Samantha Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. There are so few electric cars in Australia, you probably know very few people who drive one. While the Europeans and Americans were making progress, we didn’t even have a national plan to boost sales until last week when the government released a new strategy. Today, an electric vehicle expert on whether we can catch up with the rest of the world and when soon we’ll all be driving them.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Dr. Dia Adhikari Smith, researcher at the University of Queensland, Dow Center and School of Civil Engineering.
Samantha Hawley: Day It’s pretty clear, isn’t it, that gasoline vehicles will soon be a thing of the past. But here in Australia we really seem to be so far from that reality, don’t we?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes, that’s right, we are, and one of the reasons is that we don’t really have an adequate national electric vehicle strategy to keep pace with the global trend towards clean energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet climate change commitments.
Samantha Hawley: Yeah, so let’s do it now, shall we?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes, we do.
Samantha Hawley: The federal government has published its first electric vehicle strategy, outlining how it plans to remove barriers to buying electric vehicles. Chris Bowen and Catherine King, they’re the ministers, they’ve announced this new strategy, it’s pretty incredible, isn’t it, that we haven’t had this kind of strategy in Australia until now. They say it’s the biggest shake-up of Australia’s car market in decades.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen: In Australia years ago. We lost a decade. Now we don’t have a moment to lose and so we get on with the job. But of course there will be many details.
Samantha Hawley: It’s right?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Well, what I’ve read, it’s a 56-page report and it focuses on improving the availability, accessibility and charging infrastructure of electric vehicles to reduce emissions, reduce costs for vehicle owners and expand the range of ‘options in the country. And the other big issue is what everyone is talking about is the fuel efficiency standard, which we don’t have in Australia. Now, that plan also includes an initiative to introduce a fuel efficiency standard that is expected to help reduce carbon emissions by a lot, like at least 3 million tons by 2030.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen: Work to be done, of course, but fuel efficiency standards are an important step forward for our country. We commit to the Albanian government to develop them and to work harder throughout this year to make them a reality.
Samantha Hawley: Okay, let’s look at this fuel efficiency standard and what it is and what it’s going to do, how it’s going to work. Incredibly, Australia and Russia were the only OECD countries without either of these. So now we have one or we have one just tell me what it is and what it will do?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes. Thus, Australia has never had a fuel efficiency standard that measures or regulates the average carbon dioxide or CO2 emission levels of new vehicles supplied annually by a manufacturer. And this applies to most other major economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Australia is one of the major economies, apart from Russia, without the standard resulting in limited availability of affordable options and making the country, as some people quote unquote, a dumping ground for less efficient vehicles and pollutants
Samantha Hawley: Yes. So this fuel efficiency standard, which we will now have, which will force manufacturers to prioritize sales of electric vehicles. So potentially we’ll have more electric vehicles in this country because they’re not that easy to buy at the moment, right?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: We now have, as last year, in 2022, the sale of electric vehicles in Australia only accounted for about 3.8% of new vehicle sales, which is considerably lower than the global average of 10 to one 12%
Journalist: By rich country standards, Australia is a nation of gas guzzlers. The Electric Vehicle Council estimates that at the end of last year there were around 83,000 electric cars on the road. That’s about half a percent of all cars and of course.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Much less than the leader in this area, Norway, where more than 80% of new vehicles sold are electric. Therefore, not having these standards has resulted in Australia receiving less efficient and more polluting vehicles and limited options for Australian consumers when purchasing a new electric vehicle.
Journalist: The cars we buy tend to be less efficient and produce more emissions per kilometer driven than Japan, the European Union and the US.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Therefore, of the hundreds of electric vehicle models available in Europe and the United States, we only have a fraction of them.
Samantha Hawley: Yes. I mean, it’s quite frustrating. Yes. Car manufacturers will therefore have to ensure that the average emissions of all cars sold in a given period fall below a certain threshold. So it just forces them, it actually forces them to sell more EVs.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes, that is correct. That’s okay. Fuel efficiency standards therefore involve either a fleet-wide average emissions target or a standard efficiency target. So manufacturers will pay a penalty for exceeding this target based on the average number of new vehicles they sell. And tests overseas, like in other countries where they have strong and ambitious fuel efficiency standards, show that this is encouraging carmakers to make more electric vehicles available and to market them more intensively. And also an ambitious fuel efficiency standard tells manufacturers to invest in a greater supply of electric vehicles.
