More than 1m electric vehicles now on UK roads

One in every 32 cars now comes with a plug, with 1.1 million electric cars now in use on UK roads – up by more than 50% over the past year, accounting for 3.1% of the vehicle parc, new figures show.

The annual Motorparc data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) also reveals that, overall, the number of cars in use on UK roads in 2022 rose by 124,393 units to 35,148,045.

It means that the number of cars on UK roads has risen to levels last seen in 2019, while the overall number of vehicles has risen to a record 40,723,974 units as supply shortages begin to ease and scrappage levels decline.

The SMMT says that there are now 615,570 trucks and 4,887,593 vans in service, up 1.9% and 1.7% respectively.

Britain’s HGV parc is also at record levels, while vans make up almost one in eight vehicles in use, the largest proportion ever recorded.

Despite the overall increase in vehicles on the road, average car and van CO2 emissions have fallen by 1.6% – driven by the influx of new lower and zero emission models.

Ownership of electric commercial vehicles has also risen, with vans up some 67.3% and buses and coaches increasing by 34.9%, while the number of zero emission trucks has almost trebled since last year – although they still account for fewer than one in 600 in use.

However, public charge point rollout continues to lag behind EV uptake, reports the SMMT, with one standard public charger for every 36 plug-in cars on the road, down from 31 in 2021.  

The need for investment is even more intense for other road transport sectors, however, as these existing charge points may not be suitably located or sized to serve van operators, and there are no dedicated HGV charging points on the UK’s strategic road network at all.

Deployment of infrastructure appropriate for commercial vehicles would energise uptake of the latest electric vehicles, accelerate fleet renewal to take older units off the road, and help reduce the UK’s carbon footprint.

Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said: “After two tough years, Britain is on the road to recovery with the first growth in car ownership since the pandemic – while vans and trucks also continue to deliver for business and society in ever greater numbers.

“Better still, we are driving Britain towards a net zero future with more than a million zero emission vehicles now on the road and cutting carbon.

“With exciting new technologies and models fuelling our appetite to get back behind the wheel, now is the time to commit to greater investment in infrastructure and incentives, to speed up a switch to carbon-free mobility that is accessible to all.”

The UK’s most popular cars are superminis and small family (lower medium) models, which account for nearly six in 10 cars in service, at 11,620,116 and 9,214,039 units respectively.

Two in three cars in use are manual transmission, while 67.2% of cars driven in the UK were made in the EU and 15% were built in Britain.

The figures also show that one in five electric vans are registered in the south-east, while the East of England is Britain’s zero emission haulage hotbed, with 306 battery electric trucks registered in the region.

Meanwhile, the average car and van on the road are both nine years old, while the average truck has seen 8.2 years of service.

British-built vehicles are the most popular in the heavy vehicle sector. 28.1% of trucks and 42.1% of buses currently in use were built in the UK.