Every dark cloud has a silver lining, as the old saying goes, and in the UK right now, the fuel crisis that has brought ordinary people to blows at the petrol bowser has delivered a major guerilla marketing boost to the electric vehicle industry.
The message: there are more downsides to internal combustion energy cars than the pollution they emit; more compelling reasons to switch to zero emissions cars than government mandates that will soon make it compulsory, with new gas cars banned from 2030 in the UK.
The result: More people than ever are taking active steps into making the switch, from Googling to calling their local dealer. Reports of new data from Carguide in the UK suggest that online interest in electric cars has soared to 16 times its usual volume in one day over the past week.
Elektrek is reporting that analysis of Google search data has revealed that online searches for electric cars in the UK exploded by 1,600 per cent on Friday September 24, which it notes is the day that petrol shortages escalated across the country.
Carwow, the UK’s leading new car buying and selling marketplace, similarly reported that EV searches on its website had increased by 56% on Sunday September 26, as people weighed the alternatives to queuing up for hours to pay inflated prices for imported fuel.
Visits to Carwow’s EV-specific advice hub, meanwhile, were said to have surged 94% in a week, with the company’s director of trade, Sepi Arani, acknowledging that the fuel supply crisis could prove to be “the most influential switching event ever.
“The levels of demand for EVs through carwow this weekend have been completely unprecedented and are genuine proof that more people want to make the switch,” Arani said in a statement, cited on Inside EVs.
The huge spike in interest in EVs follows a year of huge growth in electric car sales in the UK, with data this week showing a 186 per cent jump in EV sales to 108,000 in 2020, up from just 38,000 in 2019.
The data, from a study by accountancy firm UHY and shared here, shows EV sales growth to be six times greater than the average sales growth of electric cars globally at 31 per cent in 2020, putting the UK in fourth place out of 26 countries.
And this pace has continued in the UK in 2021, with 7,388 registrations of EVs in August alone. Whether the spike in interest translates to a further spike in sales remains to be seen.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.