a day ago
Comment: EV road user tax ‘makes no sense'
COMMENT: Electric car owners should pay their way, but now isn't the time to smash them with a new tax.
If the government is serious about improving air quality, reducing the nation's reliance on foreign energy sources and reaching carbon emissions goals, it shouldn't discourage people from choosing electric cars.
It's like tackling on the obesity problem by introducing a salad tax.
It makes no sense.
Hitting EV owners with an extra $500 per year – or thereabouts – in road user fees will only discourage people from going green.
Yes, electric car owners do not pay the fuel excise tax that helps build and repair our roads.
I reckon that's a fair price to pay, at least today, for the broader social benefits of electric cars.
There are more EVs on sale than ever, and the price gap between petrol and electric cars continues to shrink.
But electric cars still struggle for traction.
Aussie drivers have bought 54,364 electric cars this year – just 97 more than the same period in 2024.
You could hardly call that growth.
Especially when sales of other vehicle types continue to grow, and electric vehicle market share has slipped from 7.4 to 7.0 per cent this year.
Introducing a new pay-by-the-mile tax on electric cars would only serve to push motorists away from zero emission vehicles, back toward combustion-powered cars.
And EVs need all the help they can get.
Hyundai just launched the Ioniq 9, an electric cousin to the Santa Fe and Palisade. The electric model starts at about $130,000 drive-away, roughly double the asking price of its combustion-powered cousins.
Kia's electric EV9 is outsold by the combustion-powered Sorento by about 30 to 1, and Volkswagen's battery-powered ID. 4 and ID. 5 duo are outsold 10 to 1 by the petrol Tiguan.
Over at Toyota, deliveries of the electric bZ4X represent just 0.3 per cent of its 142,700 sales this year.
EVs are here.
Customers just aren't choosing them.
There are headlines just about every day from car companies trying to figure out how to handle EVs in Australia.
Hyundai says it has done 'a terrible job' convincing customers to make the switch, Honda says there is 'a lot of noise' surrounding EVs while people quietly buy hybrids and Suzuki, plainly, says they 'just don't think the Australian market wants them'.
They might be right.
We quizzed more than 50,000 readers earlier this year as part of The Great Aussie Debate and found that only 14.9 per cent of people were considering an EV for their next car.
That represented a drop from 18.9 per cent in 2023.
The government wants us to get behind the wheel of electric cars, even if we don't want to choose them.
A new tax is a strange way to try and change that.
