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This means Australia must compete for a share of global production against countries that have clear policy positions on climate change and electric cars.Īround the world, China, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, New Zealand and the UK have all acted with various degrees of intervention to encourage their take-up.

#ATTACK ATTACK LONG ROAD TO NOWHERE HOW TO#

And as there are currently only a finite number of electric cars manufactured worldwide each year, car companies must think carefully about where to sell their cars, how many to send and how to price them. With Australia now wholly reliant on imports, the country is at the mercy of global markets. “You don’t just disassemble the factories and reassemble them when you need to use them again.” “Automotive manufacturing is not a Lego kit,” Dean said. It is extremely risky and expensive to build a car factory capable of producing a whole car from scratch, as each plant relies on a vast network of suppliers and must produce in large volumes to turn a profit. There have been no updates since.ĭr Mark Dean, a research associate with the Australian Industrial Transformation Institute at Flinders University, is not surprised. When Gupta failed to get traction, he said he would instead look to Victoria. Early last year, Sanjeev Gupta, the British billionaire investor, announced he wanted to take over the former Holden factory at Elizabeth, South Australia and cannibalise its old machinery to build electric cars. Sometimes this has made for big headlines that end in a whimper. The division at a federal level has so far meant little has been done to introduce a cohesive plan or national strategy, leaving state governments, local authorities and industry to go it alone amid a lack of resources, limited authority and deep uncertainty. His enthusiasm was not matched by conservative backbenchers. In Australia, work around managing the transition towards electric cars has been marred by inaction despite high-level support for electric cars from some among the current government.Īt the start of 2018, the now treasurer Josh Frydenberg penned an opinion piece as the environment minister arguing that “a global revolution in electric vehicles is under way”. Governments elsewhere have generally addressed the issue by encouraging more cars on the road to run off electricity and then working to “green” the power sources which provide that electricity. There is no other national government that doesn’t bother having a plan, or consider knowing what to do next. There are currently 17m registered cars on Australian roads which the Climate Council says represent the second biggest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the country.Įach year Australian cars collectively produce roughly the same emissions as Queensland’s entire coal and gas-fired electricity supply, making decarbonising Australia’s vehicle fleet a must to combat climate change. “We have to ask ourselves: do we continue to remain behind?” Do we want cleaner roads? Do we want safer roads? A better environment? And the other thing is, do we want to get a slice of the pie? “At the moment we are nine to 10 years behind the rest of the world in the take-up of electric vehicles. “It’s like Steve Jobs telling you that in 20 years’ time he’s going to create an iPhone and you do nothing about it.

“The entire world is moving in this direction,” says Jafari.

The bad news is that under the most conservative projections by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, it will take until 2027 for the uptake of electric cars to become significant. The organisation’s CEO, Behyad Jafari, says the good news is that this represents a 68% increase from 2016, a trend he expects to continue into 2019 as lower-cost cars like the Hyundai Ionic and new-model Nissan Leaf hit the market for under $50,000. Numbers are not currently available for 2018. But while the rest of the world has been transitioning to the new technology, in 2017 Australians bought just 2,284 vehicles, according to the Electric Vehicle Council.

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