World EV roadtrip reveals an Australian market lagging behind

As the recent electric vehicle summit got under way Dr Jake Whitehead was sitting in a plane somewhere over the Indian Ocean.

As his colleagues were shaking hands and listening to keynote speeches, Whitehead was getting a first-hand education in what the rest of the world had been up to on the electric vehicle front during the two years Australia closed its borders to the world.

And as the futures sketched out in government planning documents reveal, other countries have begun to reshape streetscapes in a noticeable way, giving a taste of what may be to come at home.

Australia represents just a fraction of these. In 2021, 20,065 electric cars were sold, which is a threefold increase on the 6900 cars sold in 2020 but still a rounding error compared to numbers reported overseas.

How the rest of the world kept moving as Australia fell into a time warp is largely due to good policy overseas.

In 2021 the International Energy Agency, a deeply conservative institution set up to monitor global oil supplies, released a report that found the world needed over two-thirds of all new car sales globally to be electric by 2030, and more than 3bn electric cars on the road by 2050 to reach net zero.

Among the most ambitious is Norway, which will ban the sale of petrol cars from 2025. Others, such as the EU member states, the UK, Canada and the US state of California have opted for a ban on new combustion engine vehicles by 2035. Even China has its own plan.

Such jurisdictions are helping people go electric. Until recently the UK government offered grants for low emissions passenger vehicles among other incentives for EV drivers, such as zero vehicle excise duty.

Though the ambition of such policies could be debated, the resulting uptake of EVs in the UK is a stark contrast to the lagging Australian market: as of July 2022, 127,492 cars registered in the UK were battery electric vehicles, up from 85,032 cars at the same time in 2021.

By far the most rapid progress has been made in Scandinavian countries. In Norway the transition began in 1990 when the band A-ha engaged in an act of civil disobedience by driving around the country in a homemade EV refusing to pay tolls and parking fines. Since then the country has introduced a suite of policies cutting VAT fees, offering free parking and charging and other incentives that have also been introduced in neighbouring countries.

In January this year, electric vehicle sales accounted for 83.7% of all new vehicles registered in Norway, in July it was 70.7%.

Outside the terminal, the pistons in the waiting cars fired on expensive imported petroleum and the smell of exhaust hung in the air.