Scottish Lib Dems call on government to build the electric car network of the future 

Scottish Liberal Democrat net zero spokesperson Sanne Dijkstra-Downie has today called for “ambition and drive” to massively expand Scotland’s electric car charging network as she revealed the scale of the challenge required for the country to transition to ultra-low emissions vehicles (ULEVs) 

There are currently 38,634 ULEVs licensed for road use in Scotland but only 1,856 public charging points (or one for every 20.8 vehicles). 

According to the Department of Transport, as of January 2022, there were 3,084,900 vehicles licensed for road use in Scotland in 2021. That means that if every vehicle were to be a ULEV achieving that same ratio of vehicles to chargers will require more than 16,000 new charging points to be built. 

Data provided by SPICe to the Scottish Liberal Democrats also revealed that on 02 November 2021 there were a total of 97 charge points which are recorded as fully offline/faulty units on the CPS network. It also revealed that the network records an average of 30 faults per day. 

Net zero spokesperson and newly elected Edinburgh councillor Sanne Dijkstra-Downie said:   

“It’s not that people don’t want to choose environmentally friendlier methods of transport, it’s that at the moment they are worried that there are not enough chargers to allow them to drive a fully electric car. Many people do not have access to a driveway to install a private charger, and trailing cables across pavements causes danger to pedestrians.  

“These figures show that charging stations are few and far between, and when you do find one there’s a good chance it might either be broken down or already occupied. 

“If people from the central belt are hesitant to drive an electric car for fear of not having anywhere to charge it, that fear is even more pronounced in rural and remote communities where the distances involved are so much greater.  

“To give people confidence that they will always be able to charge electric cars when they need to, we need a massive expansion of our car charging network with thousands of additional public charging stations in every urban and rural corner of Scotland. That’s the level of ambition and drive that will be necessary for the transition away from fossil fuel-powered cars.”  

ENDS 

Notes to editors: 

Graeme Dey: The Scottish Government only holds data on chargepoint installation on our ChargePlace Scotland network. Data is available by local authority and not at a community or settlement level. The following table sets out the breakdown of charging by local authority as at September 2021.   

There are a further 219 chargepoints owned by private sector hosts for which a breakdown by local authority is not yet available. 

The Department of Transport figures can be found here