The New AutoMotive Index
UK cars drive over 200 billion miles a year. EVs are doing an increasing share. The New AutoMotive Index tracks the change.
Tracking the cars that do the most miles
The tool below allows you to see how many miles are driven each year by cars in the UK, broken down by make, model and fuel type. Scroll down to find out more about these numbers.
A long, fat, smoky tail
UK - new car sales (BEVs in blue)
Changing all the cars on the road to zero emissions vehicles will take a long time.
There are 32 million cars on the road, and around 2 - 2.5 million new cars enter that fleet of vehicles every year.
Car sales alone don’t tell the whole story…
UK - composition of all cars on the road
Blue: Fully electric cars Red: ICE / hybrid cars
* each car represents 250,000 cars
Polluting vs Clean Miles
The metric that really matters is the number of miles driven by internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, versus the miles driven by electric vehicles (EVs).
2,124,267,057
Miles travelled by electric vehicles in the UK by the end of 2020.
516,000
Tonnes of CO2e saved
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.
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.
Methodology
Initial data comes from two sources: firstly counts of licensed vehicles over time by make and model released by the Department for Transport (DfT), specifically "VEH0120: Licensed vehicles by make and model: Great Britain and United Kingdom" [1]. Secondly average mileage per year by vehicle make, model and fuel type, created by New Automotive using MOT data from the DVSA [2] for all vehicles in the UK over the last 10 years, with over 500m data points.
Why not just use the MOT data? New vehicles are not required to obtain an MOT for the first three years on the road, so the licensed vehicles statistics gives a better picture of new vehicles. This is particularly important when examining rapidly changing parts of the vehicle fleet, like battery electric vehicles (BEVs).
Group similar models
Similar vehicle models are grouped together by shortening the model names. This is done simply by taking the first word of the vehicle model. For example a Ford vehicle with model name "FIESTA ZETEC TURBO" is shortened to "FIESTA". There is an exception list of models which are left as they are as taking the first word would not give the desired result, for example a Tesla "MODEL 3". In the DfT dataset, this takes the count of unique models from 48,000 to roughly 3,700.
Joining the datasets after grouping models gives 93% matches by count.
Adjusting by fuel type
The licensed vehicle counts unfortunately are not split by fuel type, so Ford Fiesta includes both petrol and diesel models. We want to split this out both to match the DVSA MOT data and to examine fuel type trends - not least BEV trends. To ensure consistency across the DfT licensing data, fuel type ratios were created per vehicle make and model per year, using the MOT data. These ratios were then multiplied with the licensed vehicle counts to give fuel type counts.
Create quarterly mileage
By multiplying quarterly licensed vehicle counts for a given vehicle make, model and fuel type, for example a Vauxhall, Astra, Petrol, with the corresponding annual average mileage and dividing by four, we obtain a quarterly mileage figure.
Tidying fuel types
The initial 'Electric' fuel type category contains hybrid vehicles as well as battery electric vehicles. A list of known BEVs was used to create a new fuel type of 'BEV', while other vehicles previously in the 'Electric' category were re-labeled as 'Hybrid'. Small fuel types like 'Fuel Cell', 'Gas' (not LPG) and 'Steam' were moved into 'Other' as they applied to a relatively small number of vehicles.
Adding COVID factor on mileage
Coronavirus had a significant impact on vehicle miles travelled in 2020 due to two national lockdowns. The DfT published statistics on percentage change from 'business as usual' for road traffic, based on daily traffic data [3]. This data was resampled to quarterly factors for 2020, and applied across all vehicles as a percentage decrease. This naturally does not reflect real world differences in impact across vehicle types. We would be interested to find more fine-grained data sources on this.
[1] Data on all licensed and registered vehicles, produced by Department for Transport - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/all-vehicles-veh01
[2] MOT history API - https://dvsa.github.io/mot-history-api-documentation/
[3] Transport use during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-use-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic
The Bottom Line: What gets measured gets done.
The Missing Metric
Introduction: The transition to electric vehicles is vital to tackling climate change, improving air quality in our cities, and will bring benefits to consumers in the form of lower running costs. A rapid reduction in transport emissions is vital if the UK is to meet its commitments: The fifth carbon budget requires the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2028-32 to be 57% lower than they were in 1990. Meeting that target means emissions from all the UK’s cars must be cut from 68MtCO2e today to 33MtCO2e by 2030. The faster the UK can make the transition, the better for the consumer, climate and all those who live near a polluted busy road.
In order to plan the transition to an electric transport infrastructure properly, it is important to find a measure which takes into account transition issues and the long tail of used combustion cars. This research note sets out how we are going to go about measuring the transition to electric vehicles in the UK.