The DVLA will tell you a vehicle is electric. It will not tell you whether it has a 24 kWh battery or a 100 kWh one, what chemistry it uses, or what it can realistically accept from a charger, and those are the facts that determine how long it occupies a bay, what a session costs, and whether the installation you're specifying is adequate.
If you're building for charge point operators, EV fleets or installers, "fuel type: electric" is where the useful part of the problem starts, not where it ends.
What the DVLA record gives you, and where it stops
A standard registration lookup returns fuel type, and for a battery-electric vehicle that will read ELECTRICITY. You also get CO₂ emissions (zero, unhelpfully), make, model and date of first registration.
What you don't get is anything about the battery. Two vehicles from the same manufacturer in the same year, sharing a model name, can have materially different battery packs, and the smaller one is often the one that turns up.
You also can't reliably tell a full EV from a plug-in hybrid on fuel type alone, because PHEVs are recorded variously as hybrid or petrol/electric depending on the vehicle and when it was registered. For fleet reporting that distinction is the whole point.
What battery data adds
Our Battery & EV Data product resolves, from the registration:
- Usable and total capacity in kWh: the two differ, and the usable figure is the one that determines a charging session
- Chemistry: which affects charging behaviour, particularly in cold weather
- Manufacturer range figures
- Charging characteristics: what the vehicle can accept, AC and DC
One thing it does not give you, and no registration-keyed dataset can: state of health. Battery degradation is a property of the individual vehicle over its life, and it can only come from the vehicle itself, typically over telematics or an OBD reader. Anyone selling you battery health from a number plate is selling you a model-level estimate. Treat it as one.
Three things it's actually used for
Sizing a charging session
If you know the usable capacity and what the vehicle can accept, you can estimate how long it will hold a bay and what the session will cost, before it plugs in. For a charge point operator, bay occupancy is the constraint that determines revenue per post, so the ability to predict it from a plate read is worth more than it first sounds.
Splitting an EV fleet properly
A fleet reporting "electrified vehicles" as one number is hiding the thing that matters. A plug-in hybrid driven entirely on petrol, which happens more than anyone likes to admit, and a full EV are very different from an emissions, cost and infrastructure point of view.
Resolving battery data per vehicle gives you the split without asking drivers to self-declare, which is the only way to get it right.
Specifying an installation
Whether a depot needs 7 kW posts or something considerably larger depends on what will be plugged into them and for how long. Where you already hold the registrations, and for a fleet, you do: resolving the battery specification across the whole list turns an infrastructure conversation from an estimate into arithmetic.
The response
Same endpoint pattern as everything else, keyed on the registration:
POST /products/battery-and-ev-data/api/live/lookup
X-VEHICLEMATIC-KEY: your_key_here
{ "registration": "AB12CDE" }
If the vehicle isn't electric or hybrid, the battery block simply isn't returned, and you aren't charged, because you're only charged on a lookup that returns something. That matters when you're sweeping a mixed fleet where you don't know in advance which vehicles are electric.
For a fleet-wide sweep, batch it:
POST /products/battery-and-ev-data/api/live/bulkLookup
X-VEHICLEMATIC-KEY: your_key_here
{ "vrms": ["AB12CDE", "CD62FGH"] }
A note on what's not here
We're UK only, and we key on the registration mark rather than the VIN. We don't return live state of charge, live location, or anything else that comes from the vehicle rather than from a register: that's telematics, and it's a different kind of integration with a different consent model.
If what you need is a static specification resolved from a plate, that we can do, from 2p a lookup at volume. There's more on the EV and charging page, the sandbox will show you the response without an account, and every rate is published on the pricing page.