‘Give me a throaty V8 ute’: Why Australia isn’t ready for an electric vehicle revolution

In a vast country like Australia, where people love their SUVs and V8 utes, it’s going to be a long time before the population broadly embraces electric vehicles.

Sam Newman with his beloved Lamborghini. “Sam likes muscle cars that make a noise and so do I,” says Steve Price. Picture: Aaron Francis

My friend Sam Newman has owned several high-performance supercars, including a Lamborghini Aventador.

The two-door V12 Lambo can get from zero to 100km/h in about 2.8 seconds and costs about $800,000 off the showroom floor.

It has crazy bat-wing doors and is totally impractical as a daily drive, so Sam is more likely to be seen driving the rare Ford Mustang he owns or, what I recently saw him in, a gorgeous E-Type Jaguar.

Sam likes muscle cars that make a noise and so do I. As an experiment I borrowed a Tesla S a while back from the Richmond dealer. It has a ludicrous setting that on a racetrack you can put into launch mode.

I picked up Sam and while he refused to drive, he couldn’t believe the acceleration of the Tesla from a standing start. This most expensive of the EVs available on the Australian market was like a cross between a spaceship and a golf cart.

Sam Newman listed his beloved 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429 for sale in January this year.

Like the Lamborghini, though, most people will never drive the Tesla S and if they end up in an EV it could now be anything from a Hyundai to a Kia or an up-market Mercedes.

The problem is, neither Australia, Victoria nor Melbourne are anywhere near ready to ditch petrol and diesel cars and convert to electric.

Ignore the PR hype from groups like the Electric Vehicle Council — guess what that lobby group would like you to do — and just look at the pathetically inadequate infrastructure supporting this so-called EV revolution.

The EVC crowd, by the way, is made up of a charging company chief executive, the NSW equivalent of the RACV, an Ampol petrol executive and people from Tesla, VW and Volvo.

Vested interests are convinced average Australians are ready to embrace EVs and ignorantly use places like Norway as an example of where Australia’s motoring fleet should be headed.

Australia obviously isn’t Norway or tiny places like Belgium or Holland. We have vast distances to travel through country towns lucky to have a petrol station let alone a charging station to plug into for an hour.

And who has an hour to waste refuelling a car. Ten minutes in a servo is bad enough.

Electric vehicles are coming — make no mistake — and the more that get sold and the increasing variety of models available will bring the price down dramatically.

But just like wind and solar energy they will not come in the numbers expected without, as usual, you and me — the taxpayers of Australia — sticking our hands in our pockets to subsidise their arrival.

The quiet and environmentally friendly Hyundai Kona EV. Picture: Mark Bramley

Worse, some governments have decided to impose absurd deadlines for banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars. The over-privileged landlocked kingdom of Canberra – in the ACT – this week announced that by 2035 drivers will be banned from buying a new fossil fuel vehicle.

The ACT has an energy and emissions Minister, a bloke called Shane Rattenbury. He announced that in 13 years’ time, by law in Canberra, the ACT parliament will be able to tell you what sort of new car, motorcycle or small truck you can buy.

Politicians telling Australians what sort of car they can buy — does anyone really want that?

It gets worse. These same laws deem that in just eight years, by 2030, 80 to 90 per cent of new light vehicles will be EVs. To get you there, the ACT is already providing interest free loans of up to $15,000 to buy an EV.

It’s not a whole lot better in Victoria. The Andrews Labor government wants half of all light vehicles sold to be EVs by the same year and Minister Lily D’Ambrosio is handing out 20,000 subsidies of your money to get there.

Problem for these EV zealots is they don’t live in the real world or even think about how the real world will cope with their subsidy driven EV ambitions.

If these things are so fantastic, why do we need subsidies to get people to drive one?

You only need to look at the cars on the road around you to realise Australians are nowhere near ready to embrace this EV ambush. Australia’s best-selling road cars are dual cab utes like the Ford Ranger and Toyota HiLux.

John Obolevics is one of many Australians who love their utes and won’t be told by politicians what they can or can’t drive.

We have been in love with big SUVs for family road trips and school drop off for decades and there are no EV equivalents of any of those vehicles in Australia yet.

Trawling motoring websites there are a lot of promises, everything from a Ford F-150 to something called a Rivian but the prices are eye-wateringly high and it seems they are years away from getting here.

With petrol and diesel prices at the highest levels we have ever seen, the EV might seem like an obvious alternative but until Australia builds the infrastructure to support this revolution it won’t happen.

For regional governments to be as arrogant as Canberra to think people need laws to be forced to buy EVs is an insult to the motoring public.

Australia used to be a Holden and Ford country then we became a yte and 4-wheel drive nation it’s going to be a lot longer than 2035 before we become a plug-in nation driving silently around in computers on wheels.

Give me a throaty V8 HSV Maloo ute any day.

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