Australia’s governmental progress on developing road user charging infrastructure has drawn on modelling from 22 countries whose electric vehicle market is growing.
As the department of infrastructure, transport, cities and regional development designs a system that draws revenue from EV uptake to make up for the lost excise on fossil fuel sales, the latest research report shows sales are “set to grow rapidly”.
The latest BITRE data, which the department acknowledges only has roughly 10 years worth of data to draw on, predicts the percentage of Australian annual EV sales to jump from roughly 2% in 2019 to more than 20% by 2029.
That means the government needs to find revenue from the decline of petrol and diesel fuel sales, which currently contributes about 40 cents of every dollar in excise, according to the tax office.
Modelling of electric vehicle costs out to 2030 are used to allow policy-makers to make changes based on the effect electric vehicles will have on subsidies, tax and charges.
Doubling of effective range has effectively halved cost-per-kWh.
The report says the rate of EV uptake is influenced by future petrol prices but even more significantly by outright EV costs. Namely, oil price increases won’t encourage EV uptake as much as the base EV retail price.
Australian EV market share is predicted to hit 8% by 2025 and 27% by 2030, which, based on recent VFACTS yearly figures, could equate to roughly 300,000 sales.
The report uses “steep raw uptake curve” data from the likes of Norway, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Korea and the Netherlands compared with medium-uptake curves in Australia, New Zealand, China and the UK, and flat-uptake curves from India, Japan, Spain, France and the USA – all based on a raw logistic model of 65% passenger sales saturation.
This means the countries are group based on how quickly or slowly they reach 65% market saturation by 2040.
“Australia starts later and then rises more slowly,” the report says.
“These differences (in start time and steepness) are spread across the 22 countries, which group roughly into [these] three categories.”
The report also cites the tumbling cost of battery production as a result of mega-factory production processes and the falling cost per kWh, and therefore vehicle range, as a continued trend out to 2030.
The report says the cost of battery packs has remained essentially the same from 2017 to 2025, but the virtual double of kWh range effectively halves the battery cost-per-kWh.
A separate report into the economics of transport fuel excise was published last month.
