The great car race

In 1909, five years after the Motor Car Act kicked off Britain’s motoring age, about 53,000 cars were licensed.

By 1938, that number had ballooned to 1.94 million. It took another decade to creep past 2 million, and 49 years in total to hit 4.5 million.

We didn’t so much find these numbers as excavate them.

They’re buried in old Parliamentary records that probably still smell faintly of pipe smoke and petrol.

Our starting point is 2009, when the Mitsubishi i-MiEV - a tiny, slightly awkward-looking city car - quietly became the UK’s first mass-market EV.

(Source: Dept of Transport published via Bight Blue, Zap-Map)

Petrol cars took almost 30 years to reach 2 million on UK roads, and nearly 50 years to hit 4.5 million.

Electric cars are doing it far faster. At the current pace the two-millionth EV should drive onto UK roads around 2026, around 17 years after the modern EV era began and nearly twice as fast as petrol’s growth. And they’re on track to pass 4.5 million by 2033-ish, half the time it took petrol cars to reach the same milestone.

Fair question.

The early petrol pioneers had to fight for every mile. In 1903, they lobbied Parliament to scrap the Red Flag Act, a law that literally required someone to walk ahead of each car waving a red flag. (Imaginative naming!)

Then they had to build everything pretty much from scratch: roads (proper ones), petrol stations, dealerships, mechanics. 

Modern EVs, by comparison, rolled onto the scene to find:

• a fully built road and motorway network
• the National Grid
• successive governments keen to hand out grants, tax breaks, and rules for manufacturers (hello, ZEV Mandate). (PS: If you’re wondering whether this might all come crashing down if/when government subsidies and tax breaks disappear, keep an eye on Norway.)

But here’s the twist: it can be just as hard to dismantle and replace a century-old, entrenched technology than to invent something new. Yet EVs are doing exactly that; and much faster than we ever gave up the horse.

The UK is on track to hit its two-millionth electric car in 2026 - but that’s just the warm-up.

From there, things move quickly. With the ZEV mandate set to make 80% of new cars electric by 2030, the shift away from petrol isn’t a gentle glide anymore - it’s a full-on acceleration. The National Energy System Operator (NESO) predicts there could be around 27 million EVs on UK roads by 2040. At the same time, petrol cars are heading in the opposite direction. By 2034, their numbers are expected to fall to around 11 million. Keep that trend going, and by 2040, there may be just 8-9 million petrol cars left. Put the two together, and we hit the “Great Crossover” - the moment electric cars officially outnumber petrol ones - sometime around 2036 or 2037.

Put those trend lines together - EVs growing, petrol cars shrinking - and the lines cross around mid-2039. The day when it’s likely that the majority of people you know will be driving an EV.