More than 60,000 cars are stuck on boats off the Australian coast

A whopping 60,000 new cars are stuck on boats off the Australian coast but the reason might surprise you.

Volkswagen's new ID2 electric car model. Picture: Axel Heimken/AFP

A whopping 60,000 new cars are stuck on boats off the Australian coast due to a backlog of quarantine cleaning.

Trent Nikolic, the managing editor of Drive.com.au, told 2GB’s Chris O’Keefe it takes 24 hours working around the clock to unload a vessel carrying 3000 new cars, however, the quarantine cleaning itself can only clean a rate of nine cars per hour.

According to Mr Nikolic, only 350 new cars per week are delivered, even though we’re buying over 21,000 in that time.

“When we last checked this there were at least 24 car-carrying ships that were either in limbo or waiting to dock,” he said.

Around 60,000 new cars are stuck on boats off the coast of Australia.

“These aren’t Rolls Royces, these are just general average cars the Australian families need to get around and they are waiting a year or 18 months.”

He said sellers of second-hand cars are “laughing”.

“If you’re selling a second-hand car you’ll do well, but you have to make sure you’re not waiting two years for a new one,” Mr Nikolic said.

He particularly empathised with car dealers who struggled during Covid and may be stuck with old products.

“They finally get good products and they are going to have to wait almost two years,” he said.

Australians are increasingly turning to Chinese-made cars as Aussie manufacturers use Covid-related supply issues to push up their prices.

The trend is a repeat of the rise of Korean cars, which stole market share from the dominant Japanese brands on the back of great value and long warranties.

Now the Koreans are in the firing line. Chinese-sourced cars outsold Korean imports last month, continuing a four-month trend.

MG has become one of the country’s top-selling brands. Picture: Supplied.

Leading the way is MG, which was the seventh-best selling brand last month.

China’s BYD Atto 3 also had a strong month with 770 sales, ranking just behind the Tesla Model Y.

But snapping at its heels is Great Wall Motors and its Haval sub-brand. Its sales were up and eye-watering 188 per cent last month.

Tesla deliveries tended to come in bursts last year. One month they’d shift a ton of cars and the next they wouldn’t.

But in the past few months, the electric vehicle pioneer has been on a roll.

Tesla sold almost 7000 vehicles in the first two months of this year. To put that in perspective, the brand sold roughly 12,000 cars in 2021.

At the end of last year, the Model Y SUV was leading the charge, but this month it’s the Model 3 sedan.

It was the third-best selling vehicle in the country, behind only the Toyota HiLux and the Ford Ranger.

Setting aside utes and SUVs, Tesla was the top-selling passenger car manufacturer in February.

It was the ninth-best selling brand last month, eclipsing household names including Subaru, Volkswagen, Honda and Nissan.

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