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The number of Michigan residents who own electric or alternative fuel-source vehicles has grown in the last five years, state officials told a House panel on Tuesday, which they say has made up for fuel tax losses in state revenue by way of special vehicle registration fees.
According to data presented to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee by Jackie Vention, chief operating officer for the Department of State, the percentage of state registered EV or hybrid electric vehicles has grown steadily since 2020.
The latest figures for 2025 show that 3.87%, or 310,349 of the state’s 8.01 million total registered vehicles, were classified as some sort of electric, plug-in electric hybrid or non-plug-in electric hybrid vehicle.
The figure was 1.30% in 2020; 1.51% in 2021; 1.83% in 2022; 2.22% in 2023; and 2.8% last year.
Venton said the number of non-plug-in electric hybrid vehicles saw the largest increase in EV types now on the road, as well as standard electric vehicles.
The gains in EV ownership were tempered by the fact that the pool only made up less than 4% of total vehicles registered in Michigan, but the signs of growth and acceptance of EVs were evident in heat maps created by the department that were shown to the committee. Heat maps are data representations using various shades of color to represent numerical values in the form of a map.
Heat maps for all three EV types show their wider use across Michigan’s 83 counties in the last five years, with some gains along the west Michigan coastline, central and mid-Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.
The Top 5 areas for EV registrations were made up of Michigan’s larger counties, including Kent, Macomb, Oakland, Wayne and Washtenaw. Although those areas might seem more well-suited for EVs because the Metro Detroit communities are in close proximity, Venton said there was also growth in EV registrations in places like Chippewa, Gratiot, Iron, Menominee and Wexford counties.
The data on EV ownership in the state also came with news that, on average, registration fees for non-traditional vehicles are roughly making up the difference of whatever motor fuel tax revenue was lost through the use of gasoline guzzling vehicles.
William Hamilton, a senior fiscal analyst with Michigan House Fiscal Agency, said quick math from the Federal Highway Administration shows that the average vehicle owner uses about 500 gallons of gasoline per year. Multiply that by 26 miles per gallon, which is the average mpg on most cars and trucks, and Hamilton said that figure roughly equates the amount of surcharge placed on EVs.
Hamilton noted that of the 10 million annual vehicle registrations, only about 100,000 are either hybrid or electric, calling it “a pretty small part of the equation.”
“I don’t want to say [that non-traditional vehicles are paying] their fair share, because that kind of weights the issue a little bit, but it seems like they are, roughly, compared in the aggregate [data]. Individual drivers may have different experiences, but the big picture is the surcharge seems roughly equivalent to the loss of motor fuel tax revenue,” Hamilton said.
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