Australian Drivers Ditch the Pump as EVs and Hybrids Near Half of New Car Sales

A fuel-price crisis and the end of a government subsidy are reshaping the car lot

By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne

Walk onto an Australian car lot right now and you'll find something that would have seemed unlikely a few years back: electric and hybrid vehicles selling at nearly the same clip as petrol cars.

New data from the Australian Automobile Association, reported by The Guardian, shows EV and hybrid sales roughly doubled between April and June compared with the depths of an earlier fuel-price spike, putting them close to half of all new car sales in the country. The driver — literally and figuratively — is pain at the pump. Petrol prices are on track to top $2 a litre again, the Guardian reports, after the federal government's temporary fuel excise reduction expired Sunday. That relief measure had been introduced specifically to soften the blow of a fuel crisis tied to instability in the Middle East.

Here's the plain math for an ordinary buyer: when the government subsidy that made petrol artificially cheaper disappears, and pump prices climb back toward record territory, the sticker-price gap between a hybrid and a straight combustion-engine car looks a lot smaller than it did a year ago. Consumers are voting with their wallets.

What we don't have from this reporting is a state-by-state or brand-by-brand breakdown, or comment from the auto industry on how manufacturers are adjusting supply to meet the shift. Nor do we know how much of the increase reflects new buyers switching versus existing EV owners upgrading. Those are the numbers worth watching as the next quarter's data comes in.

For now, the trend line is simple enough: expensive gas plus an expired subsidy equals a faster shift to the plug and the battery. Somebody's paying for the fuel crisis — increasingly, fewer of them are paying at a petrol pump.

— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.

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