Transport chiefs seek research firm to come up with ideas to make electric cars more attractive to public

Ireland's poor charging infrastructure has been identified as a barrier to purchasing an electric vehicle.

Transport chiefs are to spend €130,000 on analysing how to make moving to an electric vehicle (EV) more attractive to the general population.

The Department of Transport has tendered for a supplier to analyse how best to move 30% of Ireland’s fleet of non-commercial vehicles to electric by 2030 subject to ongoing “resource constraints”.

The department holds responsibility for implementing a sustainable transport infrastructure in Ireland “to support growth and social progress”.

While Ireland has seen an overall ramping-up in the use of EVs over the past decade, people seeking to make the jump to electric have also faced barriers such as the assumption they are for the more affluent in terms of the cost and rapid depreciation in value of battery-powered vehicles, and in the relatively poor nature of Ireland’s public charging network.

Some €500m was allocated via the National Development Plan between 2021 and 2025 for the provision of a “comprehensive, publicly accessible” charging network for EVs. The Department of Transport, meanwhile, currently operates with an annual budget of €3.9bn, a €480m increase on the funding provided for 2024.

In tender documents for the new project, the Department of Transport noted while there were currently more than 166,000 EVs on Ireland’s roads, the overall market share of sales for such cars fell from 19% in 2023 to 14% in 2024, suggesting a cooling-off in public enthusiasm for greener vehicles.

The department said it was seeking to identify a research and analytics company to carry out “data analysis” with a view to preparing tests for various measures which could be used to encourage the transition to EVs.

“The aim is to identify the factors or categories of factors that are thought to most influence car-purchasing behaviour in terms of EV vs internal combustion engine purchasing,” the department said, with the overall goal of identifying “the most effective deployment of resources in order to deliver the largest uplift in EV sales”.

The task will involve analysing “sentiment” towards EVs on social media and news platforms from a year prior to the noted drop in sales to the current date, the tender said.

The successful tenderer will have eight months to devise an “optimisation strategy” for EVs on the back of the aforementioned analysis, with a further 25 months then allocated to evaluating the results of that strategy.

Grants can currently be accessed for the purchase of an EV from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, with a maximum of €3,500 per vehicle.

Minister for transport Darragh O’Brien noted earlier this year that shared charging points between homes, targeted incentives for taxi drivers, and grants for electric motorcycles were all being considered as options with a view to speeding up the nationwide move to EVs.

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Last year, motorists in Cork told the Irish Examiner that issues holding back their transition to driving an EV included range anxiety, worries about dangers presented by the powerful batteries used in such vehicles, and a shortage of charging points around the country.