge percentage of the cars parked on street are EVs.
But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts and since most people don't drive their cars much on a day to day basis, it all works fine even without off-street parking. There are also several reserved medium-speed charging spots around the neighborhood and lots of fast chargers at the local large grocery store.
The "or with the potential to have" is hiding away a lot, to the point of being misleading. Most homes, especially in flats and terraced housing, which are the majority, won't have the infrastructure support for charging point conversion.
My terraced house has off-street parking, as do most of them in my area.
Houses with separate garages are also fairly easy to upgrade - we had an armoured cable buried in a new trench to connect our old property.
Similarly, most flats with car-parks are especially easy to add chargers to. They can either be 7kW points or just regular plugs. We had slow chargers installed in our old flat.
Yes, there are many properties with no easy way to add charging. But none of those places have a petrol pump attached either.
I am embarrassed for the RAC that they put out a graph with such a blindly obvious error. I spotted it within 10 seconds. Did they not read their own report?
Petrol is just too cheap to justify the cost unless you drive massive amounts. I do 3,000 miles a year, that costs £400 a year
The cheapest electric car I can see is £2500. It would take me 6 years to get the money back even if the electric was free
Average car does twice that mileage but that’s still a small part of the total cost of ownership.
I got petrol Friday for £1.45 a litre. In July 2022 it was £1.90 a litre, or £2.20 inflation adjusted. In 2012 it was £1.40 or £2.05 a litre inflation adjusted.
Maybe if petrol was in the £2-2.50 a litre it would make sense
It doesn’t much change your calculations, but if you charge at home in the UK (we trail a cable across the pavement with a low-profile cover) then the electricity _is_ all but free.
We pay 7.5p/kWh for 6 hours overnight, but we also get £5 per month back (if we charge at least 10 hours) in return for having charging interrupted for up to an hour each night when the grid has least capacity. I drive about 7000mi/year, which means I’m paying about 1p/mile on average for home charging.
(The £5/month is from the charger manufacturer, SyncEV).
I drive a bit more than you at 4000 miles a year but most of that is outside the UK so would like to see more details on the recent proposals to tax electric cars on annual mileage.
Current petrol car is 13yo so will need replacing eventually.
I think the real way I've lost money is on depreciation - that's more severe than anything else that happened - even though I always buy second hand.
If you're buying second hand, like it would appear from the price you quoted, then reliability could be the thing that makes the price worthwhile.
I also don't do high mileage but as our petrol car gets older, it's starting to be less reliable. I've had brake issues - EV regenerative braking should ease that problem - and the engine is starting to use more oil. My car has a reputation for gearbox issues from the Uber drivers that I know.
Every time there is some problem my wife gets more freaked out. To avoid total disaster I'm going to have to get something and if it's an EV I just hope that it will give us some years of plain sailing.
I bought my car 4 years ago with 12 months MOT. It’s just passed again, with two new tyres and some suspension work. And a new bulb. It’s only needed tyres, wipers, and a new wing mirror in previous years.
Not bad for £1200.
The killer cost is the massive VED, way more than petrol
Tax. I’d far rather VED were removed and the revenue reclaimed by taxing per mile. Seems crazy to have high fixed costs and low marginal, that just encourages driving.
VED is coming in on electric cars, and so is per mile charging. Meanwhile politics won’t allow fuel to return to 2012 levels in real terms let alone expanding beyond.
Far better ways to invest cash - home battery for example - than in an electric car. Maybe in 5 years there will be reasonable specced second hand ones.
3,000 miles a year is very low, I think the average in the UK is 7,200. Interestingly that has declined since the nineties (presumably because we have more two car households).
A car's assumed lifecycle is around 15-20 years. Practical suburban EVs have been around for around half that, practical ICE-replacement EVs for about a third. Consequentially, EVs have not yet arrived in the econo-shitbox segment of the used car market, and it will still take some time for them to get there - this is simply a lifecycle question and not a "new product introduction question" (which most of the press gets wrong for obvious incentives).
