Most people who have an electric car have access to a driveway or private parking. In England, 90% EV owners can park easily and charge theirs from home. But roughly 40% of UK households don’t have off-street parking, so the question is how they would charge an EV and would easy access to home-charging influence their decision to acquire one.

The practical problems are well documented. In a block of flats or a tenement, installing an EV charger may not be an option due to the cost and the legal consent required from third parties who may have no interest in giving it. In a block of flats, installing an EV charger can also be difficult because it may require running cables from the flat’s electricity supply to a shared parking space, if one is available, or to the street where the vehicle is parked.

This can involve drilling through walls, installing cables through shared areas of the building and altering existing electrical infrastructure. Such work is generally more complex (and costly) than in a detached house, where a charger can usually be installed on an external wall close to the property’s electricity supply.

According to the Electric Vehicle Association, a non-profit representing EV drivers in England, 87% of EV owners with driveways say their car is cheaper to run than a petrol or diesel equivalent. Among those without, only half say the same because they have to default to more expensive public chargers.

As a researcher exploring effective designs for urban environments, I’ve been looking at whether fixing this home-charging gap would solve the problem of access. I found that the driveway divide is really less about infrastructure and actually more about wealth in disguise.

My colleagues and I looked at data on Scottish households. Our latest study suggests that having a driveway does not get you into the electric car market – money does. A driveway only helps once you are already in.

We linked nationally representative Scottish household and housing data sets, capturing variables such as income, work, dwelling home type and age, and whether anyone there already owns or intends to buy an EV. Then we built a causal model: think of it as a map of factors that genuinely influence each other.

Wealthier households are far more likely to live in a house that comes with a driveway and to also have the financial means to buy an electric car. A standard statistical model cannot tell those two things apart. It will simply report that driveways and electric cars “go together” or correlate, leaving researchers like me to guess why.

Our approach let us ask a question you cannot normally answer from survey data: what would actually change if a household suddenly had a private driveway, holding everything else the same? The answer surprised us.

Having a driveway does make a difference. It raises the probability of owning an electric car by 70%, a substantial jump for a group (the EV owners) that is relatively small to begin with. Immediate intent to buy an EV rises too, but almost all of that effect lands on households already thinking about buying an electric car at some point in the future. A driveway pushes people along a journey they had already started.

For the roughly half of Scottish households not considering to buy an electric car at all, a driveway changes almost nothing. Income, on the other hand, is different: when we simulated what would happen if a household earned more, the share of households not considering buying an electric car fell by 23%, that is more than ten times the apparent driveway effect on that group.

The contrast is stark: money opens the door, a driveway walks you to the till. The two factors operate at different stages, which explains something that has puzzled researchers. Electric car uptake has been slowest among people in flats and tenements, and the natural conclusion has been that home charging is the problem. Our findings suggest that is only true for people already considering to buy an EV, whether sooner or later.

A Glasgow tenement household that has decided to go electric but has nowhere to charge from home faces a real infrastructural barrier. For a household on a modest income that has never seriously considered buying an electric car, the main barrier may instead be the upfront cost. Although average advertised prices for new EVs have recently fallen below those of petrol cars, this does not mean that comparable cars cost the same. At the more affordable end of the market, new EVs still tend to be less affordable than new petrol or diesel cars.

Making street charging more accessible or public charging cheaper could help households who can afford an EV. It would not, however, solve the problem of being able to afford one in the first place.

Possible solutions

All of this points to a two-track policy response. For households outside the EV market, the priority is affordability: a stronger used electric car market, and financial support aimed at those who need it rather than those already buying in. For households already intending to buy but stuck without a driveway, home-charging access is the binding constraint.

Scotland is already piloting cross-pavement charging, which runs a cable gully under the pavement so a car parked on the street can be charged from the house. The Scottish government has also consulted on relaxing planning rules to make on-street charging easier.

The driveway divide is real, but it also involves a wealth divide. Any equitable transition needs to tackle both. Investing in home-charging infrastructure alone will mainly benefit the people who were already going to buy an electric car anyway.