Private charging essential for electric car purchases

Access to private charging facilities is a strong factor in persuading people to buy electric cars. Society should reconsider the massive expansion of public charging and instead focus more on meeting the need for private charging, especially adjacent to multi-dwelling buildings.

These are the findings and conclusions of the VTI study entitled “Access to charging infrastructure and the propensity to buy an electric car”. The researchers are investigating how access to charging facilities affects the propensity to buy plug-in cars (electric cars or plug-in hybrids).

The study shows that residents of co-operative housing association who received subsidies for installing charging points were almost as likely to buy electric cars as residents of single-family dwellings. Together with income and having more than one car in the household, living in a one or two-dwelling house is otherwise one of the strongest contributing factors when it comes to electric car purchases.

The availability of public charging points also influences purchases of electric cars, but to a significantly lesser extent. The study shows that if charging facilities are increased by ten per cent near to where people live or work, the likelihood of purchasing an electric car increases by less than one per cent.

Both the price and the availability – ensuring that the car owner always has access to their own charging point – make private charging so much more important. Proximity to the charging point also plays an important role.

“Public charging can cost three or four times as much as private charging, so it is unsurprising that we are seeing such big differences between the different types of charging,” say Ida Kristoffersson and Roger Pyddoke, two of the researchers behind the scholarly article.

Given the results of the study, the researchers believe that society’s commitment to expanding public charging infrastructure can be called into question. At EU level in particular, this is viewed as an effective way of accelerating electrification and reducing carbon emissions.

However, the study suggests that it would be better for society to focus more resources on facilitating private charging close to home. In particular, improved charging facilities adjacent to multi-dwelling buildings may have a strong positive impact on increasing the uptake of electric cars.

“Other factors such as income, which also influence the purchase of electric cars, either cannot be influenced at all or take a long time to influence. However, the type of charging and where we build it can be influenced by society relatively quickly,” say Ida Kristoffersson and Roger Pyddoke.

This study is based on register data relating to private car purchases in Sweden in 2019. This creates a degree of uncertainty about whether the outcome would be the same today. The researchers would like to use follow-up studies to examine both more recent data and any geographical differences.

Text: Mikael Sönne

Translation: CBG

The report: Access to charging infrastructure and the propensity to buy an electric car External link.