Early opportunity signals of a tipping point in the UK’s second-hand electric vehicle market

Abstract. The use of early warning signals to detect the movement of natural systems towards tipping points is well established. Here, we explore whether the same indicators can provide early opportunity signals (EOS) of a tipping point in a social dataset – views of online electric vehicle (EV) adverts from a UK car selling website (2018–2023). The daily share of EV adverts views (versus non-EV adverts) is small but increasing overall and responds to specific external events, including abrupt petrol/diesel price increases, by spiking upwards before returning to a quasi-equilibrium state. An increasing return time observed over time indicates a loss of resilience of the incumbent state dominated by ICEV advert views. View share also exhibits increases in lag-1 autocorrelation and variance consistent with hypothesised movement towards a tipping point to an EV-dominated market. Segregating the viewing data by price range and year, we find a change in viewing habits from 2023. Trends in EOS from EV advert views in low-mid price ranges provide evidence that these sectors of the market may have passed a tipping point, consistent with other evidence that second-hand EVs recently reached price parity with equivalent ICEV models. We provide a case study of how EOS can be used to predict the movement towards tipping in social systems using novel data.