Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022. Does anyone remember, during the 2019 election, federal Labor's attempt to end the weekend? Well, they've only been in office for a little while and here they are at it. I'm going to explain to you why, because no-one so far has given any explanation as to how we're going to solve this issue.

Western Australia is known for its wonderful outdoor lifestyle. Whether it's during school holidays or over the long weekend, many Western Australians, including myself, hitch up a caravan or a camper trailer and head out to the great outdoors. There's no better way to see and experience Western Australia than on a road trip with a caravan in tow, whether that be into the state's beautiful south-west or up the coast to somewhere like Exmouth, both trips that I've undertaken in the last year or so.

Earlier this year, the RAC published an article entitled 'Can an electric car tow a caravan or boat?' Naturally, I took an interest in this. Could this article point to the future of family weekend travel? The article outlined the virtues and merits of electric vehicles and the advantages and disadvantages of towing with an EV. However, two lines stood out to me, and they go to the core of the discussion that we're having here today. One quote from the article said:

In principle, an EV is well suited to towing, albeit with limitations.

And it says of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles:

… they may be better suited to occasional towing rather than long distance adventures.

It is one thing for inner city members in this place to preach that everyone should be driving EVs. That makes a lot of sense if all you're doing is taking a short drive, if you're driving a passenger vehicle to somewhere like Byron Bay for the long weekend to visit the beach house. If that's all the driving you do, then, yes, it would seem as if everyone else should be doing that too. But it disregards the everyday practicalities of working families whose only annual luxury might be lugging a camper trailer up the highway for a couple of days away.

An EV might be capable of towing a boat to the Cockburn boat ramp 15 kilometres away, but what about towing that boat from Perth down to Busselton, more than 200 kilometres away? EV technology—more specifically, the capacity of EV batteries and the speed of charging—is simply impractical for anything other than city driving. It's another example of ideology blinding peoples' sensibility and reason.

There was much publicity in California around its ban on the sale of petrol vehicles by the year 2035. Its own clean vehicle incentive program offers rebates as much as US$7,000 towards the cost of zero-emission vehicles, although cars costing more than US$45,000 do not qualify. Ironically, a mere week after the announcement, the California Independent System Operator put out a statewide alert to conserve energy, including a request to avoid charging electric vehicles in order to prevent strain on the state's power grid.

Here, in Australia, we have a government wanting to put more stress on an energy grid which is not currently equipped to deal with it. I can only imagine the surge in energy consumption if every Australian were forced to drive an EV and they arrived home between 5 and 6 pm and all plugged in at the same time, at a time of day when solar power generation is waning—which, incidentally, is why the government needs to be careful when considering subsidies and incentives for home charging.

The average consumer does not actually need a fast charger. I know this. I actually own an EV, people, so I'm not against EVs. But the average consumer does not actually need a fast charger. A 10-amp charger will recharge an average EV from 50 to 80 per cent overnight with no problem. Just because you can fast charge, it doesn't mean that you should. It makes no sense for everyone to plug in and charge quickly, which would put more demand on the grid, when the vehicle can be plugged in and charged overnight. So we must be careful when we're thinking about the infrastructure that we will be putting in place.

For those of us who are camping enthusiasts—and, as I've said, I'm one—the gross combined mass of a vehicle is one of most important specifications to look for in a tow vehicle. This measurement refers to the maximum weight that a vehicle can tow safely. Staying within your vehicle's towing capacity is particularly important when you're using an electric vehicle, as the more energy an EV expends the sooner it must be recharged. It's the basic law of physics.

Knowing your vehicle's towing capacity and range is even more critical when driving in remote areas or heading on a trip to the West Australian north-west, where towns are few and far between and using charging stations becomes more challenging. What was once a 10-minute exercise to fuel up and grab a coffee at a roadhouse could turn into an exercise of hours.

Some on the other side may say, 'Well, only 10 per cent of Australians might hook up a caravan or a heavy load on the weekend.' My response to that is: if Labor wants to penalise those in that 10 per cent and add further pressures to their everyday cost of living for simply having the temerity to own a camper trailer, then they need to be upfront with them.

