It’s happening. Electric vehicle sales are getting a bit of a gallop up. Some 26,356 new light vehicles sold in Australia in the nine months to the end of September were EVs, according to the Electric Vehicle Council’s latest “State of Electric Vehicles” report.
That’s 3.4 per cent of all new light vehicles sold, and a 65 percent increase compared with the same nine-month period a year earlier, when EVs sold as a proportion of new vehicle sales was just 2 percent.
The growth is almost fivefold compared with 2020, and is astronomical when compared with EV sales five years ago. In the comparative period in 2017, EV sales were just 0.2 percent as a share of all new vehicle sales.
It’s no surprise that the celebrity Tesla marque accounted for about one-third sales int he latest reporting period. The Tesla Model 3, a battery EV (or BEV) accounted for 8,647 sales. Its starting price is around $60,000. The Tesla Model Y, an SUV, and also a BEV, accounted for 5,376 sales. Its price starts at around $70,000 in Australia.
Making up the remaining top five ranking EV light vehicle sales in the nine-month period were: the MG HS, a plug-in hybrid (or PHEV), the Lexus NX450H, also a PHEV, and the Hyundai Kona BEV.
Still, Australia is way behind the rest of the world, the EVC’s head of policy Jake Whitehead said.
“It’s great to see so much momentum behind EV sales in Australia, but to put our 3.4 percent in context, Germany sits at 26 percent, the UK at 19 percent, and California at 13 percent. The global average is 8.6 percent so Australia has a long, long way to come,” Dr Whitehead said.
He said Australia needs better EV policies to drive up adoption and availability. The most pressing concern was to get fuel efficiency standards on par with those of Europe and the US to ensure OEMs prioritise allocating the latest models to Australia.
The EVC’s report indicates there’s now some 45 EV car models available in Australia, comprising as many as 95 variants, of which 60 are BEV and 35 are PHEV. The report has an appendix listing them all — a great resource for fleets sourcing vehicles.
While this is a good increase on the variety of a year earlier, when EVC counted 34 models available, it’s a fraction of what’s available in other jurisdictions. In the UK, there are some 180 variants.
In addition the EVC report’s appendices list some 18 models of electric trucks, vans and utilities. An another 18 EVs are bus models.
If you like anything you see, you had better be quick. Some models have sold out within “minutes of being made available”, the report said.
Indeed constrained availability may have skewed the best seller rankings. Two of the best sellers in 2021 — the MG ZS BEV and the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV weren’t available in the first half of 2022.
Other models to make the top rankings of Australian EV sales in the nine months ended Sept. 30 are: the Polestar 2, Mitsubishi’s Eclipse Cross, the Volvo XC40, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Kia’s EV6, the Lexus UX300e, BMW’s iX3 and Porsche’s Taycan.
