Electric cars are often sold on the idea that charging at home overnight is cheap, convenient and stress-free. For the roughly one in three UK households without a driveway, that promise simply does not hold up, and new research suggests things are not improving quickly enough to close the gap.
A survey of 414 local authorities across the UK, carried out as part of Vauxhall's Electric Streets of Britain campaign, found that while more than 90 percent of councils now have at least one public charge point somewhere in their area, half of all UK councils still provide no on-street charging whatsoever. On-street charging, the kind built into a lamppost or a dedicated bay right outside someone's home, is the crucial option for anyone who parks on the road rather than on a private driveway or in a garage.
There has been progress. The proportion of councils offering on-street charging has risen from 31 percent in 2023 to 39 percent now, which is a real improvement. But the research also found that more than 70 percent of all on-street chargers in the country are concentrated in London, leaving large parts of the rest of the UK, including many towns and cities here in Lincolnshire, considerably further behind. The Electric Streets of Britain campaign has now had over 13,000 streets registered by residents asking their council to install chargers, which gives some sense of the pent-up demand.
Why does this matter so much? Charging is genuinely one of the two or three biggest questions people ask us when they are considering an electric vehicle, right alongside range and cost. If you can plug in at home overnight, an EV can be one of the most convenient cars you will ever own, cheaper to run than petrol or diesel per mile and ready to go every morning without a single trip to a filling station. If you cannot charge at home, the equation changes considerably, and you become reliant on public charging infrastructure that, as this research shows, is still patchy and unevenly spread across the country.
The good news is that the picture is not static. Separate industry analysis shows the UK's public charging network has now passed 120,000 charge points nationally, with the number of ultra-rapid chargers, the fast ones capable of adding significant range in ten or fifteen minutes, growing especially quickly. These ultra-rapid units now deliver more than half of all the charging energy used in the country, even though they still make up a smaller share of the total number of chargers.
If you do not have a driveway and are wondering whether an EV could still work for you, our honest advice is that it depends heavily on where you live and what your daily routine looks like. Someone who parks near a good cluster of on-street or nearby public chargers, or who can charge at work, may find an EV works brilliantly. Someone on a street with no nearby provision may be better served for now by a hybrid or an efficient petrol car, with a full switch to electric revisited as local infrastructure catches up.
This is exactly the kind of practical, no-nonsense conversation we have with customers at Lincoln Vehicle Solutions every day. We are not here to push anyone towards or away from electric, we are here to help you work out what genuinely suits your circumstances, your budget and your street. If charging is the thing holding you back from considering an EV, get in touch and we will talk it through honestly.