Despite Josh Frydenberg's enthusiasm about the future of electric vehicles, it's the future of petrol-fuelled cars that will have more immediate impact on the drive to get cleaner, more efficient vehicles onto Australia's roads.

Yet Australia is stuck with its own national brake on the pace of change. That's largely because this country still uses much dirtier fuel than most of the rest of the world. Indeed, Australia is ranked 70th in terms of fuel quality because of the relatively high percentage of sulphur permitted.