Looking at the below graph, tells a number of things
Oil-producing Scandinavian countries are leading the world for Electric vehicles (EV)
China has cottoned onto EV and is above average in the globe (partially driven by Tesla take-up)
Australia's take-up is almost a joke & perhaps the UK can teach us a thing or two
So what can we learn from EV adoption in the UK
Although there are ways to not use government intervention to increase EV take-up, there are some lessons Australia can learn from the mother country.
The UK government took a long time to increase take-up and ultimately the private sector funded a lot of the growth. At a high-level, their strategy was to get logistics/business to adopt EVs, incentivize a network of charge points and finally create personal incentives for personal cars:
2008 - LEZ fines vans/trucks which were not electric
2011 - government grants for EV charge points and confirmed the intention to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030
2019 - introduced ultra-low emission zones (ULEZ) covering passenger cars, which effectively fine non-EV cars for driving in certain zones at certain times
The net impact of this is that charge points per 100km of road from 42 (2011) to 570 (2019). This was before they introduced any their ULEZ zones.
This growth in chargepoints was predominantly funded by the private sector. Ironically, the biggest UK EV charge companies are Chargemaster (owned by BP) and PodPoint (owned by EdF). So it is old-world companies funding new-world EV charge points.
So what can we learn from EV adoption in the UK
In Australia, we do not believe that subsidies are necessary to convince people to move to EVs. If the UK has taught us anything, government grants encourage private sector spending on EV charge points... and once take-up hits a point of inflection you can incentivize everyday drivers
Without overcomplicating it... it all starts with subsidies and when the private sector has surety they can get a return off investing in EVs, the rest is history
One last point - to put it into perspective - China's population is c.55x larger than Australia's. Despite this, they already have +320x the number of EV charge points that Australia has..
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