The AA's EV Readiness Index Just Hit Its Highest Score Yet

Every quarter, the AA scores the country on how ready it actually is for electric cars. The index takes eight things that decide whether a driver can realistically make the switch, from purchase price and charging to running costs, insurance and maintenance, and boils them down to a single number out of 100. The score for the third quarter of 2026 is 60, the highest the index has ever recorded, and the fourth consecutive quarterly rise after 58.8 in Q2. That is genuine progress. It is also, by the AA's own arithmetic, a country sitting at 60% readiness with the clock running.

The latest AA UK EV Readiness Index, published on 23 September, captures a market in a strange phase. Sales are strong and infrastructure keeps growing, yet the two barriers that matter most to ordinary drivers have barely moved: the price of a new electric car, and what it costs to charge one if you cannot charge at home.

Sales are close, but not at the line

The headline sales number is strong. Battery electric cars took 29.8% of all new car registrations in August, the second-highest monthly share of 2026, according to SMMT data cited by the AA. Under the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, the government's sales requirement for carmakers, the target for 2026 is 33%. August is traditionally a quiet month, so the gap is not alarming, but the year is running short of the line.

That gap is the reason the government has opened a review of the mandate. The consultation on its future launched on 14 August and stays open until 23 October, so nothing has been decided yet. The AA's position is that it supports the transition but wants realistic targets and certainty either way. Edmund King, the AA's president, put the index milestone in those terms: a score of 60 "shows that the conditions for going electric are steadily improving, but a score of 60 also tells us that we aren't there yet."

For a driver rather than a policymaker, the mandate fight is background noise. What matters is what the index says about the things you pay for.

The two costs that split the country

Charging at home remains the single biggest financial advantage of running an electric car. The AA's figures put home charging 66% cheaper per mile than petrol, which is the kind of gap that changes a household budget rather than trimming it.

The mirror image is public rapid charging, and the AA is refreshingly blunt about it: ultra-rapid public charging is around 15% more expensive per mile than petrol. A driver who depends on the public network is currently paying more per mile than the neighbour who never considered an EV at all. That divide, between the roughly two-thirds of drivers who can charge at home and everyone else, is the main reason the index is at 60 and not 80. Our public charging price tracker and the incoming Ofgem price cap changes we covered in our preview of the October cap both feed into this, and the AA is right that no amount of target-setting fixes it on its own.

The purchase price gap is moving, slowly. New electric cars were on average 25% more expensive than comparable petrol cars in Q3, an improvement from 26% in Q2. That single point came from cheaper models arriving, notably from Chinese brands, and from the Electric Car Grant knocking up to £3,750 off eligible cars. Progress, but at 25% the premium is still the first thing most buyers meet.

The Chinese subplot

The most striking shift inside the index is not electric at all. Chinese brands took 15.8% of the UK new car market in August, close to three times their 5.5% share a year earlier. Nearly one in six new cars sold in Britain now comes from a Chinese-owned or Chinese-built brand, and most of them are electric or hybrid.

British drivers are ambivalent about it. In AA research covering 10,594 members, 42% said they would not consider a Chinese-made car, with 16% ruling it out entirely. Yet 47% think the competition will end up benefiting consumers, and the generational split is stark: 40% of 18 to 24-year-olds would consider one, against 22% of 65 to 74-year-olds. Whatever you think of the cars, the price effect is already visible in the new-EV premium, which would not be narrowing without them. We looked at what that arrival means for buyers in our piece on Chinese brands reaching the UK.

Where the used market is quietly winning

If new is still expensive, used has nearly stopped being a compromise. The AA's tracking shows used EVs averaging just 1% more than petrol equivalents, down from 3% in Q2. That is within the noise of a real forecourt. Combined with the finding from the recent MOT study that high-mileage electric cars fail fewer tests than petrol ones, the case for a used EV has changed shape entirely: the price penalty has effectively gone, and the mechanical worry is smaller than people think.

The breakdown data points the same way. AA patrols fixed 88.1% of EV callouts at the roadside, against 83.5% for petrol cars. Running out of charge accounted for 1.3% of EV callouts, down from 8.3% in 2015. The old joke about recovery trucks full of flat EVs does not survive contact with the figures.

The honest read

Sixty out of 100 is the right score for right now. Infrastructure is real and growing: the AA counts 123,677 public chargers, about 41% of the government's 300,000 target for 2030. Sales are a few points short of the mandate line and closing. The used market has gone from discount to parity. What holds the score down is the pair of problems the AA keeps flagging, a new-car premium that only competition and grants are grinding down, and a two-tier charging economy that leaves public-charge-dependent drivers worse off per mile than petrol.

Neither is permanent, and both are moving in the right direction. But 60 is a country getting readier, not ready.