While new-car registration figures must be put in context against manufacturer discounts, government grants and Salary Sacrifice tax-avoidance schemes for electric cars, the Wild West of the used-car market, where it’s every unincentivized motorist for his or herself, shows what drivers are really thinking – and few of them are thinking about EVs.
The latest quarterly figures for second-hand car sales reveal a robust market – so robust, in fact, that the 1,996,116 pre-loved cars that changed hands between April and June this year marked the highest number on record since 2021, being within 1% of pre-pandemic levels.
With a projected eight million sales this year, the used-car market is roughly four times the size of the new one. And, while roughly a fifth of all new cars registered last month ran on batteries alone, when second-hand buyers had their say in the quarter just gone only 68,721 of them asked for an EV.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which compiled the figures, highlights that used EV sales were up 40% compared to Q2 2024. But swinging from 46,773 sales over that period last year to 68,721 in 2025 means only around 22,000 people – equivalent to 1% of Q2’s market – have changed their opinion on used electric cars over the past 12 months.
Petrol and diesel models made up 90.1% of the used market in Q2 2025, with petrol’s 56.8% share dominating the landscape. Tellingly, while diesel registrations have almost been decimated and now make up just 5.7% of the new market, partly due to an unattractive corporate taxation landscape, drivers after a second-hand motor still see the appeal of the black pump, with 33.3% of sales (664,644 cars) in Q2 comprising a model with a diesel engine under its bonnet.
Used plug in hybrids were chosen by just 24,370 (1.2%) people, with buyers snapping up 100,127 conventional, plugless hybrids in the last quarter – equivalent to 5% of sales.
These figures must be set against the UK’s ‘motorparc’, also compiled by SMMT, which details how many and what type of vehicles are on the road. Here, we see 58.2% of the UK’s 36.2 million cars run on petrol, 32.1% on diesel, 4% are hybrid, 3.7% are pure electric, and just 2% are plug-in hybrids.
Diesels, and conventional hybrids are therefore slightly overrepresented on the used market compared to the motorparc, while petrol cars and EVs are marginally underrepresented. There is a more significant disparity with plug-in hybrids, which are almost half as popular with used buyers as motorparc figures indicate they should be.
Nonetheless, the motorparc powertrain mix is broadly reflected in used sales data, making it likely that second-hand electric-car sales will continue to rise as new vehicles are moved on by their original keepers – though EV residual values remain a separate concern.
The SMMT’s chief executive, Mike Hawes, says his organisation’s latest figures show the used market is “building back momentum”, and buyers of second-hand cars “benefit from more choice and affordability across a range of higher tech, cleaner vehicles, notably in the emerging electric vehicle sector”. Hawes added that “accelerated investment into the charging network” was required to “maintain this trajectory”.
