Australia sees 70% increase in EV charging locations over past year
There's been a 70 per cent jump in the number of electric vehicle charging stations across Australia over the last year. CEO of the Electric Vehicle Council, Behyad Jafari says different types of charging stations are being set up across the country.
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TVTranscript
00:00 Electric vehicle charging stations come in a few different formats.
00:05 You can get the regular charging ones where you might be parking at home for eight hours
00:09 for instance and that charger might take two to four hours to recharge your car.
00:14 And then we have different speeds of public chargers, some that will for instance recharge
00:18 your car in about 15 to 20 minutes, others that might take more like 50 minutes.
00:23 Again they're really based on where is that charger located, is it intended so that you
00:28 can like with the petrol station charge and keep driving or is it maybe at a shopping
00:32 centre where you're going to be there for a little while longer.
00:35 So the fact that we've got 800 of these faster charging stations now, is that a significant
00:40 increase to last year or is there still a really long way to go considering how big
00:45 Australia is?
00:46 Well at the same time of course we've also seen a doubling of electric vehicle sales,
00:51 we've seen that every year for the past three years, so some really encouraging moves there.
00:55 Of course with that you also want to make sure there are more charging stations for
00:58 people, particularly as we enter into the holiday period.
01:01 Day to day people will be charging their cars at home but when you're going on that longer
01:05 road trip you want that comfort of knowing I can get anywhere without needing to charge
01:09 but also now increasingly I can maybe drive past the charger or two before I need to stop.
01:14 If one looks particularly busy I can drive to the next town and charge there instead.
01:19 So given the number of people having electric cars is increasing and there are many many
01:24 roads in Australia, the next figures we've been given is another 1,000 locations over
01:29 the next three years.
01:30 That doesn't really sound like enough when it's all said and done?
01:35 Well the big thing we have to remember with electric vehicles is that you get to leave
01:38 your house with a full tank every morning because most of the charging that you'll do,
01:42 you'll be doing at home or maybe at a workplace or at a shopping centre.
01:46 Here we're talking about where are those essentially the big Bowser style ones where you'll be
01:50 going for a very quick charge.
01:52 Often these are placed alongside highways for instance to let people going on road trips
01:57 have somewhere to stop.
01:58 Unlike petrol stations we won't need quite as many of them because of course it's not
02:02 going to be the only option people have available to be able to charge their vehicles.
02:06 So how many do you think we need over the next few years then?
02:10 What's the ideal figure?
02:13 Really that depends on how many electric vehicles we continue to sell.
02:16 I think that enthusiasm Australians have for electric vehicles keeps stumping people's
02:21 expectations, we keep doubling sales year on year.
02:24 So I think hitting that 1000 mark particularly over the next few years, good smart move.
02:29 I think we'll probably be looking at a few thousand more by the end of this decade, particularly
02:33 as we start to look at millions of electric vehicles entering onto our roads.
02:38 And again that's both about being able to serve the vehicles that are on our roads but
02:42 also providing some redundancy.
02:44 Making sure if one charges out for instance you have somewhere else to go or as I said
02:48 if you don't feel like stopping in one particular town you don't have to, you get to keep driving
02:52 and stopping at the next place or if one place is busy you get to keep going and charging
02:56 at the next stop.
02:57 And how are these being funded?
02:59 My understanding is there's a bit of government funding but also private sector too.
03:03 Does there need to be more funding coming from one side or the other?
03:06 Yeah we've seen a healthy amount of funding from state and federal governments now.
03:11 I think what's been very reassuring is just the number of private companies entering into
03:16 providing public charging.
03:19 Everything from traditional petrol stations to new Australian start-ups to energy companies,
03:24 all of them seeing that there's this confidence about the shift towards electric vehicles
03:29 and saying well as a result I can spend more and more of our money to making sure that
03:33 people have a place to charge as well.
03:35 And just finally earlier this month the federal government made changes or announced changes
03:40 to how you define a luxury car so that some family SUVs that are hybrids will now actually
03:47 have to pay this luxury car tax.
03:48 Are we going to see a major difference in sales because of this change?
03:53 The government's talking it down saying it's not really a big deal?
03:57 Yeah this is really looking at cars priced above $80,000 or above $89,000 in the different
04:03 thresholds.
04:04 So for a pretty limited segment of the market essentially what the government did here is
04:08 say that there is a lower threshold at $77,000 before the tax kicks in.
04:13 That threshold was created to encourage fuel efficient vehicles and that definition was
04:18 made I think now about 15 odd years ago.
04:21 So the government rightly has said that in those 15 years there's been a lot of changes.
04:25 Cars get more efficient, more hybrids come out, more electric vehicles come out.
04:29 So we can now start to change those categories and say we'll provide that sort of exemption,
04:34 that lower threshold to electric vehicles and again making sure there's a luxury car
04:39 tax on more heavily emitting, more heavily polluting vehicles at the higher end of the
04:44 market.
04:44 market.
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