It would seem that the electric dream is not alive and well in Australia as electric vehicles sales fail to impress. The government has set some pretty steep targets for sales but these are simply not being met. Why don’t Aussies want to go electric, are they thinking like Akido Toyoda?
Australia, once you get out of the cities is a pretty rural almost backward place. Sort of a tip of the hat to an age that has become a distant memory in much of the rest of the world. But once you get in to the outback, the electric grid becomes somewhat rudimentary and less than ubiquitous.
Late last year the Government in Canberra were targeting 7 million EVs on the road, they have just adjusted that down to 4 million and that’s estimated to be further revised downwards as the sale of new EVs drop each month. Sales have dropped from 13% of all new cars being EV’s to a measly 8% as the electric dream runs out of steam, at least in Australia.
Hybrid cars are still selling as long as these are the variety that you do not have to plug into the grid. Around the world, Electric Vehicles sales had been high for two reasons; early adopters who like to show they are hip by showcasing the latest technology, or more often government subsidies making the vehicle cheaper than the equivalent ICE car.
The early adopters have dried up in more established markets so now they rely on real people making real decisions.
So what has caused this? Well the simple answer is just about everything. There is an issue down under of where the cars are being built mostly in China, and there is a natural antipathy towards anything from there based on the past history of Chinese quality, which lets face has not been good.
There is also a suspicion of security. All of these cars get over the air updates from computers in China and people worry about what could happen if the Australian government ever got into a tiff with the Peoples Republic as they did over Covid.
Would/could some petty official in China decide to turn all the cars off? I think that this would be counter productive as China has the stated aim of EV market dominance and this sort of action would surely kill that. But Aussies are apparently concerned about this.
Then there is of course the obvious range anxiety. Australia is a big place; distances are routinely measured in time and not kilometres.
Waiting in line to recharge your EV for hours is something that Aussies fear but worse than the Range Anxiety there is now a phenomenon called Charger Anxiety, this is the inability to find a charger in the middle of nowhere and of course when you run out of charge it is not like if you run out of petrol.
In an ICE vehicle you can always carry a couple of Jerry-cans of spare fuel or walk to the nearest garage, goof like trying to go and get a bucket of electricity.
Then we get to issues with cost of running an EV starting with the insurance premium. As we have highlighted in numerous previous scribblings the cost of insurance for an EV is far in excess of those for ICE vehicles.
If you scratch a battery pack you will have to replace it and that ain’t cheap. Once you get into the outback the roads are frankly third world quality, many of them are only passable in the dry and are rutted and bumpy.
Strangely Australia is not talking about increased trade tariffs, such as those in USA and Canada and Europe, for the importation for EVs largely because they do not have any car industry of their own anymore.
So that may be the only piece of good news for wannabe electric vehicles drivers down under who can still avail themselves of cheaper cars courtesy of the Chinese tax payer.