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Electric Mobility

Kelvin Say (2024) - "Electric mobility - Australia". Published online at OpenEnergyTracker.org. Retrieved from: 'https://openenergytracker.org/en/docs/australia/emobility/' [Online Resource]

Road transport

Battery electric passenger cars

The federal government has recently released its first National Electric Vehicle Strategy with an aim for 3.8 million electric vehicles by 2030 in their Powering Australia Plan. However, The Step Change scenario from AEMO considers a less aggressive trajectory.

The year 2023 saw a surge in battery electric vehicle sales with an increase of 161% over the previous year, as reported by the Federal Chamber for Automotive Industries (FCAI). While there is an estimated 152,900 battery electric vehicles and 28,700 plug-in hybrids currently registered on Australian roads, a further 3.6 million electric vehicles (or 516,900/year) are required over the next 7 years to reach the 2030 federal government target.

Source: EV Council; FCAI; Reputex; AEMO

To better indicate how the stock of new vehicles is changing in Australia, the following figure shows the shares of purely battery electric and plug-in hybrids in new vehicle registrations per year based on FCAI and Electric Vehicle Council data. Federal government modelling in the Powering Australia Plan estimates that electric vehicles could make 89% of new vehicle registrations by 2030.

Source: EV Council; FCAI; Reputex

Charging infrastructure

Presently, there are currently no explicit government targets for the number of public charging stations. However, federal government modelling in the Powering Australia Plan estimates 1,800 public fast and ultra-fast charging stations will be needed by 2030. The Electric Vehicle Council reports that there are 967 fast and ultra-fast chargers as of June 2023, which is an increase of 57% over the last 12 months. As the number of chargers are not officially tallied, the number of charging locations reported by the EV Council and Plugshare are used to indicate the current status of EV charging infrastructure.

Source: EV Council