My household doesn’t include an electric car because our Toyota still does the job and the capital cost is beyond us. I sympathise with the Mercury correspondent who took exception last week to “condescending remarks” about not going electric.
It would have been better for the planet had we all gone electric years ago, and driving an electric vehicle would make it easier for me to argue for an end to fossil fuel use.
But that’s life. For many reasons, mainly economic, EVs will take a while to become truly normal in Australia. In our bigger cities that may be just a year or two, which ought to concentrate the minds of authorities, because the implications are massive.
Appearing in my inbox each month, My Electric Car Newsletter features a rapidly rising array of new models, along with advances in the technology of batteries and chargers and all the other paraphernalia of this automotive revolution.
Take the July issue, full of strangely-named new cars that most of us have never seen. European-badged EVs are starting to appear in Australia to join Elon Musk’s Tesla, which had a big head start. Both are mainly Chinese-made – but the real news today is about China’s home-grown brands.
Their sudden appearance on our roads has a long backstory. Twenty years ago, when Musk and other tech-savvy Western entrepreneurs foresaw the end of the fossil fuel era and started investing in alternatives to internal combustion engines, China read the same tea leaves and put its substantial financial and intellectual muscle behind electric cars, buses and trucks, and the batteries that power them.
In 2024 the results are there for all to see. With about 60 per cent of world production, China dominates EV manufacturing globally. Legacy brands from Japan, Korea, Europe and North America already rely heavily on Chinese manufacturing, but home-grown makers with names like Chery, BYD, GWM, Xpeng and Zeekr are the real story. They’re dominant in China and it’s only a matter of time before it’s the same here.
Melbourne new-energy geek Sam Evans – “Electric Viking” on YouTube – spelled out the consequences in stark detail this month in a video about car sales in China. He predicts that after a tenfold growth in EV sales since 2020, by the end of this year the internal combustion engine will be “finished in China”. Where China leads the world will follow, and the revolution will happen faster than any of us are ready for.
We’re mistaken to assume that the relatively low price of Chinese electric cars indicates lower quality, says US automotive engineer Sandy Munro, an expert in all things EV. Their technology, design and finish are at least as good as that of the non-Chinese brands, and often better. They cost less because unlike legacy car brands, new Chinese players are prepared to sell at or below cost to build market share.
The market is responding. Evans cited reputable data showing a huge growth in Chinese sales of home-grown EV brands over the past four years while sales of all the famous non-Chinese brands – the likes of Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes and Ford – showed a marked decline.
The Electric Viking reports that despite high European and US import tarrifs, 18 of the world’s 20 best-selling EV models are Chinese brands. The other two are Teslas. In Australia, where EV purchases are rapidly approaching 10 per cent of the new car market, top-dog Tesla is being challenged by those once-unknown Chinese models.
The past few years here have seen the odd blip in EV market share thanks in part to tax incentives for tradies to buy large, gas-guzzling utes, but the overall trend to EVs is inexorably upward. Electric utes include a handful of established names like Ford, Tesla and Toyota, but these are set to be swamped within a year by a dozen or more cheap, powerful Chinese models.
The momentum behind EV sales raises big long-term questions for regional Australia with its strong reliance on private cars for transport – and especially for the island state of Tasmania, at the end of long, vulnerable fuel supply lines from Asia. EV sales in Tasmania last year were less than 1 per cent of total sales, well below the national average, but the shift is happening here too.
As EVs penetrate and then dominate the car market, people not rolling in disposable income will be badly disadvantaged. This isn’t a personal complaint – my driving days are drawing to a close – although I do wonder what happened to egalitarian values, or why governments don’t plan ahead or prioritise essentials. But those are other subjects altogether.