Are Electric Cars a Realistic Daily Option? (Within the UK)

Back in April, I decided to create a survey to find out whether Electric cars are a realistic daily option within the UK. This will give us an insight into whether people are ready to take the plunge to leave petrol powered cars.

Within the 2 weeks that we had the survey active we gained a hefty 266 responses. The survey included different survey techniques to allow us to get more of an insight, we had yes or no questions, tick the box questions and open questions. The open questions allowed us to see what people thought.
Such as;

You may be wondering, why would I randomly be doing this research?
Well actually it was for a University Assignment, we were asked to go do some research and given some criteria. I also did not do this alone, I worked with @ashbyalx. We also had some help from @nesbitt.

What did we think would happen with the results?
As both my and @ashbyalx are very interested in cars it was an interesting survey for us, we both thought that the majority of people would agree with keeping their petrol powered cars, as most people do not know where charging stations are, I mean do you? Lack of knowledge is a massive downfall for the electric motor. It also does not help when Electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf are so terribly built, the battery was rubbish and the charging was even worse.

One of the only manufacturers fixing this image at the moment is Tesla, their vehicles are superior within the Electric cars industry. The specifications for a Tesla are incredible, the picture below shows the difference between 2 completely electric cars and the i8 Hybrid. The newest Tesla with ludicrous goes 0-60 in an incredible 2.3 seconds, should this survey had the name "Are Teslas a realistic daily option?" because seriously, what other company is doing with Tesla is doing with the electric daily car?

We knew the results would have differences because it depends, someone's daily drive could be 10 miles whereas others could be 250 miles, this is why we left the comment box for people to explain why.

The Results
Our first question to the users was "How old are you?" this is so we could see who was taking the survey.

Luckily we had posted the survey in many different places including Reddit & Facebook Groups which gave us a wide spread of ages, after this, we asked where do you live within the UK, this was so we could see if people just didn't have knowledge of things like charging stations around them. The graph is hard to read but within the Excel sheet that will be posted at the bottom you can understand it more

The last thing we asked for (Information wise) was whether they have a full UK driving license, this is so we can understand whether the people replying can even drive.

This is where the questions come into play, the first question was what car they currently drive. This was so we could understand whether people already drove cars such as Electric/Hybrid vehicles.

We now come to the interesting question, it was a question to see whether people actually thought there were enough charging stations within the UK (5 means no, 1 means yes)

We then asked a similar question, but this one was aimed at charging stations local to them (5 means no, 1 means yes)

This is when we asked the question, how many miles do you drive daily? This mixed with the charging stations allowed us to see whether people would be able to use an electric car or not because it could just be that the person is not educated enough within the electric car industry

We then decided to see if people thought that electric cars/charging them were cheap enough, the results are very interesting, 5 on the buying of the car meant it was expensive while 1 meant cheap, this means most people do not think they're cheap enough yet, which is understandable but 5 on the charging of the car meant cheap, now people may not be educated enough to understand that charging an electric vehicle is very cheap, to do around 300 miles it's around 10 times cheaper than a traditional 1.4L car, this is a massive saving BUT can the saving beat the fact you have to wait for it to charge? We will find out what people think soon

Now coming onto the grant you can receive for buying an electric vehicle, most people agree with a grant for buying an electric vehicle but a lot less would take it than you would think, this may be because the price of electric vehicle are still so high or the fact that people do not fully understand the point of the grant

Coming onto the battery of the vehicle (5 Meaning no on both, 1 meaning yes on both) you can see below that people either think that the batteries are not good enough or are not sure, this could be the fact they may be uneducated within the electric car industry because we then got mixed signals of whether people thought the batteries are good enough for an average long journey, this is a hard one to work out considering some of the earlier stats too

We decided to ask people if they knew anyone with an electric car, this was to see what was about. It ended up being 50/50. This partly could have been people counting in Hybrids.

The second to last question we asked was whether people thought they were viable as a daily vehicle, this is another result that shocked us as it came out to be 65.8% saying yes, but we did make sure to get their opinions

Then the last question was whether people would actually buy one at this point, which gave us some interesting results

What I think
I personally see people who do not drive far owning an electric vehicle, especially if you're in a place such as London, they're cheap to run, they're nice and quiet and the grant from the Government is very good but then I can also see the bad part, if you want to go on a trip you have to either have another car, hire one or wait around in service stations for them to charge. They're still a new technology, they may have problems that people cannot foresee and also the batteries may not last as long as people think, especially if you're fast charging them.

Conclusion
Within the research we have done it is hard to see whether the market is at, people seem to like the idea of them but not want to buy them, they some completely disagree and would not own them as a daily driver. I think it will take some time to win people over and once the batteries get better and charging gets quicker people will start to want them more and more, it is also the styling too, some of them are damn right ugly! We can clearly see though Tesla is leading the market and starting to change more and more peoples minds on Electric vehicles.

What are your thoughts?

Excel Sheet Link - https://mega.nz/#!YBpGiQ4A!fQfqs37C_aFDNd3n3sd6wixBGnw-7ld70s5x62wU-yU