Petrol is dead, is Diesel next?
Sales of petrol cars are declining fast in the UK, according to the latest data from Electric Car Count, which tracks new car registrations in the UK. Petrol’s share of the market has fallen from around two-thirds of all new cars in July 2020 to just 53% in July 2021. New AutoMotive predicts that petrol’s market share will sink below 50% by the end of 2021, as consumers snub old polluting technologies. However, July 2021 saw a worrying growth in new hybrid vehicles, many of which are no less polluting than petrol or diesel counterparts.
Ben Nelmes, Head of Policy and Research at New AutoMotive, said:
“July’s new car registrations data is further evidence of the quiet revolution that is taking place in the UK car market. In July 2019, 96% of new cars were either petrol or diesel. Now, just over half of new cars bought are petrol, and we expect diesel cars to become a niche part of the market by the end of the year.
“There is much to welcome in July’s data. We see British brands emerging as EV leaders: two in every five Jaguars bought in July 2021 was fully electric.
“But we also see a continued and worrying growth in hybrid sales. Hybrids are not net zero vehicles, and we are concerned that customers are paying over the odds for a technology that will soon be outdated. This is further evidence that the UK needs a strong California-style system that enables people to access the benefits of fully electric vehicles.”
The full data release is available here. You can view the data on our interactive dashboard, here.
UK market overview
Over 10,000 new fully electric cars were registered in July 2021 - the highest share of the market so far this year. Similarly, new diesel car registrations have never recovered from the collapse in sales during the pandemic.
Table 3 provides a full UK market overview.
Regional highlights
The North East, Birmingham and London and Oxfordshire have emerged as hotspots for new EV registrations. The average market share of pure electric cars in those areas is now:
North East - 14.4%
London - 16%
Birmingham - 15.2%
Oxfordshire - 19.6%
We present regional data on a three-month rolling average to account for irregular vehicle supply patterns.
The race for EV market share
VWs were by a wide margin the most numerous EVs registered in July. Just 8 Teslas were registered in July - a product of the lumpiness of the supply of Tesla vehicles. The low market shares of even the top ten EV manufacturers demonstrates the growing variety of fully EV models, and manufacturers’ efforts to enter and secure a share of this growing market segment.
For the full data, and year-on-year comparisons, refer to table 1 in the full release.
The manufacturers who are quickest to electrify
Of the volume brands, Renault continues to lead the transition to fully electrified sales with 28% of its new cars being fully electric in July 2021. The data also show a welcome jump in sales of fully electric Jaguars - two in five new Jaguars were fully electric in July 2021.
For the full data, refer to table 2 in the full release.
Notes
About Electric Car Count
Electric Car Count is a monthly data series from New AutoMotive, a not-for-profit independent transport research organisation with a mission to accelerate and support the UK’s transition to electric vehicles. You can find out more about New AutoMotive by visiting www.newautomotive.org/mission
Electric Car Count provides an overview of the newly licensed passenger cars. It is released monthly, in the first few days of each month, providing data on the previous month’s newly licensed cars. In the UK, vehicles must be licensed (also known as registered) to be legally driven on UK roads.
We provide an overview of the state of the market, showing the number of cars registered by each manufacturer, broken down by fuel type. This provides a new way to track the transition to EVs in the UK.
Visit our interactive data dashboard here: www.newautomotive.org/ecc
For more background information on the statistics we provide, you can read our blog about the race for EV market share: www.newautomotive.org/blog/the-race-for-ev-market-share-is-under-way
Data sources & methodology
The data shows the number of type M1 vehicles (i.e. passenger cars) in the DVLA’s vehicle licensing database as it stands on, or shortly after, the 1st day of the month. The DVLA’s vehicle licensing database is the legal record of all vehicles licensed for use in the UK. We obtain the data from the DVLA’s vehicle enquiry service API, and the DVSA’s MOT history API.
The data covers all cars with a standard form UK vehicle registration mark (VRM, i.e. the vehicle’s number plate), but does not capture any vehicles with personalised VRMs.
Terminology
We use the following terms to refer to vehicle fuel types:
Pure electric: battery electric, or other purely electric-powered vehicles (such as hydrogen). These are vehicles where the drivetrain of the vehicle is only electric, with no facility to drive using a fossil fuelled engine.
Hybrid: vehicles that have the ability to drive under electric power or under fossil fuel power. These include vehicles classified by the DVLA as “hybrid electric”, “electric diesel”, for example.
Q&A
Why are the numbers different from other organisations, such as the SMMT?
Our numbers are typically slightly different from those published by the SMMT. We cannot speculate as to why this is because the SMMT do not publish the methodology for obtaining their vehicle data.
Our data is based on the DVLA’s legal record of vehicles licensed as it stands on the first of the month.
Our methodology does not capture newly registered vehicles with a personalised number plate. These take longer to appear in our database, and are not included in the monthly release. We do not believe that these are a statistically significant part of the market.
Will you make this data open and accessible to more organisations?
Yes, we are happy to supply the data to anyone where doing so will not conflict with our mission. We encourage people to reach out to us on data@newautomotive.org.
