Holden hits the graveyard, bring on the EV

The car industry is in the midst of huge change, with Holden's demise just a sign of the times. Picture:

It may be an unpopular take but when news came of the demise of Holden all I could summon was a shrug of the shoulders.

Meanwhile others are mourning the loss and have lapsed into gormless nostalgia, eyes misting over recalling the good times, the trips and travels while omitting the travails. Perhaps that first frenzied love making took place in a Holden, hopefully while parked.

Nostalgia is by nature selective. It is a trick of memory.

We forget those old Holdens had some nasty habits. They broke down a lot. They were bone jarringly uncomfortable. Especially unpleasant was that on impact the glove box would fly open, decapitating the seat belt-less passenger.

Ah, the good old days.

There is no point in getting mawkish about brands. Where would it end? Moaning that I can’t gnaw on a Hoadley’s Poly Waffle in my MoGo while speeding towards the Zeppelin port?

The future for motor vehicle manufacturing globally is fraught. No one knows this more than the manufacturers themselves. When they peer into the future, they see a ghastly vision of ride sharing on steroids, where new car manufacture is cut by at least a quarter and probably a whole lot more.

How could this possibly happen when there will be more people, better roads, and a vast, emerging middle class in Asia and Africa?

In the next twenty years, many of us and those living in big, sprawling cities especially won’t own vehicles. We will subscribe to them, paying a portion of the cost of the vehicle and a slice of the costs of maintenance, registration, taxes et cetera to a company by monthly fee. Subscribers will summon their driverless vehicles to pick them up and drop them off.

We can safely put that at one vehicle for every two or three households.

That alone should make you fairly cautious about investing your super in General Motors or Ford, Toyota, Mazda, BMW, Audi, Hyundai etc. Long story short, General Motors, founded in 1908, is market capitalised at $US50 billion. Founded in 2003, Tesla’s market cap is $US145 billion.

We don’t have a car industry in this country anymore and what little influence we had to bear on how the global industry shapes itself and responds to technological change is gone. We are along for the ride.

In short, the role of the car as a freedom chariot and locale for urgent love making with two on the floor and three in every garage is coming to an end.

If you think this is all science fiction nonsense now might be a good time to remind you that Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) was set in 2019.

Does anyone remember the unseemly debate about electric vehicles in last year’s election? It was a head-desk moment for many thinking Australians, driven by partisan politics and some fruity contributions by the commentariat either stuck in some fetishistic whimsy for the internal combustion engine or out barracking for one team or another.

Amusingly, Labor’s EV policy has now been consigned to the internet graveyard; a 404 – File Not Found. Take a stroll through the Labor website and see for yourself. The policy does not exist or rather it sits gathering dust somewhere in the floor to ceiling ‘under review’ pile.

The aim of it, according to Bill Shorten, was to have the same number of EVs purchased to ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles by 2030 without any clear, comprehensible way of getting there.

The policy did not even advocate for the purchase of EVs for government fleet vehicles, the only impact the government has on the market.

The Morrison government does have a policy on electric vehicles. Yes, it exists. But it is what we might call a strategy rather than a policy and one seemingly stuck on the issue of the creation of a standardised charging plug.

The marketplace has already made its decision and installed standardised charging units around the country. Many more will come.

Tesla are set to be a huge player in the car industry. Picture: Getty Images

Motor vehicle manufacturers will have EVs price competitive in Australia by 2023. Within ten years, ICE vehicles will be a niche manufacture, if they’re manufactured at all. EV ranges (now at around 400 kilometres) will grow, charging will be quicker. Despite what Scott Morrison said in the heat of the campaign last year about Bill Shorten killing your weekend, EVs pull caravans and boats now.

Most of all, they are really fun to drive.

For consumers, the choice will be driven as in all things by cost and convenience. Therein also lies a nightmare for any federal government.

As it stands, if you fill your EV at a charging station, you’re out about $20, compared to around $100 to fill the tank of a standard six-cylinder sedan. If you charge at home, it’ll contribute less than $5 to your power bill. But if you’ve got a bank of photovoltaic cells on your rooftop, you’re paying precisely nothing to fill your car. Either way, not a cracker goes to the federal government in fuel excise. As it stands, fuel excise contributes around $11 billion to federal coffers every year.

No doubt the they’ll come up with a road tax or some other God-awful grasping measure. They always do.

Also worth bearing in mind is that Australia has just 22 days of crude oil, 59 days of LPG, 20 days of petrol, 19 days of aviation fuel and 21 days of diesel stockpiled at any given time.

Any interruption to shipping, by say, pandemic or natural disaster or regional conflict and we’ve got a big, scary problem. The internal combustion engine may be the choice of a lot of motoring journalists but the guzzlers are not much use sitting in a garage out of juice.

There will be profound changes to the social landscape. When you’re next driving around, consider that one in every two service stations you pass will be gone within ten years. By 2040, the workaday servo will be nothing more than a curiosity, like a trip to the drive-in movies is now.

There’ll be a lot of jobs lost, too.

New jobs will come. The car makers recommend all EV owners have charging equipment where the vehicle is garaged. Imagine the demand for installation of 15-amp power points and generic charging units in garages allowing people to charge their vehicles from 1 per cent to 100 per cent as it stands right now in three hours.

If you’re a young person wondering about a career, electrical engineering or an electrical trade is going to put money in your wallet for a long time to come.

I can almost see the brows furrowing. Surely, Australia’s love affair with the car will go on and on forever. We will want our collectables and our run arounds. We will want or SUVs and our dual cab pick-ups and our sedans, our Jeeps, our Jazzes, our Jags. We will want our Corollas, our CX-5s and our … Commodores.

Oops. Sorry. That one is already gone.