Day by day the calls for Australia to introduce fuel efficiency standards in an effort to catch up to the rest of the world in the switch to electric vehicles – and to solve its growing fuel security, cost and pollution issues – grow stronger.
Experts have been calling for it for years, ever since an Australian Transport Council recommended it in 2008, and at leat nine different proposals have been presented since then – nearly one a year. The reason it didn’t was because of a series of outrageous scare campaigns led by industry and embraced by conservatives..
The result is that Australia has a fleet of dirty inefficient cars that likely cost an extra $2.2 billion in added fuel costs in 2021 alone – and is leaving the country with poor fuel security, bad pollution, and at the end of the queue when it comes to the uptake of electric vehicles.
Over the last six years, the total cost of not implementing fuel emission standards, as had been recommend by the Climate Change Authority, and endorsed by a ministerial forum, is estimated at $5.9 billion – and that is fuel costs alone, not health or climate impacts.
And it is all the result of what experts say are a series of misleading campaigns, with the strings pulled by the incumbent car lobby fearful of change and eager to protect one of the last “free markets” in the western world.
The Australia Institute has released a report that details the multiple attempts at stopping the introduction of a fuel efficiency standard, on the same day as Fairfax Media revealed correspondence that confirms the efforts by the car industry, and Toyota in particular, to continue to dilute and frustrate rules that could support a switch to EVs.
The documents revealed by Fairfax confirm the huge lobbying efforts of some of the leading legacy car makers in diluting Australia’s policies on EVs, in a bid to protect their strong hold on hybrid vehicle sales.
Australia’s EV sales remain less than two per cent of total new car sales, a fraction of what they are in the US, and particularly in China and most parts of Europe. (The world average is expected to be nearly 14 per cent this year).
Yet the demand for EVs in Australia is huge and largely unmet – as witnessed by the massive orders for the Tesla Model Y (more than 15,000), which began deliveries in Australia last week – and because apart from Tesla it is near impossible to get hold of one.
Most other car companies are putting their priorities elsewhere, to countries that do have fuel and emissions standards, and are either not offering their EVS at all to Australia, or providing only a small number.
Australia may have come closest to a fuel efficiency standard in 2017, when the then energy and environment minister Josh Frydenberg floated the idea in an opinion piece, only to be shouted down by the Murdoch media for proposing a “carbon tax on wheels”.
Frydenberg dismissed the allegation, but the Coalition quickly backed off, and when Labor went to the 2019 election with a fuel emission standard proposal, prime minster Scott Morrison borrowed the Murdoch branding and called it a “carbon tax on cars”, and energy minister Angus Taylor described it as “reckless.”
It’s been typical of the scare campaigns thrown at new technologies by the fossil fuel lobby and conservatives. But now the industry and advocates have had enough, and are urging the new Labor government to finally embrace them. Climate and energy minister Chris Bowen is not ruling them out.
“Fuel efficiency standards are a common, relatively simple policy mechanism with net benefits,” The Australian Institute writes in a new report released on Monday. “However, previous attempts to introduce standards in Australia have been marred by disinformation and misleading claims.”
“Australians are being left behind simply because, as a nation, we are still accepting gas guzzling cars with no emissions standards,” says Richie Merzian, the TAI’s climate and energy program director.
“Australian motorists are the victims of having one of the world’s least efficient and most polluting car fleets, and it’s costing us every time we fill up at the petrol pump.”
Merzian argues that rather than extending the reducing of the fuel excise, policy makers should lock in savings for the motorists by introducing average efficiency standard for new cars in Australia that will ensure they are more efficient and less polluting.
Merzian says the introduction of robust fuel efficiency standards – rather than the soft ones now proposed by the main car lobby – should lead to 100 per cent zero emissions new vehicle sales by 2030 or 2035 at the latest.
This would not only reduce transport emissions, he says, but save Australians money in fuel costs and reduce the nation’s dependence on imported oil.
The best way to do it?
Merzian says fuel emissions standards should be implemented as soon as possible, and they need to have integrity, and should use the WLTP standard, or World Harmonise Light Vehicles Testing Procedure (WLTP).
Other considerations include allowing for manufactures to pool emissions with other manufactures, how a sales weighted average target could be applied to allow the vehic
Other policy measures that could be added include higher fuel taxes, tax or registration fees based around a CO2 component, along with zero emissions vehicle sales targets, and incentives for efficient or zero emissions vehicles.
“Fee-bate systems”, which levy a fee on the purchase of higher emitting vehicles and use the revenue to incentivise the purchase of zero or low emissions vehicles, are also easy to implement and are self funding if designed carefully. They exist in New Zealand and in France.
For more news on the EV transition, and the latest models and trends, please go to our EV-focused sister site, The Driven.
