Where EV adoption is heading, not where it sits today
A chart of UK local authorities by current EV share and growth trajectory
Where a place sits today tells you where the market has already landed. Where it's heading tells you what an infrastructure investment will be worth over the next ten, twenty years. Both matter. They aren't the same signal.
This chart plots all 335 UK local authorities outside Greater London on two axes. Current share of private cars that are battery electric sits on the horizontal. The underlying growth rate in that stock sits on the vertical.
The dashed vertical line is the national median (2.3% of private cars). The dashed diagonal is the fitted relationship across the full set: a clear negative slope, meaning higher current share generally comes with slower growth. Together, those two splits produce four groups:
Emerging opportunity. Lower current share, growing faster than peers at the same share. Adoption accelerating from a smaller base.
Established leaders. Higher current share, still growing faster than peers at the same share. These are the LAs that haven't slowed down as they've matured.
Lagging peers. Lower current share, growing slower than peers at the same share. Where adoption has started but hasn't taken off.
Plateauing. Higher current share, growing slower than peers. Early adopter markets running out of headroom.
Hover any dot in the chart below for the detail behind it (best experienced on desktop)
Where EV adoption is heading
UK local authorities by current penetration and growth trajectory
Why this view matters
Current EV penetration is a backward-looking signal. It tells us where the market has already been. The underlying growth rate is forward-looking. It tells us where demand is heading.
We read both. The four-quadrant view separates LAs that look similar on a single-year snapshot and behave very differently over the investment horizon. An Emerging opportunity LA and a Plateauing LA can share the same headline growth figure at a given moment and sit at completely different points in their adoption cycle.
It isn't the whole assessment. It's one lens, designed to make the trajectory visible before it shows up in the stock.
What the chart actually measures
The number on each dot is where battery electric cars are registered to a private keeper, not where they were first sold. If a car is bought new in Surrey, registered to a leasing company, and three years later bought second-hand by someone in Doncaster, it shows up in Doncaster's figures from the quarter the keeper address changes. The chart tracks where cars live, because that's where they get charged.
Company and fleet vehicles are excluded throughout. Private keepership only. When those fleet cars come off lease into the second-hand market, they show up at their new residential address at that point.
Why Greater London is excluded
Greater London boroughs show a distinctive pattern: high current share combined with very low growth. That's driven by factors unique to the London market, including ULEZ expansion displacing older vehicles, higher rates of fleet and short-term keepership, and residential churn into surrounding counties. Including London compresses the chart scale and distorts the pattern for the rest of the country. The underlying relationship holds in both directions, but it's cleaner to read without London in the frame.
Data and method
Private BEV stock by local authority is from the DVLA quarterly vehicle statistics release (private keepership only, excluding company and fleet registrations). Total private cars are from DfT table veh0105. Both are published at local authority level and joined on ONS LA code. The dataset covers 2025 Q3.
The growth rate on the vertical axis is an 8-quarter linear regression of private BEV stock per LA, expressed as an annual rate and floored at zero. This approach smooths out single-quarter volatility (fleet registrations, data corrections) and gives a more defensible signal for long-horizon infrastructure decisions than a literal year-on-year comparison would.
The trend line on the chart is a linear fit across all 335 non-London LAs. Quadrant boundaries are set by that trend line (horizontal split) and the national median BEV share of 2.3% (vertical split). LAs with fewer than 100 private BEVs are excluded to avoid small-base percentage noise.
