It’s official – Australia is the world’s number one laggard in EV adoption

UK website GoCompare recently did a study on EV adoption throughout the world – with interesting results.

GoCompare set out to see which countries are best prepared for the future of electric cars by looking at the following factors for each country:

• The size of the EV fleet (in terms of pure EV and PHEV);
• The number of publicly accessible charging points per km of road network;
• The number of petrol stations vs the number of publicly accessible charging points;
• The EV fleet vs its number of publicly accessible charging points;
• The number of publically available slow charging (3.7 to 22kW) and fast-charging (43kW AC and all DC) chargers.

The results are pretty damning: Australia ranked no. 1 worst in two of the variables:

• Fewest chargers per 100km (0.05)
• lowest number of charging stations vs petrol stations (7%)

Australia also has a tiny number of publicly available chargers (at 476 it was the fifth lowest, only beaten by the tiny – both in area, and population – countries of Estonia, Hungary, Iceland and Luxembourg).

Australia also only managed to avoid the highest number of EVs per charging point by the fact that we have such a small EV fleet (at a combined total of 7340 EVs and PHEVs).

As for which country has the smallest EV fleet – that was the only variable where we were beaten by more than just a couple countries, although we were still down near the bottom. (BTW: Slovakia holds that title, at 831.)

Estonia does, however, have almost the same number of publicly available chargers as Australia, to service a fleet of around 10 per cent the size of ours, less than a quarter the population and a land area that is all of 0.6 per cent the size of Australia’s!

I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate on the reasons for this outcome. Negligible government policy initiatives, poor support for EV charging installation, feet-dragging on behalf of the manufacturers to even bring in EV options to buy all come to mind.

At the other end of the spectrum: the highest total EV owning country is China with over 1.2 million EVs and PHEVs. (Which includes 951,000 of them being pure battery EVs).

The USA is next, with 762,060 EVs. As a side-note: the USA have the most PHEVs in that total with just under half of them (at 360,510) being PHEVs.

Click here for the full suite of data.