Electric cars are still mainly driven for business purposes

You probably hear it sometimes; ‘electric driving is mainly something for the business driver’. That’s true as a bus and is also fairly common knowledge. After all, in the past sales figures regularly showed that privately sold electric cars form a minority. However, that does not tell the whole story, because you also have electric private lease cars. It is even more difficult to get a picture of the current proportions between private and business driven electric cars. To do this, we need to take a closer look at the total number of current registrations of electric cars and then look at it how those cars are registered.

AutoWeek therefore requested figures from Bovag (and RDC) and the Rai Association. With the help of figures from the VNA about private lease in 2022, the ratios could be further narrowed, so that a global picture of the ratios between private and business driven electric cars can be formed. It turns out that about 23 percent of the fully electric cars in the Netherlands are privately owned. Nearly 4.5 percent electric private lease cars are added, which brings you to a total of about 27 percent purely privately driven electric cars. All in all, this concerns more than 130,000 cars.

Will the rest be driven purely for business? No, not that. Business leased cars or cars bought for business (for example from freelancers) can of course also be partly used for private kilometres. It is not possible to calculate for what part these are used privately. More than 10 percent of electric cars are registered as ‘small business’, so for example on a sole proprietorship. Almost 65 percent of electric cars belong to a fleet, are registered by a leasing company or belong to a leasing company but are registered in the name of a company or individual. Finally, you have just under 6 percent registered in the name of a car dealer, trader or importer. Just under 2 percent is a rental car.