Australia has lagged behind much of the developed world in its uptake of electric cars. Now – for more reasons than soaring petrol prices – we’re flicking the switch. | Tony Davis
Anne Matheson is sitting in her home office in the northern suburbs of Sydney, hands nervously hovering over her keyboard, waiting for the clock to tick over to 1pm. It’s May 18, 2022, and the former marketing and finance executive, who is 60, has been rehearsing for this moment, working out how to use as few keystrokes as possible. She has to click through to the “pay deposit now” box as quickly as she can.
volume was incredible. But this is different, we’re talking about an $80,000 car – not a $500 console.” “We have tens of thousands of people on our expression of interest list. The Australian market is starved for EVs.”, they still accounted for just 2 per cent of new-car purchases. Other countries eclipse these figures. In the UK, about one in eight new cars last year were pure EVs, in the Netherlands close to one in five. Norway is the runaway leader for adoption, with almost two out of every three.
Tipping is president of the Tesla Owners Club of Australia – which claims 2000 members – and is perhaps, now, a greenie. When we speak, it’s via a bad mobile phone connection as he crosses from outback Queensland into the Northern Territory. He’s on a 6000-kilometre EV road trip, part of a new career bringing energy security to remote areas, particularly Indigenous communities, mainly by linking solar with back-up batteries.
Mountain drives a Mitsubishi plug-in hybrid, using electricity in the city and the petrol engine for longer journeys . He stresses that the automotive gasoline engine has had more than 130 years of intense development; the lithium-ion EV has matched it in many areas, and exceeded it in others, in a comparatively short time. And it will continue to improve, while the cost of renewable energy will keep falling.in the earliest days of motoring.
Finkel believes that battery electric will be the way forward for most passenger car applications, with hydrogen having more potential for trains, trucks and buses. He’s owned three different battery EVs and his back-of-the-envelope calculations before the recent increase in power prices suggest the average electric car typically costs $50 to run 1000 kilometres when charged at home, less if you have solar.
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