Since the Liberals have started their pushback against Labor’s electric vehicle policy proposal (to set emissions intensity for the whole fleet of vehicles at 105 grams of CO2 per kilometre) there has been a flurry of outrage from progressive journalists. The Liberals are being unreasonable, the thinking goes. There is no “carbon tax” proposed by Labor and the Liberals are just trying to inflame the passions of the electorate in advance of an election it looks set to lose.
All of this hides a number of important questions that we need to answer if we want to arrive at a policy that can actually work, which the Labor policy may not do.
As things currently stand, the technologies involved in the production of electric vehicles have certain limitations. One is range and another is charging speed. Because of these limitations, which are set by the laws of physics and cannot, unlike government policy, be altered easily, the Labor proposal to limit emissions from an individual vehicle to 105 grams of CO2 per kilometre (on average, across the whole fleet) might be unworkable in the Australian context.
At present the most advanced plug-in electric vehicle that I have heard of has a range of 539km for a Model S Tesla (which by the way costs over A$100,000). Many other plug-in EVs have a much shorter range, such as 280km for the Hyundai Ioniq and 335km for the BMW i3. This kind of range will get you less than a third of the way from Sydney to Brisbane, so to do that trip you would need to start in Sydney with a full charge and still need to recharge at least three times en-route in order to arrive at your destination without being towed. Possibly more than this.
Then there is the matter of charging speed. Labor politicians are saying that you can get a full charge into an empty plug-in EV in less than ten minutes and I’ve seen a press release from engineering firm ABB saying that their fastest charger can put 200km-worth of power into an EV in eight minutes. That means that for most plug-in EVs it would take about 20 minutes at least for a driver to get a full charge into their car. That’s the absolute very best scenario, and in many cases conditions won’t be as good as this and people will have to queue for longer to get their cars charged, and it will take them much longer than this to charge them. Imagine driving to Brisbane and having to wait two hours each time you need to top up your vehicle with power. It might take days to get there.
The only way that you can extend the range of an EV is by using a petrol engine in the same vehicle, giving you a hybrid power system. This kind of engine uses the friction involved in braking to charge an on-board battery. But a hybrid car produces more than the quantity of emissions that Labor has said it would mandate as the individual average limit for the fleet of vehicles. The Toyota Camry hybrid (which has a 2.5-litre petrol engine), for example, produces emissions equal to 142 grams of CO2 per km. (The current light-vehicle fleet emissions intensity is 192g per km of CO2.) There are also hybrids that you can plug in, and these have a lower emissions rating, such as the Mitsubishi Outlander which is rated at 41g per km.
With pure-electric plug-in electric vehicles, the emissions ratings are virtually zero. The Tesla Model S, for example, emits 0 grams of CO2 per km at the tailpipe, where such emissions are measured. But given that many vehicle users (for example farmers and tradespeople) won’t be able to buy anything other than a petrol-powered vehicle, that means that a lot of car users are going to have to buy plug-in-only vehicles, since another large cohort of drivers will need to get a hybrid due to the practical limitations of the technologies involved.
It should be noted of course that as time goes on the technologies involved in the production and operation of EVs will improve, so some of the limitations discussed in this post might not exist in 2025, when the fleet emissions target is proposed to come into effect. But in order to get to that target we'll have to change our buying habits now since not all cars in the fleet will be new at that date.
It’s not clear what would happen if the necessary laws were passed and the target was not reached. As far as I know, retailers and manufacturers are obliged to ensure the target is met. What will happen if it is not, has not been made clear at this point in time.
When it comes down to it, Labor’s EV policy might work if enough people do what they haven’t so far been doing: buy plug-in EVs. In 2017, only 2200 plug-in EVs were sold in Australia so we know that there’s currently not much appetite for them in the market. By 2025 the underlying technologies might have improved but we don’t know what’s going to happen on that front, so it’s all a bit up-in-the-air as we speak. On the other hand the Liberals need to get back in their cage a bit and think about what they can do to help make the policy a success.
One thing the they might constructively suggest to ensure a strong take-up of EVs by the community is a way to get strata managers and bodies corporate to decide to spend the money needed to make sure that parking areas in apartment blocks have the charging stations residents need to juice up their cars overnight. This would go a long way toward helping Labor to make its policy plan into a reality. It would also be a simple, effective method of getting people to make the switch to a lower-emissions vehicle.
