Electric cars: Where Australia (sadly) lags America

Does anyone enjoy being beaten senseless by someone weaker and more pathetic than them? I guess Gandhi might have, because he could see the benefit to the bullied.

Personally, I don’t enjoy being belted by anyone of any stature, but I genuinely find it even harder to be outsmarted by idiots.

Now look, it might offend some people, but I feel the same way about Australia – which I feel passionately proud to be a part of – being intellectually crushed by any other country (New Zealand doing a better job on the pandemic even bothers me slightly) but nothing stings more than the Americans outstripping us.

Just to be clear, I love America, and always have. I go there every chance I get and would live in New York tomorrow, were I to be given a million Tesla shares. But when California – the world’s largest fifth economy, its Dream Factory and a wonderful place in general – announced that it was going to ban the sale of the internal-combustion engine by 2035 this week, it hurt me, deeply.

(Just as it did the first time I saw a billboard advertising a shiny, shifty lawyer in Australia – oh how I used to laugh superiorly when I saw those in the States.)

Sure, many European countries have made similar pledges, but I get that. They are countries full of smart people switched on about climate change, determined to do something about the air pollution in their big cities. America is full of … human beings who think military assault rifles are a good thing to put in the hands of numpties, that George W Bush was smart enough to run the world and that Donald Trump is an inspirational leader who cares deeply about other people.

And, to be fair, it’s equally filled with geniuses, like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

California might be an outlier, in American terms, and it surely is on the issue of banning “gasoline cars”, but it’s also just one of many states to make cannabis legal, first for medicinal reasons, and now just for fun, and possibly because ingesting it is less likely to make you shoot other Americans than drinking alcohol will.

We are just as far behind on that issue as we are on climate change, incredibly, and possibly further.

The question the ICE ban raises is not how California – a huge car market with more than two million sales a year, and a vast populace that buys more than 15 percent of all petroleum sold in the US – is going to get this done, in fewer than 15 years (keep in mind that the ban will only apply to new vehicles, and a second-hand pickup truck will still cost you only about $12). No, the question should be why we are so far behind, not only the whole world, but the American bit in particular.

One of the six million annoying things that politicians will say to you if you’re silly enough to sit down with them is that they don’t lead the public, they follow. Properly brave politicians – like JFK, Paul Keating and that Gandhi fellow – are the exceptions. Most of them have no guts at all and desire only to be re-elected and to do that they are constantly trying to sniff the air to see what people want – which they mostly seem to do by reading the tabloids – and trying very hard not to shock the horses.

So they argue that they would happily start building charging infrastructure and handing out incentives to people to buy EVs, if that’s what people were shouting for. Instead, all they hear in their ivory towers is people from the energy industry saying we need more coal and gas.

And yes they could point to the sales figures for EVs in this country so far, which are very low, but behold the chicken and the egg – would they by higher if the government did something to encourage them? Cockadoodle do. Give that politician a prize.

Interestingly, Audi tells us that its research shows more than 50 percent of Australian consumers are actually interested in buying an EV, and it seems clear that what they’re struggling most for is choice, particularly choice of the affordable kind.

Meanwhile, in America, or at least the progressive Californian part, they’re continuing to make us look like backward rubes. Or like we like to think of Americans.