The most electric counties in the UK

While scenes of chaos played out at petrol stations across the country amid shortages over the last few weeks, for many electric vehicles owners, the queues of traffic has been avoidable. EVA England, a non-profit representing new and prospective EV drivers, reports a rise in electric car enquiries and interest at EV dealers, particularly in the last few weeks.

The UK government is currently aiming to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 to encourage a switch to zero-emission electric vehicles. However, this can’t happen unless there are enough places for us all to reliably charge up, so how does the electric vehicle charging infrastructure look around the UK?

This comes as sales figures for electric cars continue to increase in the UK. In the first quarter of 2021, more than 31,000 electric vehicles were sold in Britain. With these sales, the UK narrowly outsold France to become the second largest electric car market in Europe.

Dick Lovett has created an electric index, to discover which county and regions are the most equipped for the move to only electric cars. To do this, we found the amount of EV charging points per region and county, the number of electric cars per region and county, and the number of fast and slow charging points.

Which county is the ‘most electric’ in the UK?

Drivers in London have adopted electric vehicles the fastest. With 96,608 electric vehicles roaming the streets of London, there are 6,314 public and private EV charger points in the UK’s capital city. 7.40% of these chargers are fast chargers, meaning drivers can be fully charged in a matter of minutes.

In comparison to South Wales which features largely at the bottom of the table. Swansea, Bridgend, and Caerphilly all have under 10 public EV charging points, and are also the areas with the least amount of electric cars. Scotland on the other hand are spread across the board.

With over 450 rapid charge points in the capital, it met the commitment to install 300 by 2020. It’s little surprise that Londoners have been among the quickest to embrace the EV.

Which UK Region is the ‘most electric’?

The South East is one of the most electric regions in the UK, with 2,283 EV charger points, 208 fast chargers and 1,575 slow chargers. Although the South East has a smaller amount of electric cars compared to other regions, 31% of the charging points are rapid chargers, meaning more people can get a full charge a lot quicker than the North East, with only 16%.

In comparison, there are a few regions that have a high number of electric vehicles but a lower amount of EV charger points. For example Scotland as a whole has almost 1,000 charging points but over 30,000 electric cars. 

Methodology

Dick Lovett sourced the above data by creating an index for three factors. The number of EV charging points, referring to publically available charging devices in each authority, taken from the National Chargepoint Registry chargepoints.dft.gov.uk, the number of electric cars from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency and the average output, number of fast and slow chargers which also comes from National Chargepoint Registry. The number of registered plug-in vehicles has been taken from the Department for Transport. We then manually updated every UK region to pull through the information in our index. 

Public charging facilities are popping up by the day across the country, but it’s fitting that London is leading the race for the most public chargers per city. We must keep in mind that most EV owners will be charging their vehicles from home, so publicly available chargers are only one part of the story.

Scott Martin - EV Specialist at Dick Lovett