Even Tesla Can’t Overcome Australian Hostility to Electric Cars

[TruckElectric]

A Tesla Inc. showroom and service center in Sydney. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

Tesla Inc. and the electric-car industry generally thrive in the world’s richest nations. Not so in Australia, where even tractors outsell EVs two to one.


More than four decades after Mel Gibson’s super-charged Ford Falconroared across the country in Mad Max, the car-loving nation is defying a global shift to electrification. Battery-powered vehicles made up just 0.7% of Australia’s new car sales in 2020, while in the U.K. and European Union, the figure soared to more than 10%.


The resistance is drawing the ire of global automakers, which are delaying or skipping vehicle releases in Australia to supply markets that offer EV subsidies and have more aggressive emissions targets. Volkswagen AG, Europe’s largest automaker, likens Australia’s EV policies to those of a “third-world country.”


In Australia -- where Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm is based -- efforts to de-carbonize road transport are among the worst in the Group of 20 nations, according to BloombergNEF.

Australia the Laggard

Australia’s ranking behind developing countries like Indonesia and Turkey reflects an ideological battle between a conservative government stifling electric-vehicle growth and a global car industry committed to technological upheaval.

Australia is a “uniquely hostile market” for EV makers, according to Behyad Jafari, chief executive officer of the Sydney-based Electric Vehicle Council. National policies make its citizens look like “a bunch of gas-guzzlers,” said Jafari, who wants subsidies for EV buyers like those in the U.K. and Europe.

Transport accounts for 18% of emissions in Australia, one of the world’s biggest per-capita polluters. Last year’s wildfires in Australia that burnt through an area about the size of the U.K. and destroyed at least 3,000 homes highlighted the nation’s susceptibility to climate change.

Read more: The Australian Dream Is Dying in the Wildfires

Yet a 2020 Technology Investment Roadmap from Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government assigned a lukewarm “watching brief” on battery, hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars. More recently, the government’s Future Fuels Strategy discussion paper in February said new technologies were a chance to cut emissions, but dismissed subsidies as poor value for money.

A Tesla Inc. electric vehicle charges at the automaker’s showroom in Sydney.
Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

That risks leaving Australia with the dregs of global EV production and a charging network struggling for investment.

“The government appears to be at best indifferent, at worst opposed, to zero-emission vehicles,” Volkswagen said in a statement. Australian regulation is “in some respects comparable to that of a third-world country.”

VW’s electric ID.3 hatchback, released in Europe last year, and the ID.4 crossover, probably won’t land in Australia until 2023 at the earliest, according to the company, which aims to be the global EV market leader by 2025.

Some Nissan Motor Co. EVs are also skipping Australia. In a statement, the Japanese company blamed “the lack of consistent and cohesive national targets and supporting policies.”

A Volkswagen ID.4 electric Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) inside the VW Autostadt automobile delivery towers in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Photographer: Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz/Bloomberg

Without subsidies, price has become a major obstacle to uptake. Greg Caleo, the Sydney-based head of marketing agency Blue Hat Green, said he’d love an EV -- partly to set an example to his daughters -- but can’t bring himself to spend almost A$80,000 ($61,000) on one. So he’s sticking to his eight-year-old Mercedes. “I’ll drive it into the ground,” Caleo said.

At the end of last year, there were about 50 EV models on the Australian market, though only a handful cost less than their comparable fuel-powered models, government data show. Teslas start at A$66,900 for a Model 3 and stretched to A$189,990 for a high-end Model S. In the U.S., a Model 3 goes for $38,490, while it costs 249,900 yuan ($38,000) in China.

Even Nissan’s little Leaf hatchbacks cost A$50,000 in Australia. That’s as much as A$16,000 more than the base models of Australia’s top-sellingvehicles, the rugged Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger.

Nissan’s Leaf e+ electric vehicle
Photographer: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg

While EV sales in Australia may pick up when they cost the same as traditional cars, demand is still projected to be slow. EVs will account for only 18% of new cars in Australia in 2030, though the figure will reach 64% in 2040, BloombergNEF said last year.

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Fossil fuels and EVs have served as political tools for Morrison, who has become increasingly isolated internationally for refusing to commit to a net-zero target. In 2017, he brandished a fist-sized lump of coal in parliament. “Don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you,” he told the Labor opposition. “It’s coal.”

On the campaign trail two years later, Morrison warned EVs couldn’t tow trailers and boats. Electric cars, Morrison said, would “end the weekend.” He went on to claim an unexpected election victory.

With little policy certainty and so few EVs on the roads, Australian owners are left with comparatively few places to power up beyond the heavily populated eastern seaboard. Tasmania and the vast Northern Territory, home to Darwin and Alice Springs, have only a few dozen charging stations in total, the Electric Vehicle Council said in its annual report last year.

Read more: The Switch to EVs Needs Plugs on the World’s Remotest Roads

“The lack of policy is the catalyst that causes all the other issues,” said Jafari, the council’s CEO.