Samantha Hawley: All right. So the government says it will now consult the public and industry to finalize the details of this. But do we know what the goal is in Europe and the US? For example, they want electric vehicles to account for two-thirds of passenger vehicle sales by 2032. In countries like the UK and Japan, they will ban the sale of petrol vehicles between 2025 and 2030. So what is our goal? Do we know what our goal is?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Well, we can look at other countries as we design our fuel efficiency standards. So, for example, Europe, the US and even New Zealand with their recently announced new fuel efficiency standards have separate targets for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles to reduce CO2 emissions. So they are designed differently depending on different countries like Europe. They have the goals established every five years, while annually in the USA and New Zealand. The targets in the US were also recently as we had the announcement from the Biden administration where it recently got tougher to expect at least 67% of new cars sold to be electric by 2032.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden: A future of the automotive industry that is electric. Electric battery, electric plug hybrid electric fuel cell. It’s electric and there’s no reverse gear. The question is if.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: So by looking at these different designs and different ways of designing these standards, I think it’s the experts and the consultation paper that the government has put out, we can come up with the ideal plan or design for Australia.
Samantha Hawley: Yeah, I mean, those are really ambitious goals, right? A little within the decade. It is hard to imagine that we would make such a big change in such a short time. Are there barriers here in Australia that perhaps other nations in Europe, for example, don’t face?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Well, there are barriers related to the initial cost and because they are much more expensive and as a result it means it goes back to the standards, because we don’t have the standards, we don’t have enough supply of electric vehicles, no There aren’t enough models available .
Samantha Hawley: Not to mention, I also guess we live in a huge country. And when I talk to people I don’t know that much about, to be honest, but when I talk to people who have electric vehicles, one of their biggest problems is finding charging points. And of course, if you’re traveling long distances in Australia, this becomes even more problematic.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes. Therefore, I think that the national strategy that they published has a lot of push to consider initiatives to support the deployment of the National Charging Infrastructure Network and also its integration into the electricity grid to support electric vehicles, because this is definitely a very important factor where people worry. , have range anxiety that whether there will be a charging network available when driving long distances.
Samantha Hawley: right well So it looks like there’s still a lot of work to do in that regard.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes, that is correct. And also, of course, there is the heavy vehicle sector, which we are not even talking about. We are only talking about light vehicles such as passenger cars.
Samantha Hawley: As far as passenger vehicles go, buying an electric vehicle right now is very, very expensive.
Journalist: Prices are coming down, but electric cars are still out of reach for most people.
Samantha Hawley: I see that part of the government’s strategy is to create a second-hand market for electric cars faster. So how would you do it?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Yes, it is very interesting to know that in Australia, fleet sales, as well as a fleet of cars, companies or the government that have a fleet of cars, fleet sales make up 41% of all car sales annually and these vehicles are available are available in the secondary manual market within 3 to 5 years, which could lead to more people being able to buy an electric vehicle at a reduced cost. Government fleets or business fleets have target dates to move or transition their entire fleet to electric vehicles. Once we have these fuel efficiency standards, we will have more models and better costs. Then the second-hand market will be available to people with a reduced cost of electric vehicles.
Samantha Hawley: OK, OK. So we have to move to electric vehicles, of course, because the whole world is going in that direction, and basically, not too far away, you won’t be able to buy a gasoline or diesel car or vehicle. But the bigger picture is, of course, what we need and the Government has made a legal commitment to cut emissions by 43% from 2005 levels by 2030. How important is this package to achieving that target?
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Well, this is the right step forward, no doubt. But, of course, we should not talk, just talk about it and consult. We need these fuel efficiency standards to be in place by at least 2024 or 60% of all new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2030. We need these kinds of commitments to meet our 43% reduction target by 2030 .
Samantha Hawley: And Dia, tell me, in your opinion, how far will we all go with an electric vehicle? It’s an exciting prospect.
Dr Dia Adhikari Smith: Well, ah, in 2040, I hope 2040 is when we get to 100%. That would be a good goal.
Samantha Hawley: Dr. Dia Adhikari Smith is a researcher at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The cheapest electric car available in Australia is over $40,000. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Flint Duxfield, Chris Dengate and Sam Dunn, who also mixed. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. I’m Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, email us at ABC News Daily at abc.net.au. Thank you for your attention.
