Australia finally has it's first national electric vehicle strategy. The strategy outlines the vision, objectives, and desired outcomes for the new strategy. This includes key initiatives to address supply, demand, and infrastructure gaps that hinder greater EV uptake in Australia.
While we recommend reading the entire official 56 page document from the federal government, we've created a summary of the key aspects of the policy
There is no reference to how other forms of electric vehicles or electric vehicle strategies around e-micromobility adoption integrate into this strategy. Part of the justification for the focus on passenger and light commercial vehicles is because they make up 60% of Australia's road emissions. It also reinforces the rhetoric that 'electric vehicle' is a term used exclusively to describe electric cars and not other forms of e-mobility.
More electric vehicles means less cars that rely on fossil fuels and traditional petrol. Fuel excise makes up around 1% of Australia's GDP, meaning that if less people buy petrol, this has a direct impact on government revenue. While the document covers the need to install more public chargers and increase incentives for multi-level dwellings or strata schemes to install chargers, there is no mention around strategies to ensure there is enough revenue to allocate towards road maintenance and repair. Road User Charging (RUC) forms a large part of this discourse - we need to have a conversation around creating a fair, flexible, and user-friendly RUC scheme to future-proof revenue for the purpose of road infrastructure repair and asset maintenance.
While there were references to greater data sharing, particularly around charging infrastructure utilisation and placements of networks, there was only vague mention of what form that data might come in or the role of vehicle-generated data. Understanding origin-destination of EVs, utilisation of charging infrastructure, and gaps by leverage connected vehicle data was another omission in this report.
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