I should like to thank a number of people on Twitter who helped me to find the information used to make this post. Without their help, I would have been struggling for much longer to come to grips with the issues involved. The mainstream media coverage of this issue has been patchy, lacking in detail as a general rule, and has the wrong information in some cases.
All of this hides a number of important questions that we need to answer if we want to arrive at a policy that can actually work, which the Labor policy may not do.
As things currently stand, the technologies involved in the production of electric vehicles have certain limitations. One is range and another is charging speed. Because of these limitations, which are set by the laws of physics and cannot, unlike government policy, be altered easily, the Labor proposal to limit emissions from an individual vehicle to 105 grams of CO2 per kilometre (on average, across the whole fleet) might be unworkable in the Australian context.
At present the most advanced plug-in electric vehicle that I have heard of has a range of 539km for a Model S Tesla (which by the way costs over A$100,000). Many other plug-in EVs have a much shorter range, such as 280km for the Hyundai Ioniq and 335km for the BMW i3. This kind of range will get you less than a third of the way from Sydney to Brisbane, so to do that trip you would need to start in Sydney with a full charge and still need to recharge at least three times en-route in order to arrive at your destination without being towed. Possibly more than this.
Then there is the matter of charging speed. Labor politicians are saying that you can get a full charge into an empty plug-in EV in less than ten minutes and I’ve seen a press release from engineering firm ABB saying that their fastest charger can put 200km-worth of power into an EV in eight minutes. That means that for most plug-in EVs it would take about 20 minutes at least for a driver to get a full charge into their car. That’s the absolute very best scenario, and in many cases conditions won’t be as good as this and people will have to queue for longer to get their cars charged, and it will take them much longer than this to charge them. Imagine driving to Brisbane and having to wait two hours each time you need to top up your vehicle with power. It might take days to get there.
The only way that you can extend the range of an EV is by using a petrol engine in the same vehicle, giving you a hybrid power system. This kind of engine uses the friction involved in braking to charge an on-board battery. But a hybrid car produces more than the quantity of emissions that Labor has said it would mandate as the individual average limit for the fleet of vehicles. The Toyota Camry hybrid (which has a 2.5-litre petrol engine), for example, produces emissions equal to 142 grams of CO2 per km. (The current light-vehicle fleet emissions intensity is 192g per km of CO2.) There are also hybrids that you can plug in, and these have a lower emissions rating, such as the Mitsubishi Outlander which is rated at 41g per km.
With pure-electric plug-in electric vehicles, the emissions ratings are virtually zero. The Tesla Model S, for example, emits 0 grams of CO2 per km at the tailpipe, where such emissions are measured. But given that many vehicle users (for example farmers and tradespeople) won’t be able to buy anything other than a petrol-powered vehicle, that means that a lot of car users are going to have to buy plug-in-only vehicles, since another large cohort of drivers will need to get a hybrid due to the practical limitations of the technologies involved.
It should be noted of course that as time goes on the technologies involved in the production and operation of EVs will improve, so some of the limitations discussed in this post might not exist in 2025, when the fleet emissions target is proposed to come into effect. But in order to get to that target we'll have to change our buying habits now since not all cars in the fleet will be new at that date.
It’s not clear what would happen if the necessary laws were passed and the target was not reached. As far as I know, retailers and manufacturers are obliged to ensure the target is met. What will happen if it is not, has not been made clear at this point in time.
When it comes down to it, Labor’s EV policy might work if enough people do what they haven’t so far been doing: buy plug-in EVs. In 2017, only 2200 plug-in EVs were sold in Australia so we know that there’s currently not much appetite for them in the market. By 2025 the underlying technologies might have improved but we don’t know what’s going to happen on that front, so it’s all a bit up-in-the-air as we speak. On the other hand the Liberals need to get back in their cage a bit and think about what they can do to help make the policy a success.
One thing the they might constructively suggest to ensure a strong take-up of EVs by the community is a way to get strata managers and bodies corporate to decide to spend the money needed to make sure that parking areas in apartment blocks have the charging stations residents need to juice up their cars overnight. This would go a long way toward helping Labor to make its policy plan into a reality. It would also be a simple, effective method of getting people to make the switch to a lower-emissions vehicle.
I should like to thank a number of people on Twitter who helped me to find the information used to make this post. Without their help, I would have been struggling for much longer to come to grips with the issues involved. The mainstream media coverage of this issue has been patchy, lacking in detail as a general rule, and has the wrong information in some cases.
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