What does you car say about you? While the Government is unlikely to do much research into middle-aged men driving newly bought sports cars, it has looked into the uptake of electric vehicles (EV) and found most owners are...middle-aged men.
According to the latest research most private EV owners are middle-aged, male, well educated, affluent, in urban areas with households containing two or more cars and the ability to charge at home.
This is likely to stay the same over the next three to five years the report suggests, with existing owners appearing ‘satisfied with their EV and positive about buying another in the future’ due to their performance, low fuel costs, and the ease and convenience of home charging.
The ‘rapid evidence assessment’ research on the uptake of ultra low emission vehicles (ULEVs) is part of the wider government agenda to have every new car in the country a ULEV by 2040.
Driving range is still the greatest perceived downside of EVs for private owners, with most drivers charging at home overnight rather than using public charging infrastructure.
This is despite public charging provision in the UK being ‘comparable, even favourable in certain respects, to provision in countries with more developed EV markets’.
‘A package of well-designed financial incentives plus non-financial incentives (and possibly also investment in public charging) may be the most effective means of increasing EV uptake,’ the report finds.
‘Private and fleet EV owners in the UK indicate the Plug in Car Grant was important in reducing the upfront costs of EVs, and in the case of some fleet owners, the additional benefits they can qualify for has been an active motivation for them to buy an EV,’ the reports states.
EVs are typically the ‘main car’ in private owner’s household, used for the majority of day-to-day journeys to work, education and other local destinations.
Most owners of EV fleets are private sector businesses with fewer than 500 employees and a small-medium sized fleet across a range of industries. The demographic of future uptake in this area is ‘uncertain’.
The UK's ULEV market has recently undergone a significant expansion. In the last quarter of 2014 and first quarter of 2015 they represented over 1% of new car sales for the first time.
'ULEVs represented a similar proportion of new car sales in the UK in 2014 as they did in the US, France and Germany, while California (3.2%) and Norway (17.8%) had two of the largest EV market shares globally,' the report states.
