Interest in electric vehicles has spiked since Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu decided it was time to kill the Ayatollah, with people trying to avoid sky-high fuel prices.
But the effort to save money may end up costing you more than you ever imagined.
Battery car sales spiked 42 per cent in March compared to February, to 15,839 new cars – or 14.6 per cent of the total new car market.
As a proportion of the market, that was nearly double what it was in March 2025.
But more than 80 per cent of EVs sold in Australia come from China, and it is now the top manufacturing country for cars exported to Australia.
More and more obscure brands keep hitting the market – with more than 40 now selling EVs in Australia.
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Now, Brad Gannon, the chief executive of Capricorn Group – which represents more than 30,000 auto repair shops across the country – has warned that this onslaught of brands will unleash a decade of pain on unsuspecting motorists who will be left high and dry by manufacturers that go bust.
“The risk for consumers isn’t at the point of sale but when a repair is needed down the track, when parts may not be available, or brands may not be operating in the country anymore,” Mr Gannon said.
“This could impact not just servicing but re-sale values.
“Workshops are already reporting vehicles sitting idle for weeks or even months, leaving owners paying finance, insurance, and registration on cars they can’t use.
“What we’re hearing from across the industry is that the issues emerging now will define the next five to 10 years of vehicle ownership for many Australians.”
People are buying duds but they don’t yet know it.
The allure of electric vehicles is once again shown to be a smokescreen. The promise of saving money and the environment is much harder to achieve than we are led to believe.
If it’s not the manufacturers themselves falling over, you have to worry about the importers.
As this masthead’s motoring reporter David McCowen reported a month ago, two Australian EV importers came a cropper in the space of one week in March.
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AusEV, which was importing the Ford F-150 Lightning, went into receivership on March 17 and XPeng importer TrueEV appointed administrators two days later.
BossCap, the parent company of AusEV, was converting the Fords from left to right-hand drive in Brisbane but with both in receivership, it told owners it was “unable to undertake warranty repair works”.
So long and good luck.
The Australian EV market may be small compared to the petrol and diesel car market, but a multitude of manufacturers, particularly those in China, are clearly keen to get a piece of the market.
They are likely enticed by significant subsidies offered to drivers through tax breaks, assuming that it would sustain strong interest.
There are also more EV manufacturers, and much smaller ones, than traditional car brands because it is a much easier market to enter.
An EV has fewer moving parts and so is practically much easier to build. They don’t have to adhere to the strict emissions standards now forced upon internal combustion engine manufacturers.
The high volume, low cost model of Chinese manufacturing also nicely suits EV production which is why its entry to the international car market has been so explosive.
Competition should, in almost every circumstance, be a good thing. It ought to reduce prices and increase quality.
But a country of 27 million people can only sustain so many car manufacturers and these Chinese outfits couldn’t give a stuff whether their Australian operations fold or not.
It doesn’t really matter to them whether consumers are left unable to repair or service their cars – as long as they’ve made some money and can move on to another country to do the same there.
And this new burst of interest in EVs has again proved what I have said all along – electric vehicles mostly sell because people think it is financially advantageous, not because they actually want to drive them.
Just as people buy them because they get tax breaks – and European countries where they’ve removed subsidies have experienced sharp declines in sales – they’re now buying them because they think it’ll save them money on fuel.
Economic factors drive interest in electric vehicles, not their brilliance.
But, depending on what you’re buying, they may not be such a great investment in the long run.
