Electric car sales slump to 13% of new registrations in January

The sale of electric cars captured just 13 per cent of the new registrations market last month, a marked slowdown in the growth of zero-emission vehicles.

The market share of the 17,000 battery electric cars registered in January was much less than the 16.6 per cent they accounted for during 2022 as whole, when 267,000 new such vehicles were sold.

The January figure is significantly down on December, when a large quarterly shipment of Teslas skewed the data so that electric cars captured 33 per cent of the market. It is also down on November, when electric car sales accounted for 20 per cent of all sales.

January and December tend to be low and slow sales months in the motor trade and not representative of longer-term trends, which tend to come out in the top-selling new registration plate months of March and September.

Market experts are blaming the cost of energy for the slowdown, both in the perception of the operating costs of electric vehicles versus petrol but also in the cost of living impact on households’ disposable income.

Recent surveys found that there were only a handful of new electric cars priced at below £30,000 while the equivalent petrol version would be almost half that price.

“Sales of electric vehicles have come back down to earth,” said Ian Plummer, commercial director at Auto Trader, the online vehicles sales marketplace.

“On our marketplace, demand for new electric vehicles is at a three-year low thanks to higher energy bills. They now account for fewer than one in 10 of all new car enquiries being sent to retailers — down from almost 30 per cent last summer.”

Others believe a slowing electric take-up is a result of the highly-publicised failure in the number of public recharging points installed to keep pace with the number of electric cars on the road.

“We need to see continued investment and incentives from policymakers including rapidly expanding the nationwide rollout of charging points which, at its current rate, is one of the biggest hurdles to widespread electric vehicle ownership,” said Nick Williams, transport sector director at the car finance bank Lloyds.

The January sales suggest a consumer interest in hybrids, which can run on an electric charge but include a petrol engine and are significantly cheaper to buy than an all-electric vehicle. Plug-in hybrids captured 7 per cent of the market versus 6.3 per cent in 2022 while sales of self-recharging hybrids with low electric range were up to 14.4 per cent compared to 11.6 per cent for 2022 as a whole.

According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), the total number of new car registrations for January came in at 131,000, a year-on-year rise of 15 per cent and the sixth consecutive month of growth.

That is in line with the 15 per cent recovery in the new car retail market for 2023. The SMMT forecast followed a chastening 2022, when the 1.61 million registrations marked an unexpected fall on the pandemic year of 2021 and left the market at a 40-year low not seen since the deep recession during the Thatcher government in 1982.