UK fuel crisis sparks panic buying of EVs

You may have seen the headlines about queues at petrol stations in the UK as the post-Brexit paradise is running out of fuel, but it’s also causing a surge of people panic buying electric vehicles.

According to Google search data, there was a 1600 percent surge in searches for EVs in just one day this week, as Britain’s catastrophic fuel shortages made people reconsider the wisdom of internal combustion.

Car website Auto Trader saw a 61 percent increase in EV traffic with a similar uplift at Carwow.

Electric car dealerships also reported huge spikes in interest. Martin Miller, who owns an EV dealer in Guildford, Surrey, told The Guardian his diary was booked with test drives and he was already low on stock.

“People buy electric cars for environmental reasons, for cost-saving reasons and because the technology’s great,” he said. “But Friday (when the fuel panic began) was one of those moments where people said, ‘Do you know what, this is a sign that we need to go electric’.”

“Saturday was bonkers but Friday even surpassed that, it was very strange. I’ve now got trade-in cars with no petrol to move them.”

Miller said it seemed that the large number of people who’ve been wanting to buy an EV but putting it off had suddenly jumped into action. “People were using it as ‘this is the moment where I’m not going to put this off any longer’.”

Stephen Kenwright, co-founder of UK SEO agency Rise at Seven, says the terms people are searching for related to EVs have also shifted markedly during the fuel crisis. Previously the most common searches were for “Tesla” and “Tesla shares” but the more general search for “electric vehicle” is now taking off.

“All of a sudden people who had no interest in the EV market are now searching EV and researching if they are affordable,” Kenwright said.

Ben Strzalko, the owner of Electric Cars UK in Leyland, Lancashire, said “a lot of electric car owners will be chuffed to bits this last week” as they drove past huge queues at fuel stations and plugged in their cars at home.

The UK is banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and of hybrids by 2035. In July, the UK registered more full EVs than new diesel cars for the second month in a row. 

Sales of EVs jumped 186 percent in the UK in 2020, up to 108,000 that year from 38,000 in 2019.

EVA England spokesman Warren Philips  believes the shift to EVs is already well under way in that country, but that the fuel crisis “underlines how electric cars could work for the majority of people”.

“The interest is already there, this just adds to it. With the climate crisis, with the cost of fuel probably going to rise … people will start looking at electric cars where you just skip that entire step,” he added.