Ampol, Hyundai team up for cheaper EV charging
Ampol and South Korean car maker Hyundai have joined forces to capture a bigger market in selling EVs and services to corporate and government fleet clients.
Ampol boss Matthew Halliday says the growth of the company’s expansion into electric vehicle charging stations will be partly fuelled by fleet sales, as the company looks to a new partnership with Hyundai to drive its shift away from petrol.
Ampol signed an agreement with the South Korean car maker Hyundai on Thursday, with the two companies looking to capture a bigger market in selling vehicles and services to corporate and government fleet clients, and potentially adding a hydrogen fuel cell offering to Ampol service stations.
Mr Halliday told The Australian the partnership would also target households that were looking to buy a Hyundai electric vehicle, with the fuel major likely to offer “attractive” pricing to pick Ampol’s emerging AmpCharge network over other recharging options while on the road.
Ampol was given approval by the Australian Energy Regulator in June to become an electricity retailer, and the new partnership will also allow it to offer Hyundai owners bundled home charging and other electricity products.
But the partnership will also target fleet buyers, with Ampol to offer an electric version of its fuel cards to corporate clients and potentially looking to install charging stations in office parking lots.
While electric vehicle sales have begun to accelerate in Australia, they still lag badly behind sales of diesel and petrol fuelled cars. September figures from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries show 7247 battery electric vehicles were sold in the month, outstripping the sale of hybrid vehicles for the first time.
But the total was still only 7.7 per cent of the total new vehicle sales during the month – although a substantial improvement on the overall market penetration of 2.7 per cent.
Mr Halliday said fleet sales were likely to be the major factor in increasing the penetration of electric vehicles, and underpin Ampol’s product offerings.
“I think scale is going to come at the front end of this transition through fleets – as companies with emissions targets and governments that have targets transition their vehicle fleets. They need that infrastructure at scale, and we become quite a meaningful supplier of electricity off the back of that scale,” he said.
Ampol has now installed charging points at five service stations across Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, offering with 150-kilowatt chargers that can recharge a car’s battery from 10 to 80 per cent in about 20 minutes. It plans to install charging points at more than 120 of the 700 or so fuel stations it operates before the end of 2023.
Hyundai Australia chief operating officer John Kett said the new partnership could also see Ampol offering recharging facilities to the company’s hydrogen cell vehicles in the future.
Mr Kett said the uptake of hydrogen fuelled vehicles had been relatively slow in Australia. He said the ACT government was trialling the use of 20 of the company’s Nexo sports utility vehicles, with a small number also being trialled in Queensland.
But Mr Kett said he believed sales of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles would lift if the company’s partnership with Ampol increased refuelling options across the country.
“We need a bigger infrastructure around hydrogen to make them a real commercial reality, both for companies such as Apple and then for Hyundai to be able to bring these vehicles into the country,” he said.