Butler: If Australia doesn’t embrace EVs, it’ll end up like Cuba

The Driven

Labor has warned that Australia risks ending like Cuba – a living museum of outdated vehicles – if it doesn’t embrace the global shift to electric cars.

In an interview with The Driven and RenewEconomy for the weekly The Driven Podcast, Labor climate spokesman Mark Butler says Australia has to embrace electric vehicles or risk becoming an island of automotive antiquity.

“If Barnaby Joyce had his way, we’d end up like Cuba. We’d be stuck … because of his ideological opposition to electrification of transport, all tuning up 1970s Commodores.”

Butler says he been astonished by the degree of hysteria in the Coalition and much of the media about the party’s EV policy, which sets an EV target of 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030.

The fear campaign launched by the Coalition has been broad and ridiculous – or in the words of software billionaire Mike Cannon Brookes “batshit insane”

The scare campaign has included everything from “killing the weekend,” the death of the ute, the lack of “grunt”,the inability to travel long distances and the refusal to believe that fast charging exists, even though Australian companies lead the world in this technology.

“People struggle to understand why the government wants to fight the future on this,” Butler tells The Driven podcast.

“It is happening whether we like it or not, and there are a whole range of really good things that will flow from it. We should be embracing it, not fighting it.”

Read the full story on RenewEconomy’s electric vehicle dedicated site, The Driven…