EV growth accelerates in London despite national decline in buyer interest

London Hydro is seeing an uptick in electric vehicle adoption but reports show fewer Canadians are considering buying them, CTV’s Reta Ismail investigates.

As of April this year, London has more than 4,550 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the roads - with approximately 63 per cent of the vehicles full EVs and 37 per cent plug-in hybrid.

The Vice President of Engineering and Construction at London Hydro, Allan Van Damme, showcased one of the over 450 public Electric Vehicle Chargers available across the city on Monday to support a steady increase in EVs.

“In London, we’ve actually seen an increase of 50 per cent year over year for the last three years.”

Despite the local growth in London, a recent survey by Auto Trader shows a national decline in EV purchase intent for the third year in a row, down to 42 per cent from 68 per cent in 2022.

AutoTrader VP of Insights and Intelligence Baris Akyurek said there are three main reasons behind the decline.

“They don’t think that the infrastructure has expanded enough, so that’s number one. Number two is the range anxiety - you know, whenever you do this road trip or if you want to drive for a few hours, where am I going to charge my vehicle? And the third one is higher purchase costs,” explained Akyurek.

Van Damme maintains that London’s power grid has a lot of capacity.

“We can accommodate new electric vehicles on the London hydro grid.... we’ve increased the size of some of our wires and transformers to accommodate new subdivisions and new developments,” continued Van Damme. “We work with Hydro One, and we do long-range planning up to a five year, window to make sure that we have the right supply coming into the into the City of London, and we also look out even further - ten years when we’re building new transformer stations.”

AutoTrader also pointed to fewer incentives as a reason for the decline in interest, noting the federal incentive program in Canada was paused effective January. Akyurek says the move will likely have an impact on sales, pointing to an example in Germany where when the country ended rebates in 2023, there was a nearly 70 per cent drop in EV sales the following year.