That being said, there's an argument that even basic EVs are often much more pleasant to drive and less hassle overall, which could be a reason for them to command a sustained premium on the used market.
How are EV's going to get to econobox/shitbox levels when the batteries go bad in less than half the time you mentioned and it costs ~£5000 for a new one?
Because newer batteries are not degrading as fast due to better thermal and load management. Because newer cars use newer chemistries that are less prone to degradation.
Moreover, just like some cars are good enough for people now, the cars with some degraded batteries will be good enough for some second hand buyers.
EVs are great if you're wealthy and have the prerequisite 'EV-compatible home' (with garage/driveway for charging)
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
Truly rich people would never buy EV as pleasure car, maybe city workhorse but then, they don’t need a city workhorse. Lamborghini have just cancelled their electric car because of lack of demand. People love the roar of ICE
EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.
> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.
You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.
Bollocks. We live in a flat in London, we have an EV. Charging isn’t cheap like if I was charging on my home tariff, but still cheaper than gas and there’s lots of options around me. I get a discount as a local resident too.
Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.
How much per kWh are you paying and how many miles per kWh does your vehicle do?
Yup it's only the quite well-off round here with EVs. Who would want to pay 60-90p/kWh at public chargers!?
The only people I know with full EVs don't have driveways. It's not really an issue - you can charge when you go grocery shopping
Didn't work so well in my experience: it's about as expensive as petrol (on top of the car being more expensive) and it takes longer than a grocery shop for a charge. You really don't get much benefit unless you can charge at home.
I found https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi... a fascinating report, especially how nearly half of London has off-road parking.
In my (generally affluent) zone 4 neighborhood in London, the number of green plate EVs had multiplied like rabbits over the past few years, but few houses have off-street parking. A huge percentage of the cars parked on street are EVs.
But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts and since most people don't drive their cars much on a day to day basis, it all works fine even without off-street parking. There are also several reserved medium-speed charging spots around the neighborhood and lots of fast chargers at the local large grocery store.
Most of inner London doesn't need a car at all.
The "or with the potential to have" is hiding away a lot, to the point of being misleading. Most homes, especially in flats and terraced housing, which are the majority, won't have the infrastructure support for charging point conversion.
I don't think that's quite accurate.
Flats and terraced homes aren't the majority - about 55% of people live in detached or semi-detached houses. See the ONS Census data at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
My terraced house has off-street parking, as do most of them in my area.
Houses with separate garages are also fairly easy to upgrade - we had an armoured cable buried in a new trench to connect our old property.
Similarly, most flats with car-parks are especially easy to add chargers to. They can either be 7kW points or just regular plugs. We had slow chargers installed in our old flat.
Yes, there are many properties with no easy way to add charging. But none of those places have a petrol pump attached either.
Thanks, this link therein looks very impressive, about the usage of space for parking, and the roads needed to connect them too:
https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/spa...
"London" covers a quite large area and outside of central London houses are the most common type of housing.
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The content is just very old. This article is from Feb 2026: https://www.zapmap.com/ev-stats/ev-marketHere’s the RAC’s data from 2025 https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/choosing/electric-...
SMMT publish monthly data too
And which ever way we look at it electric cars are becoming more popular
Collated sales data for many countries:
https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/
Moving to electric is not some optional thing that you can choose not to do. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. They will run out at some point.
We can either make the shift now or we'll have to do it later. Much better to do change early and invest in it early.
This seems to lack 2025 data, unless BEVs have suddenly disappeared! (Which they haven't, everyone around here in stockbrokerland seems to have one.)
The data point for BEVs in 2025 is off by a factor of 1000. It reads 1,747.961; the decimal point instead of thousands separator is surely an error.
I am embarrassed for the RAC that they put out a graph with such a blindly obvious error. I spotted it within 10 seconds. Did they not read their own report?
