The claim

The Labor Party has argued Australia is trailing other nations in adopting electric vehicles.

In an interview on Sky News' last month, the ALP's Climate Change and Energy Spokesman, Mark Butler, said Australia's electric vehicle take-up was one-tenth of the global average.

He said a Labor government would cut greenhouse gas emissions from transport and help Australians save on their petrol bills by introducing the country's first national electric vehicle policy.

This policy would include a target of 50 per cent of new car sales being electric by 2030.

"It would simply see us start to catch up with the rest of the world," Mr Butler said.

"We have lower electric vehicles sales than any other country in the OECD."

So, does Australia have the lowest uptake of electric vehicles among the 36 members of the OECD?

And would Labor's policy bring it closer to other countries in embracing clean-car technology?

RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Mr Butler's claim is close to the mark.

As a proportion of total new car sales, thirty-two OECD member countries have higher sales rates for electric vehicles than Australia does.

Australia is ahead of just Mexico, Chile and Turkey — emerging economies that are not usually considered at the same state of development as Australia.

Mr Butler would have been more accurate had he said Australia has lower electric vehicle sales than comparable developed countries.

Labor's proposed target would increase the number of electric vehicles on Australian roads, but would be unlikely to put it ahead of most other OECD nations, several of which have more ambitious targets.

As a proportion of total new car sales, most OECD member countries sell more electric vehicles than Australia. ( Photo by David Nuescheler on Unsplash )

What is an electric vehicle?

The simple definition, adopted by a Victorian parliamentary inquiry (among others), is a vehicle propelled by an electric motor or motors

This captures two types of vehicles — battery-electric vehicles that require recharging from an external source and plug-in hybrid vehicles with both batteries that can be externally recharged and either an internal combustion engine or a liquid fuel range extender.

A broader definition that is sometimes used expands this to include fuel-cell electric cars, which have an electric motor powered by an onboard fuel cell that is externally refuelled with hydrogen gas.

This appears to be the definition Mr Butler is using, given he told the ABC's Jon Faine on April 1 that the car industry internationally was moving to put all research and development funding into battery electric and hydrogen electric vehicles.

This second definition has also been used by the federal Department of the Environment and Energy.

But the International Energy Agency and most national automobile associations exclude fuel-cell electric cars from its datasets due to uptake being so low that it is barely worth collating.

Globally, only 7,200 fuel-cell cars were sold in 2017, mostly in California and Japan.

Fuel-cell cars made up just 1.1 per cent of all electric cars sold in Japan, and this was the highest proportion in any country.

Hybrid electric vehicles without a plug are sometimes also categorised as electric vehicles but have generally been excluded from analyses of the technology as they do not draw from external energy sources.

This fact check uses the first definition, taking in just battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

How many electric vehicles are sold in Australia?

Getting an accurate assessment of the number of electric vehicles sold in Australia is challenging, mostly due to Tesla not releasing its sales figures.

According to a report by research body ClimateWorks for the Electric Vehicle Council, 1,208 battery EVs and 1,076 plug-in hybrids were sold in Australia in 2017, making a total of 2,284.

This included an estimate of the number of Teslas sold.

Data leaked to Renew Economy later suggested the figure for Teslas alone was 1,410.

The Electric Vehicle Council says the total dipped slightly to 2,216 in 2018.

The political parties agree that electric vehicle sales are insignificant in Australia compared with petrol-fuelled cars.

Both the Coalition and Labor have adopted the ClimateWorks analysis that just 0.2 per cent of new cars sold are electric vehicles.

This equates to 1 in 500 new passenger vehicles running on electricity.

How does this compare with other OECD countries?

A Senate select committee inquiry completed in January 2019 reported that Australia lagged other comparable countries in embracing electric vehicles due to a comparative lack of policy to drive their uptake.

However, finding a consistent and complete data source across all OECD member countries proved difficult.

The best resource was found to be at ev-volumes.com, a Swedish website that describes itself as the electric vehicle world sales database. It shared its figures with Fact Check.

