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.

So, the two-millionth electric car will hit UK roads in 2026, and the four-and-a-half-millionth by 2033, we reckon. But when do EVs actually outnumber petrol cars? 

If we take the current ~13% annual growth rate, we’re on course for roughly 10½ million EVs by 2040.

Meanwhile, petrol has already peaked. There were 18.7 million petrol cars on UK roads in 2024, what Auto Trader dubbed “Peak Petrol.” According to their numbers, it’s a steady decline from there on.

By 2034, that number is expected to drop to around 11 million, as older cars head for the scrapyard and new petrol models stop getting made. That’s a fall of 7.7 million in ten years, roughly 4% of the petrol fleet disappearing each year.

Keep that pace going for another six years, and by 2040 there’ll be about 8-9 million petrol cars still on the road, less than half today’s total.

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.