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Electric Mobility

Kelvin Say (2023) - "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.

At the start of 2022, there were approximately 34,000 purely battery electric passenger vehicles in Australia, according to the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE). At the end of 2022, the EV Council reported over 83,000 battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were registered on Australian roads.

To better indicate how the stock of passenger vehicles is changing in Australia, the following figure shows the shares of purely battery electric and plug-in hybrids in new car registrations per year from the Federal Chamber for Automotive Industries (FCAI) and Electric Vehicle Council. Federal government modelling of the Powering Australia Plan estimates that electric vehicles could make 89% of new vehicle registrations by 2030.

Charging infrastructure

Presently, there are currently no explicit government targets for the number of public charging stations. However, federal government modelling of the Powering Australia Plan estimates that 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 from EVC and Plugshare are used to indicate the current status of EV charging infrastructure.