David Penberthy: EV lemon fears show who’s really in charge

Teslas are being shipped to Australia faster than anyone can buy them – or more accurately, faster than anyone wants to buy them, writes David Penberthy.

A bit over 10 years ago I made one of the more ludicrous but excellent purchases of my life. I bought an 11-seat Toyota LWB Hiace van off a bloke on Gumtree for the asking price of $2000. At that price it would have been rude to haggle. You can spend more than that on lunch with a few mates in Sydney without trying. Two grand it is, I’ll be over with the cash tonight.

This majestic old bomb rolled out of the Toyota factory in 1994 when Paul Keating was prime minister and Bon Jovi were topping the charts with their heart-wrenching torch ballad Always.

The car has enjoyed a colourful three decades on this earth. It started life as a prisoner transfer van for the Victorian Department of Correctional Services, carrying shysters and degenerates from the Melbourne courts to their new digs at Pentridge. At the end of its period of public service it was sold second-hand to a family of Brethren churchgoers who used the van to transport their many children.

The digs at Pentridge Prison. Picture: Adrian Didlick

It was then bought by the guy who sold it to me, a young arty bloke who had removed all the back seats and installed exercise bikes in the cabin. The bikes had fruit blenders attached to their handlebars and the blender motors were connected to the exercise bikes’ chains. He would park the van at fairs and sell “pedal smoothies” where kids could fill the blender with the fruit of their choice and pedal it into drinkable form.

My plan for the van was equally demented. It now resides at a beach in SA where you can drive on to and park on the sand. I reinstalled seven of the nine rear seats and it’s now basically a sand dune on wheels, filled with towels, bats, balls, sandcastle equipment, folding chairs and barbecue stuff so we can set up for the day in a jiffy. I get it serviced once a year to make sure it’s not going to explode or that the brakes haven’t failed.

Penbo's beach bus. Picture: Supplied

To this day it purrs like a kitten, albeit one with emphysema. We have probably had more fun as a family in that van than anywhere else, and my older kids now love using it with their mates too.

The weird thing about the van is that if I listed it on Gumtree tomorrow I would probably get $5000 for it, for one key reason. Despite having 411,000km on the clock and more than a few rust spots, the $2000 beach mobile has a special life force known as a Toyota engine. Like Arnie at the end of Terminator II, if you took to the 30-year-old Toyota Beach Bus with sledgehammers and drove it off one of the local cliffs, its eyes would glow red as it came back to life.

I was thinking about the indestructible beach bus this week while reading about the collapse in prices and slowing demand in Australia for electric vehicles. Poor old Elon Musk is shipping Teslas to Australia faster than anyone can buy them – or more accurately, faster than anyone wants to buy them.

Brand new Tesla cars sit parked at a dealership in California. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP

Only a few months ago every Tesla that arrived in Australia was pre-sold. A year or so ago, there was a wait list to get your hands on one. Not so anymore. The key problem for Teslas, and other electric vehicles, is that many people have twigged to the fact any vehicle whose engine might not last much longer than 10 years is a potential lemon-in-waiting with zero resale value.

A photograph emerged this week of the so-called Tesla “graveyard” at Port Melbourne where many of the 2000-odd Teslas that arrive in Australia for sale each month are now sitting unsold at the docks. It’s a powerful illustration of how the next big digital-age must-have item can come unstuck through admirable, analog-era scepticism.

I mean call us old fashioned but it seems a fair question to ask of a carmaker – so this engine, it’s going to last more than 10 years, right?

Sticky-beak governments have an unpleasant habit of inveigling their way into our private affairs. As environment minister, Chris Bowen managed to annoy every ute-owner in the land by floating new vehicle efficiency standards earlier this year which would have jacked up the cost of every HiLux, Ranger and Triton. In Britain, the government is sticking to what it calls a “realistic and achievable” plan to phase out all petrol-powered cars by 2035 – all that from a supposedly conservative government.

Environment minister Chris Bowen managed to annoy every ute-owner in the land, according to David Penberthy. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Elon’s Tesla graveyard and the slowing demand for EVs amid a Chinese-led discounting war says a lot about human behaviour. It shows that most of us are increasingly wise to the fact that EVs still take a long time to charge, that you can’t just hit the road and go bush in one.

Most of all, we are wise to the fact that, as the technology currently stands, our new electric car might be a thing of great utility for barely a decade. That’s not much of a selling point for the second-biggest investment we will all make in our lives.

There’s a broader matter of principle here. Take the case of Chris Bowen. I don’t want to accept any behavioural advice from a man who is billing the next election as a referendum on nuclear power, when his own government has signed a tripartite defence deal requiring us to manufacture nuclear submarines and house their high-level waste. If he makes that much sense on such a major matter of public policy, he should have no role to play helping me select a vehicle.

And as for the idea of “phasing out” petrol-powered vehicles, when it comes to the mighty beach bus the real problem will be ever stopping the thing from going, if the past 30 fun-filled years are anything to go by.

Originally published as David Penberthy: EV lemon fears show who’s really in charge