UK Electric Car Registrations Up 350%

Originally published on EV Obsession.

Last year, I was stumped how UK electric car sales could be so lame when the country offers such good incentives. Perhaps the issue was that no one knew about them, as sales have jumped through the roof this year. With over 14,000 electric cars sold in the UK in the first half of the year, the increase over the same period in 2014 is a whopping 350%.

In fact, with 300 more sales, the running total for 2015 will match (and then quickly surpass) the 2014 total of 14,500.

Brits registered a little more than 35,000 electric and hybrid cars in the first 6 months of 2015, representing ~3% of all new car sales. That actually sounds pretty lame to me, so hopefully the rapid rise of electric car sales is the start of some seriously exponential growth. With the many benefits of electric cars on the table, I don’t see how the future could logically be otherwise.

Here’s a further breakdown of the numbers, which come from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT):

• Pure-electric car registrations grew 83% in the first 6 months of 2015, from 2,558 in 2014 to 4,681.
• Plug-in hybrid registrations grew 520% in the same period, from 1,538 to 9,541.

Hmm, looks pretty clear which segment set off the bigger firecrackers.

In that plug-in hybrid segment, the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV has been the pacesetter. It is now the top-selling electric car in the UK (as well as in Europe). Over 10,000 of the sharp-looking SUVs were on British roads by the end of the first quarter of 2015. I actually test drove one of these beauties (in Poland) with a friend of mine (who is living in the UK) today — I’ll try to publish my review of the Outlander PHEV soon.

Picture by Zachary Shahan | EV Obsession | CleanTechnica (CC BY-SA 4.0)