The Electric Car Count API

How does the API work?

The API is a RESTful service which returns monthly total new car registrations broken down by categories specified in the API call. The response is in JSON format. 

When making a call to the API, you must specify a particular region. If you require UK-wide statistics, specify ‘UK’ as the region. A full list of alternative regions and other optional parameters is below. 

How we did it…

We used data from a variety of sources to create this data tool. We’re constantly working to improve it, and would love to hear your views - email us on data@newautomotive.org.

Terminology

In general, whenever we refer to ‘EVs’ or ‘electric vehicles’, we mean purely electric vehicles, not hybrids.

Data requests

If you would like access to the data we’ve used to make this, or to find out more about how we did it, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch using a form on our Data and Licensing page.

Copyright

All Electric Car Count content - including charts and releases - is copyrighted under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For more information, see the Data and Licensing page.

Accessing the API

Users must register for access to the API, and will receive a secure key. Users will also receive relevant documentation on operating the API.

To call the API, make a HTTP GET request to the following URL: https://api.newautomotive.org/ecc 

Do not share this key with anyone outside of your organisation, and be careful not to accidentally publish your key in repos or to share your key with others when sharing your code.

Possible parameters

The only parameter required to begin a query is the ‘Region’. This ensures maximum flexibility.

Region

Any DVLA areas (or combinations thereof) may be used - alongside nation-wide queries.

For more information about these regions and the areas they include, see our blog post explaining how we map new registrations.

Fuel type

Any one of the following fuel types may be queried:

• Petrol

• Diesel

• Gas

• Hybrid

• Pure Electric

• Fuel Cells

Make

Any brand or marque is acceptable. The API categorises over 50 manufacturers including all major brands.

Month

Any date or date range (from December 2017 onwards) can be queried using the yyyy-mm format.

Data sources

We obtained the data from the DVLA’s vehicle enquiry service API, and the DVSA’s MOT history API. These APIs provide access to the vehicle licensing database, which is the record of all licensed vehicles in the UK. The database is updated in near real time, and we refresh our data monthly to obtain the previous months’ new registrations. The data we display covers all cars with a standard form GB and Northern Irish vehicle registration mark (VRM), but does not capture any vehicles with personalised or non-standard new VRMs, meaning there may appear to be slight discrepancies with other similar data series. Our charts include all cars, as defined as type M1 vehicles.

Our data now includes registrations taking place in Northern Ireland.

Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2021
Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database rights 2021
Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database rights 2021
Contains OpenDataNI data provided under UK Open Government License

We are grateful to doogal.co.uk for making available much of the data we have used to create this resource.