There are now more than 400,000 pure battery electric vehicles on the roads of the UK, with the number of machines that can be plugged in rising by 71% year-on-year.
That’s according to car industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), which has just released the results of its annual study of the UK motorparc – the number of all types of cars, vans, buses and trucks currently active on the roads – for 2021.
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In total, there are 748,349 vehicles on UK roads that can be plugged in, a total that includes battery electric, plug-in hybrid and range-extender machines. That comprises 720,053 cars, 26,990 vans, 993 buses and 313 trucks, and compares to around 438,000 such machines on the road in 2020.
That includes 413,711 battery electric vehicles (including 387,796 cars) and 318,688 plug-in hybrids (316,691 of which were cars). That means BEVs now account for 1.1 per cent of all machines on UK roads, compared to a 1.0 per cent share for plug-in hybrid vehicles. More than half – 58.8 per cent – of all plug-in electric vehicles are registered to businesses.
That illustrates that, while growing rapidly, vehicles that can be plugged in are still dwarfed in number by petrol and diesel-engined machines. The SMMT says that there were 40,506,971 vehicles in use on the UK’s roads last year, including 35,023,652 cars. In total, 58.6% of all cars on the roads are powered by petrol engines. That means plug-in electric cars represent one in 50 cars on the road.
The data also showed that the uptake of plug-in electric vehicles varies substantially in different regions of the UK. The SMMT says that 33.1 per cent of all such vehicles are based in London and the South East, representing 3.0% and 2.6% of all cars in each region. Buy contrast, just 0.9% of cars in the North East are plug-in electric, and such machines account for just 0.8% of the car parc in Wales and Northern Ireland.
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