Are we running out of people RICH enough to buy electric cars?

A new report from Autotrader shows the interest in electric cars is waning, with searches for electric cars falling sharply in recent months.

We’ve moaned endlessly that electric cars are just too expensive for ordinary car buyers to consider, and it’s starting to look like that is finally starting to have an impact.

Autotrader, the UK’s largest car buying site with some 65 million visits a month, is reporting that the proportion of electric cars viewed on its site has fallen from a high of 26 per cent in September – when we had long queues at filling stations – to just 16 per cent in February.

It seems the spike in interest in EVs when we were all queueing for petrol disappeared as soon as the queues did, with the gap between prices of ICE cars and EVs of some 37 per cent continuing to make them out of reach for most. And it seems that those searching for EVs are older buyers from affluent areas, the exact opposite of the normal early adopter profile as young and metropolitan

Erin Baker, Editorial Director of Auto Trader, said:

Sooner or later we will run out of people who are rich enough to buy electric cars, and the latest data from our marketplace could be an early indication of what’s to come. It’s a canary in the coalmine moment and the Government needs to take notice if it wants to keep the rate of adoption on track for 2030.

But even if most normal buyers are steering clear of expensive EVs, there is rising interest in hybrids, with searches for Hybrids accounting for 20 per cent of searches, up from just 9 per cent a year ago.

It’s hard to see how a real roll-out of EVs will happen until EVs achieve price parity with ICE, and even then many buyers are concerned about the patchy availability of reliable charging.