Australia left behind as rest of the world accelerates with EVs

OPINION

It is surprisingly easy to make senior car-company people angry, or even tearful. Or, at least, it is if you’re a motoring journalist.

When the CEO of an automotive giant asks how much you love his company’s latest creation and you give him an honest answer about how much it looks like a slug in a bow tie, and is as much fun to drive as a whoopee cushion, they really do get quite upset.

You can, if you don’t fancy confrontation, easily get the same kind of reaction by asking them about electric vehicles and the joy that is attempting to sell them in a market like Australia.

What amazed me, for quite some time, was that they bother to try at all. The first Nissan Leaf, launched back in 2010, was as realistically priced as Sydney real estate but didn’t sell quite as well. And yet Nissan perseveres – albeit with a vastly improved Nissan Leaf that’s much better value – and its sister company, Renault, even attempts to sell the quite wonderful and attractive Zoe here (private sales so far this year, roughly, and I don’t mean to be unkind, zero).

Mazda is going to bring its first ever EV to Australia, too, the MX-30, despite the fact that the people from head office in Japan told us, at the car’s launch, that it would only be sold in countries where it made sense – ie those where you could charge it using electricity produced by something other than burning not-actually-clean coal.

And countries where the authorities go out of their way to help car companies sell them. Places like Norway, where we first drove the Mazda in prototype form, where EVs made up 42 per cent of sales in 2019.

Buy an EV in Norway and the government will applaud and reward your green-friendly, dolphin-kissing choice by giving you permission to drive in bus lanes, 50 per cent discounts on car-ferry fares, a 100 per cent discount on your road tax, no purchase or import taxes, and an  exemption from the country’s 25 per cent VAT on your purchase.

They used to let EVs park for free, too, but now they simply have too many of them.

Ask a car-company person in Australia to describe our government’s attitudes to incentivising people to buy EVs in this country and some of them get very upset indeed. I know of one former car-company boss who says he sat in meeting after meeting with federal politicians in which they showed no interest whatsoever in moving on the issue.

He described it as like running repeatedly into a wall with his head, but less enjoyable. Nothing, but nothing, that he, or his colleagues, presented to these politicians – not facts about global warming, figures that show the uptake in other countries, not even projections that show that, one day, if we don’t get on board, there won’t be anything but EVs to import, and we’ll look pretty bloody stupid and out of touch then.

And then I realised why car companies do keep trying. It’s not just a matter of doing the right thing, being good corporate citizens, it’s a realisation that they need to shift the Australian market so that they can have a future.

Sticking our heads in the sand about global warming, and EVs, while even China pays more attention to both, certainly hasn’t had a political cost yet, but you’d have to wonder how long that can last.

Buyers of EVs in California get a $US2000 cash rebate. Free money, just for buying an EV. Unimaginable here.

Although, to be fair, in Victoria you do get $100 off your annual rego costs if you buy an EV. Wow.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve had car company people beg me for help – just to get the word out, to tell people that Australia could do better, if its government would just get on board.

Even the ability to drive your EV in bus lanes, or just commuter lanes, might help. But no.

Our politicians, who made fun of the EV idea at the last election, suggesting that a move towards them would steal away the great Australian weekend, believe that any move towards electrification should be driven by the market, as the move to hybrids was. The idea being that people won’t want to pay for petrol, because our taxes make it so expensive, so they’ll look for other alternatives.

But when I think about that I can’t help picturing our prime minister holding aloft a piece of coal in parliament.

The fact is, they could make a difference, I’d argue they should make a difference, but the movement in that direction so far, at least from the party currently in charge, has been so slow it almost makes me cry.