Sprintcyclist wrote on May 23^rd, 2025 at 11:04pm:



According to the latest edition of Road Vehicles Australia this nation had 22.3 million registered vehicles in January 2025, of which 259,690 are electric, or just over 1 per cent of the total fleet. Most of that is in passenger vehicles, where there are 249,430 electric cars out of 16.08 million, or roughly 1.6 per cent. In the heavy and commercial fleet, electric vehicles number only in the low thousands out of more than five million vehicles; in percentage terms EVs are a rounding error. This does not count all the off-road vehicles working in mines and agriculture.

There was a flurry of breathless stories recently about the surge in the sale of EVs in March so this column called Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries chief executive Tony Weber to sift the statistics.

“March 2026 was the best month ever recorded for EVs in Australia, with 15,839 sales, or 14.6 per cent of the market,” Weber says. “The other 85 per cent of sales are using either petrol or diesel as part of their propulsion. Given there are around 20 million light vehicles on the roads in Australia, it is clear that we will rely on diesel and petrol supply for decades to drive our fleet.”


The road to a new energy future will be long. EVs will have their place but the power that moves this nation now and in the foreseeable future is liquid. Until we face that reality, we will remain what we have become, supplicants for the fuels we once made ourselves.

As Shakespeare warned, “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” The question is whether we still have the wit and will to find them.

And - for all those who believe owning an EV will be a lot cheaper because they don't have to pay for petrol and pay tax on that petrol:

Australia's EV 'tax' one step closer as government works with states, territories

The Commonwealth is working with state and territory governments to shape a road-user charge that'll be levied on electric vehicle owners.

8 Sep 2025

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Yep, gotta pay for all that road maintenance somehow. Mind you, if the government used all of the money it collected in fuel taxes to fund road maintenance this probably wouldn't be a big problem right now.

And, I strongly suspect the majority (if not all) of the people who currently own an EV or are looking at buying one are not doing it out of any concern about pollution and the environment - they just want to try and save money. Which is fair enough, I guess?