As various states and territories pledge to phase their government fleets across to fully-electric by the end of the decade, and somehow encourage half of all new sales to be fully-electric by then as well, Australia's vehicle sales at this point in time make for some interesting reading.
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If you think you're seeing SUVs everywhere these days, you're not imagining it. Australia bought 574,000 SUVs in 2022 alone, and that figure represents 53.1 per cent of the year's new registrations for all light vehicle types.
Also interesting is 2022's top-selling SUV in Australia - the RAV-4 (34,854 units) - only ranked third as a nameplate, such is the very wide variety of SUVs being offered.
The top two big sellers for individual nameplates are the HiLux (64,391 units in 2022 when the 4x2 and 4x4 are combined) and the Ford Ranger (47,479 units).
Also just looking at nameplates, only two cars broke into the top 10 with the Corolla sixth (25,284) and the Hyundai i30 tenth (21,166).
Continuing to make a mockery of the old win on Sunday, sell on Monday mantra, Toyota sold more than 2.4 times as many vehicles as the next brand, capturing over one fifth of the Aussie market (21.4 per cent) all by themselves. That's interesting for a couple more reasons too. Firstly, Toyota has sold more than 200,000 vehicles in Australia annually for 18 of the last 19 years. 2022's 231,050 units was also its best result in 14 years, and not all that far off their pre-GFC sales of 238,983 in 2008 and 236,647 in 2007.
The other interesting thing about Toyota is, despite having offered more decent hybrids than anyone else, and for longer than anyone else, and owning a big chunk of Tesla which they've supported with drivetrain tech, Toyota still appears to be quite resistant to going fully-electric on its own vehicles. Even the TV ads for Toyota hybrids have tried to portray plugging in as a massive hassle.
As for battery-electric vehicle (BEV) sales in Australia, they were up. The upbeat way to say it is they nearly doubled in 2022 to reach 33,416. The other way to put it is this still only represents 3.1 per cent of the 1,081,429 new motor vehicles reported by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI).
In fairness though, that doesn't do the segment justice from a demand standpoint, because sales (which for the FCAI's data only count once the vehicle is actually delivered) were held back by supply. Case in point, just looking at February 2023 the percentage of BEVs was 6.8 per cent of total deliveries with 5,932 units. So at this point it does seem to be climbing as much as supply allows.
That's the problem though. While there is an extensive variety of battery-electric vehicles available to order, from little city runabouts through family sedans and SUVs, as well as delivery vans and other commercials, the phrases available to order, and available to deliver, have two very different meanings.
In 2022 Tesla fell short of its - very low by automotive industry standards - global target for manufacture but still recorded a personal best globally and in Australia. The Model 3 topped the BEV segment in Australia with 10,877 examples delivered in 2022, and the Model Y slotted in an exceedingly comfortable second with 8717 units.
Despite only being launched in the final quarter of 2022 the BYD Atto 3 slotted into third for the year with 2113 units, so expect that to be much higher in 2023.
Meanwhile the commercial sector still waits for some of those light EVs. The 2022 data shows just one Ford e-Transit because at least two separate delays have pushed it back nine months (so far), and LDV only registered five examples of the eDeliver 9.
So, circling back to the states and territories introducing policies and strategies that aim to dramatically increase the number of EVs in their fleets and registered for use on their roads, they're going to have to do a lot more than ensure there's plenty of public charging infrastructure and pricing incentives for buyers. They're going to have to figure out how to help address the issue of vehicle supply in an industry over which they have little to no influence these days, other than perhaps the mining of significantly more resources to make them which presents its own conundrum from an environmental standpoint.
