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Monday April 13
Electric dreams
“Reading the article about 6 things Australia should do to tackle the energy crisis made me wonder how big the task is to ‘turn over’ the passenger vehicle fleet as the main candidate for conversion to electric vehicles. There are about 15.7 million passenger vehicles in Australia so increasing the proportion of EVs in new vehicle sales to 120,000 in six years is pretty small beer. A faster EV uptake won’t make much difference either as the task is too big for that. The government would need to think about re-introducing a domestic car industry that focused on changing existing vehicles to battery power. It would need to find a domestic supplier and promise subsidies and/or tariff protection for a manufacturer or several manufacturers who could undertake the task. If one million vehicles could be converted each year it would still take 10 years to complete two thirds of the task.”
John Elliott, Canberra
