Australia’s Capital Territory has become the first state or territory in Australia where electric vehicles have claimed a 20% share of new car sales.
Numbers published on the ACT government’s Climate Choices website this week show that EVs made up just under 21% of new car sales for the month of April 2023, when 326 new EVs were registered.
That took the total new EV registrations for the national capital to 1,224 so far in 2023, growing the total EV fleet by one third in just three months. The total number of EVs in the ACT is now 4,223.
Overall new car sales for the whole of Australia also grew in April, hitting a record share of eight per cent – underlying the scale of the ACT achievement.
“We put a range of programs in place to encourage electric vehicle uptake and I was pretty excited that we are well ahead of the nation,” ACT Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Shane Rattenbury told the Smart Energy conference in Sydney.
“We got the first quarter data and 18% of new vehicles registered from January to March inclusive were electric vehicles. And then the April data came out yesterday and was 21%.
“So that’s one in 5 vehicles being registered in the territory. It’s an extraordinary update and shows you that once the supply issues are over we can move quite quickly.”
Daniel Bleakley is a clean technology researcher and advocate with a background in engineering and business. He has a strong interest in electric vehicles, renewable energy, manufacturing and public policy.