Even in 2024, you occasionally hear someone say: “I don’t want an electric car yet – I’d rather wait until I’m sure they’ll stick with it.” We’d like to reassure those folks, the nervously skeptical trend followers: electric cars have been going strong since, well, forever.

Let’s limit ourselves to England, where you have a great site: howmanyleft.co.uk, a great project by a guy named Ollie Smith. There you can see exactly how many cars of their make and model have been sold and are still on the road, and this gives us the opportunity to take a closer look at old electric cars.

The “survival rate” of the first electric vehicles

For example, 3,104 Nissan Leafs were registered from 2011 to 2013, meaning they are all now between eleven and thirteen years old. Of these, 2,152 are still in operation, while 122 have been removed from road tax (temporarily or otherwise). This “survival rate” represents nearly three-quarters (73 percent). For comparison: 89 percent of Ford Focus vehicles of the same age are still in use.

Even more surprising is the fact that 84 percent of Peugeot iOns and Citroën C-Zeros from that era still survive. We did not include the technically identical Mitsubishi i-MiEV, because some may have been imported from Japan later, coloring the data.

The Renault Zoe only arrived in 2013, but of the units sold that year and the following, 88 percent are still running. So even early primitive electric cars, with small batteries that need to be charged often, hold up well. We won’t worry about the newer ones, which are better in every way.