SOURCE: BLOOMBERG

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[CyberDingo]

WELL, as an older Australian, I think the (swear, swear for many lines!) has had a policy of destroying our country.
A dollar now, f the future. I feel so sorry for the younger generations. No jobs, no house and penalties ALL the time to satisfy the fossils that support our "government".
The g's are always trying to find ways to discourage RE, supported by our press, and lots of FUD!
I thought the LNP was going to get dumped last election; they even thought so too!
But stupid people believed their lies, and voted for the dollar.
If I could type quickly and wouldn't get chucked off the site I would really tell you what I think of them.
I know many others who think the same.
Maybe next election. Democracy doesn't seem to get the best results.

 

[TruckElectric]

Victoria, Australia considers ‘worst EV policy in the world,’ companies respond

In Victoria, Australia, the state government is considering implementing a punitive mileage tax specifically on electric cars. A coalition of organizations, including Hyundai, VW, Uber, ABB, WWF, and others, has come out against the proposal, calling it the “worst electric vehicle policy in the world” in a full-page ad in The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

The Victorian government currently collects no such tax on gas cars — and doesn’t even collect a gas tax at all. It also has no specific electric vehicle incentives to balance out this proposed tax.

The tax would be assessed at 2.5 cents per kilometer and paid each time registration is renewed. Electric car drivers would have to maintain records for five years, with possible penalties if drivers fail to produce these records. No such mileage record requirement exists for gas car drivers, thus adding a burden to EV drivers of time along with a burden of cost.

The average Australian car is driven around 13,300km per year, which means the average tax would be $332 per year, equivalent to $255 in the US. This is higher than any EV tax in the US. But despite the boneheadedness of these EV taxes, which we and others have covered many times before, at least there are also EV incentives available in some of these states. In Victoria, there is no such EV-specific incentive.

And even though the cost for each owner would be higher than anything we’ve seen in the US, it still won’t be enough to make up a significant portion of the budget. Victoria currently has about ~6,000 electric vehicles registered in the whole state, so you can expect 1-2 million in funding from this per year. That’s enough to build about one new kilometer of road, not counting administration fees for the new tax. For comparison, Victoria has more than 155,000km of road.

Companies seized on this fact in their open letter, suggesting that Victoria would be unique in the world by adding an EV tax without any balancing incentives to encourage EV ownership. These companies, including some automakers, stated that these fees would make automakers less likely to send their best new vehicles to Victoria and would jeopardize the state’s ability to meet necessary emissions goals — which it has delayed locking in.

The Victorian government states that it needs to collect these taxes because EVs don’t pay gas taxes and thus don’t contribute to road funding. However, Victoria does not collect a gas tax — the federal Australian government collects that tax. And Australia’s road funding doesn’t even all come from gas taxes anyway, so the idea that there is a direct and essential connection between gas taxes and road funding is false – particularly since road damage is not done by passenger vehicles anyway. For all intents and purposes, virtually all road damage is done by large trucks. Because of the fourth power rule, a fully-loaded semi-truck does ~10,000 times more road damage per mile than a passenger vehicle does.

And those aren’t the only costs from road transportation, anyway. While the last year has been quite chaotic, some might remember that in early 2020, all of Australia was on fire due to massive heatwaves (as reflected in the featured photo for this story). This resulted in poor air quality across the country due to smoke from the fires. These fires were exacerbated by climate change, which in turn is being caused by human fossil fuel burning. Electric vehicles reduce the energy use of transportation and result in lower global warming emissions from transportation, even when charged on coal-heavy grids like Australia’s.

This brings up the matter of Australian industry — coal is king in Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter. Perhaps fossil fuel lobbying is behind this push for EV fees? But this wouldn’t make sense because coal is used for electricity – which can run electric cars. If anything, Australia should be happy to see more demand for one of their signature industries (okay, they shouldn’t, coal is bad and needs to be eliminated immediately, but the point is: we’re not talking about Alberta or Saudi Arabia here, places reliant on oil use, but an industry where jobs will not be lost from a shift to EVs). Australia is also the world’s largest lithium exporter, an element that is crucial to electric car batteries. So electric cars are in their national interest.

And while Australia does have a significant petroleum industry, virtually all of it is in Western Australia, which is outside of the Victorian government’s purview.

According to the Public Transport Users Association in Victoria, Australia, the combined costs of noise, urban air pollution and climate change from vehicles in Australia total $8.4 billion per year. That’s quite a lot more than the proposed $1-2 million, which will be raised by Victoria’s EV tax. Which, again, is punishing the vehicles that are not responsible for these costs, rather than the ones that are.

But Victoria, instead of considering the benefits of converting vehicles to electric, which would save them tremendous amounts of money in health and environmental damages, is instead considering punishing environmentally and socially conscious choices and forcing greater costs on the very vehicles that are already saving money for all Victorians.

While the idea of a mileage tax (with a weight multiplier) for road usage makes sense as it would more fairly distribute costs to the cars and trucks responsible for it, Victoria’s proposed EV tax is not fair. It is a punitive measure directly for electric vehicles from a government that collects no revenue from gas cars and whose residents pay significant costs from the externalities from those same gas cars. These proposals are boneheaded in general, but Victoria’s plan here is unconscionable — bad for Victorians, bad for Australians, and bad for humans.

SOURCE: ELECTREK

 

[mhaze]

Electric cars powered by coal. Yes!

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