World EV Day – Australia beyond the tipping point

Electric car sales in Australia are rapidly picking up pace, so on World EV Day we look at who is winning the race and what the future has in store

Have the scales tipped in favour of the electric revolution?

Sales of new electric cars accounted for 6984 of the 109,966 vehicles sold in August this year. That’s 6.4 per cent of all new cars sold. The year-to-date figure is even higher, with 7.2 per cent of all new cars running on batteries alone.

Tesla makes up a staggering 57.4 per cent of new electric volume (32,820), with the American brand on track to deliver 50,000 cars this year alone. Next is BYD who has shifted 8004 units of the compact Atto 3 ahead of new launches by way of the smaller Dolphin hatch and Seal sedan later this year.

Third in line is Volvo (2948), a manufacturer that is still selling traditionally powered cars alongside its electric ones. That said, in August the sale of electric Volvos (122 C40 and 382 XC40) made up 49 per cent of the Swedish brand’s total volume, and account for 37 per cent of Volvo’s year-to-date sales. Volvo is still on track to be a wholly electric company by 2026.

Next is MG at 2510 units, then Mercedes-Benz at 1724, Polestar at 1678, Hyundai at 1574, BMW at 1555 and Kia at 1553. The remaining 13 brands are still building momentum and account for 2849 combined sales so far this year.

Why is this 7.2 per cent mark so important?

At the end of 2022, EV sales made up just 3.1 per cent of our new car market. We eclipsed the total number of 33,410 electric sales from 2022 in early June this year, and if you combine plug-in hybrid sales data, in the first eight months of 2023 we have sold more electric vehicles than in the past 12 years combined.

According to research published by Bloomberg in June 2022, the widely accepted tipping point for electric vehicle mass adoption is 5 per cent.

From this point, the cars cease to be an early-adopter novelty or niche, small-volume product and become part of the mainstream fleet. The article also notes that all 19 countries (at the time of publishing) that have crossed the 5 per cent mark have done so with market incentives and pollution standards.

While the latter is only a recent step for Australia, we ironically reached our 5 per cent mark when Victoria scrapped its incentive program and New South Wales looked at doing the same.

Regardless, if Australia follows the pattern identified by Bloomberg’s research, we are looking to be at around 30 per cent market share of electric vehicles by 2027.

It feels like a big step in a short time, but if you consider the new EV market share has been doubling every year, we may get there even sooner.

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