Question reference: S6W-04355
- Asked by: Marie McNair, MSP for Clydebank and Milngavie, Scottish National Party
- Date lodged: 15 November 2021
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Current status: Answered by Graeme Dey on 24 November 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how many electric cars have been sold in each of the last five years, how the percentage of cars that are electric compared to those that use other fuels has changed over the last five years, what incentives will be put in place to encourage drivers to switch to electric cars and what (a) funding and (b) support is being provided to (i) local authorities and (ii) businesses seeking to install electric charging points.
Answer
The Department for Transport (DfT) publish annual figures on their website on the number of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) registered in the UK, a link can be found here Cars (VEH02) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) . This data does not provide a breakdown of EV’s registered per region, data is only available per region on the total number of vehicles registered across all propulsion groups.
The following table which includes the total number of EV's registered in the UK over the last 5 years and the market share they represent.
Year | BEV/Unknown (Thousands) | Market Share | Non-BEV/Unknown (Thousands) | Market Share |
2016 | 10.7 | 0.40% | 2713.1 | 99.60% |
2017 | 14.0 | 0.50% | 2550.3 | 99.50% |
2018 | 15.8 | 0.70% | 2378.2 | 99.30% |
2019 | 38.1 | 1.60% | 2308.5 | 98.40% |
2020 | 108.0 | 6.50% | 1548.4 | 93.50% |
BEV - Battery Electric Vehicles, Unknown - Ultra Low Emission Vehicles not Petrol/Diesel.
Since 2014 the Scottish Government has supported decarbonisation of fleets in local authorities. As part of our overall Fleets funding of almost £50 million we have provided over £30 million of funding to local authorities to enable the procurement of over 2,300 zero and ultra-low emission vehicles as well as charging and refuelling infrastructure.
Since 2011 the Scottish Government through the Energy Saving Trust (EST) have funded the Low Carbon Transport Loan (LCTL) which provides an interest free loan to support individuals and businesses across Scotland purchase new EV’s. To date this scheme have helped over 5100 individuals and businesses across Scotland make the switch to ultra-low emission vehicles by providing loan funding of over £140 million.
The Scottish Government has made grant funding available for installing Domestic (Home) Chargepoints. Since this scheme launched the Scottish Government has supported the installation of almost 12,000 domestic chargepoints to a value of almost £10 million.
The Scottish Government has made grant funding available through the Business Chargepoint Fund to support organisations install EV charging infrastructure on their premises for use by occupiers, staff and visitors. Since 2011 the Scottish Government through this fund has supported almost 1300 businesses with grants worth over £9 million to install EV chargepoints.
To further support the uptake of EV’s, the Scottish Government has invested over £50 million in the ChargePlace Scotland (CPS) network, which now has over 2000 publicly available chargepoints located around Scotland.