Norway is, by far, the global leader in proportional terms, with 49.1 per cent of new cars sold in 2018 either battery or plug-in electric cars. Reuters reported the figure climbed to 58.4 per cent in March 2019.

It is joined at the top of the list of electric-vehicle countries by its Nordic neighbours — Iceland (19.1 per cent of the new vehicle market), Sweden (8.1 per cent) and Finland (4.7 per cent) — and the Netherlands (6.1 per cent).

In terms of total sales, the comfortable leader among OECD member countries is the US, where about 361,000 electric vehicles were purchased last year.

However, the figure equated to a share of just 2.1 per cent of the new car market.

In California, which is embracing clean-car technology more aggressively than other American states, the share was 7.8 per cent.

Across Europe, about 389,000 electric vehicles were sold, equivalent to a market penetration of 2.5 per cent.

The market share for individual countries was, in descending order:

Portugal (3.6 per cent);

Portugal (3.6 per cent); Switzerland (3.2 per cent);

Switzerland (3.2 per cent); Austria (2.6 per cent);

Austria (2.6 per cent); the UK (2.5 per cent);

the UK (2.5 per cent); Belgium (2.5 per cent);

Belgium (2.5 per cent); France (2.1 per cent);

France (2.1 per cent); Denmark (2 per cent);

Denmark (2 per cent); Germany (1.9 per cent);

Germany (1.9 per cent); Luxembourg (1.9 per cent);

Luxembourg (1.9 per cent); Hungary (1.4 per cent);

Hungary (1.4 per cent); Spain (0.9 per cent); and

Spain (0.9 per cent); and Italy (0.5 per cent).

Sales rates of electric vehicles in Canada (2.2 per cent) were at a similar level to its southern neighbour.

Across the Pacific, in South Korea and in Japan, they measured 1.8 per cent and 1.2 per cent respectively.

Meanwhile, New Zealand and Israel each had an electric vehicle market share last year of 1.4 per cent.

The website ev-volumes.com does not list electric vehicle data for many of the eastern European and Latin American members countries of the OECD.

For the former, Fact Check turned to environment consultancy Transport and Environment, which by including a different set of countries calculated a lower electric vehicle market share across Europe of 2 per cent.

It charted proportional sales for Ireland, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Slovakia and Poland.

All recorded levels of between 1.7 per cent and 0.2 per cent.

Slovakia and Poland were at the bottom of that range, at a level equivalent to that for Australia.

That leaves three OECD members — Mexico, Chile and Turkey — with lower electric vehicle sales rates than Australia's. All are classified as emerging economies.

The most recent reliable data is for 2017, when electric vehicles made up 0.1 per cent of new sales in Chile, 0.02 per cent in Mexico and 0.01 per cent in Turkey.

Though not directly related to Mr Butler's claim, it is worth noting that China recorded more than 1 million sales of electric vehicles in 2018, easily the most in absolute terms.

Their share of the new vehicle market almost rivals that of northern Europe, reaching 4.2 per cent.

Would Labor's policy bring Australia into line with other developed nations?

If elected, the ALP promises an electric vehicle target of 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030.

The target would not be regulated, but would be used to encourage manufacturers and consumers to make the shift from petrol cars.

Based on comparative targets provided by the Electric Vehicle Council to the Senate inquiry into electric vehicles, it would shift Australia closer to similar countries.

Several countries have said they will no longer register new cars with combustion engines in coming years.

Norway and the Netherlands have set 2025 as a target for this; Ireland 2030, and France, the UK, and Taiwan 2040.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has described France and the UK's targets as "the right approach" without adopting a similar goal.

Japan has a lower target than Labor, aiming for between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the new vehicle market by 2030.

Nine US states have pledged to have 3.3 million zero-emissions cars on the road by 2025.

Outside the OECD, China says all its new cars will be electric in the "near future".

Principal researcher: Adam Morton, contributing researcher

Sources

ev-volumes.com, Global xEV sales tracker, full- year 2018