loading . . . 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 (EOSs) 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 advert 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 internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) advert views. View share also exhibits increases in lag-1 autocorrelation and variance consistent with hypothesized 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 EOSs from EV advert views in low to 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 second-hand ICEV models of the same age. This pioneering analysis of how EOSs applied to novel data can be used to predict the approach to a tipping point in a social system warrants further research to test the robustness and wider applicability of the method. https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/16/411/2025/
