Table of Contents
Plug-in vehicles made up 9.3% of the passenger-use, light-duty vehicles garaged in Winchester on July 1, nearly three times the statewide share, according to Massachusetts Department of Transportation data.
Charging those vehicles away from home is another matter. The town lists six public charging ports in service, two of them open to the public only outside school hours, and the town plans to begin collecting a fee at the free charger on Laraway Road.
The department’s Vehicle Census counted 1,538 plug-ins in Winchester in its July snapshot: 1,111 battery-electric vehicles and 427 plug-in hybrids, out of 16,478 passenger-use, light-duty vehicles. Statewide, 163,274 of 4,900,751 comparable vehicles were plug-ins, or 3.3%. The state total leaves out vehicles the dataset assigns to an out-of-state category.
The figures are an inventory of vehicles registered and garaged in town on a single date. They do not measure sales, individual owners or households, and they cannot show how often those vehicles charge or how many miles they travel on electricity. Conventional hybrids, which cannot plug in, are excluded; Winchester had 1,746 of them in the same vehicle class.
Battery-electric vehicles alone accounted for 6.7% of the town’s 16,478 comparable vehicles. Statewide, they made up 2.2%, or 108,647 of 4,900,751.
Plug-in count grows sixfold since 2020
In the Jan. 1, 2020, snapshot, Winchester had 254 plug-ins, including 163 battery-electric vehicles and 91 plug-in hybrids, among 16,142 comparable vehicles, or 1.6%. Massachusetts had 25,609 among 4,673,041, or 0.5%.
By July 2026, Winchester’s count had grown by a net 1,284 vehicles, to about 6.1 times its 2020 level, and the plug-in share of its passenger fleet had climbed 7.8 percentage points. The statewide count grew slightly faster in proportional terms, about 6.4-fold, though from a much lower starting share, while the state's plug-in share rose 2.8 points.
Those are net changes between snapshots. They reflect vehicles registered, sold, moved or taken off the road, not the number of electric vehicles bought in town.
The climb has not been uninterrupted. Winchester’s plug-in count slipped from one quarter to the next four times, most recently between July and October 2022, when it fell from 573 to 556. It has risen in every quarterly snapshot since.
Between July 1, 2025, and July 1, 2026, the count rose by 188, from 1,350 to 1,538, a 13.9% increase. The plug-in share went from 8.2% of 16,529 comparable vehicles to 9.3% of 16,478, a gain of about 1.2 percentage points. Statewide, plug-ins rose from 146,099 to 163,274, lifting their share from 3% of 4,893,579 vehicles to 3.3% of 4,900,751.
Most of Winchester’s latest annual gain came in the second half of 2025. The count rose by 30 during the first six months of 2026, and the number of plug-in hybrids stood at 427 in both the January and July snapshots.
Charging options come with limits
Winchester Sustainability Director Ken Pruitt described the town’s charging equipment in an interview. By his account, much of it is closed to the public, restricted to certain hours or not yet running.
The best-known public station is a dual-port Legrand charger on Laraway Road that Pruitt said is free to use. He said the station dates to 2017, when it was installed with a state Electric Vehicle Incentive Program grant and wiring provided by Eversource.
Winchester News reported in December 2025 that the earlier unit at the site had been out of service for two years during construction at the Winchester Center commuter rail station, and that the town bought a $5,308 replacement installed by town engineers.
A second charger, near the Winchester High School loading dock, is restricted to teachers during school hours, Pruitt said.
The town’s website lists its two ports as open to the public from 4 p.m. to midnight on weekdays and from 6 a.m. to midnight on weekends during the school year, and from 6 a.m. to midnight daily from June 16 to Aug. 31.
Two Level 2 chargers between Town Hall and the library and one at the Department of Public Works are strictly for municipal vehicles, including those used by the health, engineering and nutrition departments, Pruitt said.
The town’s fleet, including the public works department’s electric pickup, is separate from the passenger-vehicle figures.
Fees and school ports remain unsettled
Public fast charging already carries a price. The town lists two fast chargers, both in the Jenks Center lot on Skillings Road, at 49 cents per kilowatt-hour. When they opened in June 2025, Winchester News reported the company FLO operates and maintains them and keeps the revenue.
Pruitt said fast chargers make owning an electric vehicle more feasible for residents who cannot charge at home, like those in condos or. Private businesses, including Bonnell Ford, also offer charging.
Pruitt said the Laraway Road charger has stayed free because payment software was previously too expensive. The town is now preparing to charge drivers about 30 cents per kilowatt-hour there, he said.
A charging-software dashboard screenshot bearing Pruitt’s name, filtered to all locations in that account from Sept. 1 to Sept. 28, showed 468 charging sessions, about 8,834 kilowatt-hours of electricity and no revenue. The screenshot does not identify which stations the account covers, and a session count is not a count of individual drivers or vehicles.
The largest block of town chargers is still dark. Lynch Elementary School has four dual-port chargers, or eight plugs, that Pruitt said were inactive pending financial authorization between the town and the charging company Electric Avenue.
The town’s website says those plugs will be available only outside school hours and that one will be reserved for town government vehicles. As of Sept. 28, the site listed the Lynch chargers as not yet operational and the Laraway Road station as free.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
