A household in Craigieburn in Melbourne’s outer suburbs changing over to an electric vehicle from a Holden Commodore will deliver almost 10 times the savings in carbon emissions compared with a similar swap by an inner-city Melbourne owner, a KPMG report concludes.

KPMG has spent 10 months crunching the numbers on EV uptake and vehicle carbon emissions on a suburb-by-suburb basis in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and says policymakers should be concentrating on the outer suburbs of Australia’s largest cities when it comes to incentives to deliver the best outcomes for reducing emissions.