From the Summary Podcast - Electric Vehicles Take the Lead

[upbeat music] In August, more than 27,000 electric vehicles were sold across the country, making up almost a quarter of all new cars sold.

Trent Nikolic is a car expert and motoring journalist.

Trent, why have we seen sales of EVs ramping up so significantly?

It's probably gonna be a thanks for the tip scoop moment for me to reveal [laughs] this, but petrol prices, diesel prices, uh, the availability of petrol and diesel, the fear that they'll go up even more.

Uh, I think we're always going to see month on month, in terms of related back to last year, climbing the way that we have.

Maybe not as starkly as we've seen it, but I, I think anybody who was looking at the situation, looking at the price of fuel, and then looking at the order books for electric vehicles, would've suspected that we would've seen an uptick.

And this is on top of quite steady growth of hybrid vehicles.

Yeah.

Now we're seeing pure electrics also catching up to petrol and diesel.

So in terms of the makeup of how the car's being driven, it's shifted quite dramatically if you look over the last five or 10 years.

Absolutely it has.

I think a lot of people are realizing that there are ways to cut their fuel bill, and we've been saying this for years and years in terms of the advice that we offer people, is if you compare an apple with an apple, so if you compare a medium SUV that's petrol with a medium SUV that's a petrol hybrid, without changing anything about your driving behavior, you cut your fuel use in half.

So you get into the hybrid, if you were spending 100 bucks a week, you'll be spending 50 straightaway.

A lot of Australians look at that and think, "That's the way forward for me, because I don't have to plug it in, I don't have to charge it, I don't have to think about that.

I can just get in it and drive.

I can do what I've always done, which is see the fuel light come on, look for a petrol station, fill it up, keep going." So I think that's why Australians have started to look at hybrid.

What that means, too, is that Australians are not scared of the technology.

So hybrids have effectively a basic electric motor system within them, and that means that Australians aren't necessarily scared of that technology if they're buying a hybrid.

And you mentioned the logistical challenges.

Is there a, a chance we'll see an easing off on, eh, electric vehicles as we reach a, a tipping point of people who do make trips, you know, even if it's two hours up the freeway, the, the logistics around a purely electric vehicle are still a little bit of a hurdle for some people?

Yeah, they're absolutely a hurdle for some people.

I think we're, we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg.

You know, i- I've always said if we got to 20 or 30% of new vehicle sales at the end of the year, so if we sold a million new cars and 200 to 300,000 of them were electric, you'd see at the moment, with the infrastructure that we have, all sorts of challenges out on the road.

We've already seen up and down the major highways on the East Coast at Christmas, over Easter, queues for chargers as everybody hits the road.

Now, the people who disagree with me will say, "Oh, well, that's just part of the uptake and that won't be a problem for very long." It will be, because the rollout of the infrastructure has not accelerated.