EV Owners Filed a Record 1,317 Complaints in Just Three Months

Electric car owners lodged 1,317 complaints with The Motor Ombudsman between April and June this year, a rise of 95 per cent on the 676 disputes filed in the same three months of 2025. It is the highest quarterly total the scheme has recorded, and it lands at a point when EV sales are climbing fast enough that dealers cannot keep pace with the after-sales work that comes with them.

The Motor Ombudsman is the government-backed body that settles disputes between drivers and garages or dealers who have signed up to its codes of practice. Its own figures show that April brought 416 new cases compared with 233 a year earlier, May rose from 238 to 446, and June alone climbed from 205 to 455. Every single month posted its steepest jump yet, which points to a problem that is getting worse quarter on quarter rather than settling down as the market matures.

Customer service, not the battery, is the biggest complaint

Almost half of all EV disputes in the second quarter, 45 per cent, were about the standard of service from the retailer rather than a fault with the car itself. Drivers told the ombudsman that cars had been advertised with lower mileages than they actually had, that agreed part-exchange values were changed after the fact, and that confirmed prices were not honoured once a deposit had already been paid.

After delivery, the pattern continued. Owners reported repeat repairs that failed to fix the original fault, work that created new problems the car did not have before, confusion over over-the-air software updates, and subscription charges appearing on their account without having agreed to them. None of these are teething problems specific to electric motors. They are ordinary retail failures that happen to be landing on a fast-growing group of buyers who are often new to the brand and unfamiliar with what they are entitled to expect.

Charging problems made up 13 per cent of complaints, with owners describing batteries that a flagged fire risk stopped from filling past a certain point, cables that would not release from the charging port, and AC charging systems that repeatedly cut out after a few minutes. Chassis and motor faults accounted for 10 per cent, electrical faults another 10 per cent, and battery problems, including high-voltage defects and failing 12V batteries, made up 8 per cent of the total.

Why this looks like a service failure, not a technology failure

The ombudsman’s own numbers show that EVs are still more reliable per car on the road than petrol or diesel models. In 2025, EVs generated one dispute for every 169 registrations, against one dispute for every 26 registrations for a petrol, diesel or hybrid car. That gap tells a clear story: it is not that electric cars break more often, it is that the dealers selling and servicing them have not caught up with the volume of buyers now coming through the door.

Every single month in the second quarter recorded a bigger year-on-year jump than the one before it, from 79 per cent in April to 121 per cent in June. That trajectory tells the real story, more than any single monthly total: the gap between EV sales growth and dealer readiness is widening rather than closing.

The average sum a consumer asked for to settle a dispute was £6,830 in the second quarter, down from £8,659 a year earlier. A lower average claim alongside a much higher case count suggests more buyers are coming forward over smaller, more everyday problems rather than only the catastrophic ones, which fits with a service and communication failure rather than a technical one.

The market is growing faster than the after-sales system around it

Part of the explanation sits in how quickly EVs are being registered. Industry figures for July show battery-electric cars now taking a 21.3 per cent share of the new car market, up from 18.5 per cent a year earlier, with plug-in hybrids up 33 per cent over the same period. Every one of those new registrations eventually needs a first service, a warranty claim, or a software update handled correctly, and dealer networks built around decades of petrol and diesel servicing are still working out how to resource that shift.

The ombudsman’s own comparison of disputes against the wider vehicle parc backs this up. Non-EV models generate one dispute for every 32 cars across a two-year combined parc, falling to one in 48 across five years. For EVs, the equivalent figures are one dispute in 180 cars over two years and one in 244 over five years, roughly six times fewer complaints per car in the market as a whole. In short, the cars have not got worse. The market for them has simply grown far faster than dealer training and staffing can keep up with.

Interior and cabin issues made up a further 8 per cent of Q2 disputes, ranging from digital dashboards working intermittently to radio volumes jumping to maximum on start-up, along with trim failures, peeling steering wheel coverings and mould found on interior fixtures. Exterior complaints, at 5 per cent, covered condensation building inside headlight units, bubbling paintwork and misaligned charging flaps. Range-related disputes, often assumed to be the biggest source of EV dissatisfaction, in fact made up just 2 per cent of the total, reinforcing that it is the buying and ownership experience around the car, not the technology inside it, driving the surge.

What you can do if a dealer lets you down

Drivers buying or already running an EV have more protection available to them than most realise, and it works regardless of whether the retailer has signed up to a code of practice.

• Check whether the retailer is accredited to The Motor Ombudsman’s New Car Code, Service and Repair Code or Vehicle Sales Code using the free Business Finder tool at themotorombudsman.org. Accredited businesses are bound to resolve disputes through the ombudsman rather than leaving a buyer to take them to court.
• Get every promise in writing. If a part-exchange value, on-the-road price or delivery date is agreed over the phone or in a showroom, ask for it confirmed by email before handing over a deposit. Verbal promises are far harder to enforce once a dispute starts.
• Use the Consumer Rights Act 2015 alongside any manufacturer warranty. Buyers have a short-term right to reject a faulty car within 30 days for a full refund, and a reversed burden of proof for the first six months, meaning the retailer has to prove the fault was not there at the point of sale rather than the other way round.
• If a garage cannot fix a fault after multiple attempts, put the repair history in writing and raise a formal complaint with the retailer before contacting the ombudsman. The Motor Ombudsman generally expects a business to have had a fair chance to put things right first.
• Keep every invoice, service record and message thread relating to the car from the day of purchase. Disputes over software updates and subscription charges are far easier to resolve when there is a paper trail showing exactly what was agreed and when.

If informal contact with the retailer does not resolve things, a dispute can be raised free of charge with The Motor Ombudsman at themotorombudsman.org/consumers/make-a-complaint, provided the business is accredited to one of its codes. For retailers outside the scheme, Trading Standards and the Consumer Rights Act remain the main routes to a resolution.

Electric car ownership in the UK is growing fast enough that the industry’s after-sales machinery is struggling to keep up. Buyers who know their rights before they hand over a deposit are in a far stronger position than those who find out about them only after something has already gone wrong.

Sources:

• https://www.themotorombudsman.org/electric-vehicles/ev-disputes-brought-by-consumers-to-tmo-in-q2-2026/
• https://www.themotorombudsman.org/consumers/our-codes-of-practice/
• https://www.themotorombudsman.org/consumers/make-a-complaint/