Petrol is just too cheap to justify the cost unless you drive massive amounts. I do 3,000 miles a year, that costs £400 a year
The cheapest electric car I can see is £2500. It would take me 6 years to get the money back even if the electric was free
Average car does twice that mileage but that’s still a small part of the total cost of ownership.
I got petrol Friday for £1.45 a litre. In July 2022 it was £1.90 a litre, or £2.20 inflation adjusted. In 2012 it was £1.40 or £2.05 a litre inflation adjusted.
Maybe if petrol was in the £2-2.50 a litre it would make sense
It doesn’t much change your calculations, but if you charge at home in the UK (we trail a cable across the pavement with a low-profile cover) then the electricity _is_ all but free.
We pay 7.5p/kWh for 6 hours overnight, but we also get £5 per month back (if we charge at least 10 hours) in return for having charging interrupted for up to an hour each night when the grid has least capacity. I drive about 7000mi/year, which means I’m paying about 1p/mile on average for home charging.
(The £5/month is from the charger manufacturer, SyncEV).
I drive a bit more than you at 4000 miles a year but most of that is outside the UK so would like to see more details on the recent proposals to tax electric cars on annual mileage.
Current petrol car is 13yo so will need replacing eventually.
You are comparing against a free ICE car? And it still works out financially after just a few years for the average driver?
And you think this reflects badly on the EV transition?
I think the real way I've lost money is on depreciation - that's more severe than anything else that happened - even though I always buy second hand.
If you're buying second hand, like it would appear from the price you quoted, then reliability could be the thing that makes the price worthwhile.
I also don't do high mileage but as our petrol car gets older, it's starting to be less reliable. I've had brake issues - EV regenerative braking should ease that problem - and the engine is starting to use more oil. My car has a reputation for gearbox issues from the Uber drivers that I know.
Every time there is some problem my wife gets more freaked out. To avoid total disaster I'm going to have to get something and if it's an EV I just hope that it will give us some years of plain sailing.
I bought my car 4 years ago with 12 months MOT. It’s just passed again, with two new tyres and some suspension work. And a new bulb. It’s only needed tyres, wipers, and a new wing mirror in previous years.
Not bad for £1200.
The killer cost is the massive VED, way more than petrol Tax. I’d far rather VED were removed and the revenue reclaimed by taxing per mile. Seems crazy to have high fixed costs and low marginal, that just encourages driving.
VED is coming in on electric cars, and so is per mile charging. Meanwhile politics won’t allow fuel to return to 2012 levels in real terms let alone expanding beyond.
Far better ways to invest cash - home battery for example - than in an electric car. Maybe in 5 years there will be reasonable specced second hand ones.
3,000 miles a year is very low, I think the average in the UK is 7,200. Interestingly that has declined since the nineties (presumably because we have more two car households).
Petrol has never been £1.90 a litre for any length of time
https://www.racfoundation.org/data/uk-pump-prices-over-time
Thank you for linking to the data showing petrol at about £1.90 a litre in 2022.
A car's assumed lifecycle is around 15-20 years. Practical suburban EVs have been around for around half that, practical ICE-replacement EVs for about a third. Consequentially, EVs have not yet arrived in the econo-shitbox segment of the used car market, and it will still take some time for them to get there - this is simply a lifecycle question and not a "new product introduction question" (which most of the press gets wrong for obvious incentives).
That being said, there's an argument that even basic EVs are often much more pleasant to drive and less hassle overall, which could be a reason for them to command a sustained premium on the used market.
How are EV's going to get to econobox/shitbox levels when the batteries go bad in less than half the time you mentioned and it costs ~£5000 for a new one?
Because newer batteries are not degrading as fast due to better thermal and load management. Because newer cars use newer chemistries that are less prone to degradation.
Moreover, just like some cars are good enough for people now, the cars with some degraded batteries will be good enough for some second hand buyers.
2025 data https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/choosing/electric-...
(2024)