I read with interest the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries' submission to the inquiry into this bill. The study that the FCAI commissioned found that, if a 100 per cent battery electric mandate were to be put in place by 2030, an entry level car would go up by $12,500, and Australian drivers after a mid-sized SUV would need to increase their budget by $10,000.

Now to some science and facts. You don't need to like these facts, but they are constrained by the laws of physics. There is no development of the laws of physics. They are what they are. We can try to master them, but we can't defy them.

So what disturbs me in the EV and broader climate change debate is that there is a real, significant lack of scientific literacy and realistic projections. Current generation lithium iron phosphate batteries have a gravimetric energy density of approximately 150 watt-hours per kilogram. Now, diesel and petrol have a gravimetric energy density of 12,700 watt-hours per kilogram—nearly 85 times the weight.

Now, granted: EVs use their stored energy more efficiently than do internal combustion engine vehicles. Think of the wasted heat that radiates from an internal combustion engine car. An EV converts about 90 per cent of the energy stored in the battery into motion, whereas an ICE vehicle only converts about 20 per cent of its energy into motion and the rest is wasted as heat and through other mechanical losses.

But the issue here is the weight and mass of the battery. In order to get the payload capability in an EV equivalent to an ICE vehicle, you need a battery that weighs about 60 times the weight of the fuel that would otherwise be stored in the vehicle's fuel tank. Why is this important? A small-to-medium battery EV practically makes perfect sense for people who are just commuting around the city. A model 3 Tesla has a 60 kilowatt-hour battery. This battery weighs 460 kilograms. EVs bigger than this really start to become impractical and, arguably, economically irrational.

Take, for example, the F-150 Lightning dual cab, which you can currently only buy in the USA. This big American truck is super impressive. I'd love to drive one; I reckon it would be really exciting. The big problem is that the battery weighs 817 kilograms. Even with this enormous battery, the standard-range F-150 Lightning is only equivalent to that from 18 litres of fuel. This means that the range is severely limited, especially if you load it up—let alone hooking up a trailer, boat or caravan to it. Anyone who has ever towed anything marginally heavy will know that as soon as you hook it up your range is more than halved.

Case studies in the US have demonstrated that the real-world range capability of an F-150 Lightning, when loaded up, is about 100 kilometres. Imagine driving from Perth to Exmouth: 13 times on the trip you would have to pull over for three hours, and that is assuming that you've got a fast charger at the roadhouse. It's simply not going to be possible. To get the range capability of a diesel powered vehicle, you would need a battery nearly four times the size of the one that is currently in the F-150 Lightning. This is completely unworkable. It would be ridiculously expensive, would weigh too much and wouldn't even fit within the form factor of the vehicle itself. Imagine the extra wear and tear on the road, the safety implications if you had an accident and the extra wear and tear on the tyres and brakes—not to mention the insane amount of raw material required to make these batteries.

As I said, small-to-medium electric vehicles make sense. They don't have to carry a big payload and, for the most part, if they're used in and around town, their batteries can be topped up overnight. But four-wheel drive SUV and ute EVs don't make a lot of sense, unless of course you don't intend to go big distances using their payload capacity.

Some may say that battery and charging technology will improve. I've been looking into this and I'm disappointed to have to tell them that there is nothing, even on the periphery of battery science development, that promises to increase the energy density by a factor that makes them a practical replacement for a larger vehicle. This is why, for now, a hybrid actually makes sense. Let's face it: most owners of dual cabs and four-wheel drives are not loading them up or towing over big distances for 365 days of the year. So having a small battery which will cover the short commutes and be recharged daily, backed up by a small internal combustion engine for those occasional longer and loaded-up drives, makes sense over the short-to-medium term. Why is this an issue? The latest figures from the Australia Chamber of Automotive Industries show that the biggest-selling vehicles are dual cabs and four-wheel drives. These are the vehicles that Australians want, and someone actually needs to be upfront with them if Australians are to be expected to change their buying habits.

I note the amendment proposed by others to sunset the inclusion of plug-in hybrids in this FBT-exemption bill. While the coalition doesn't support the bill—because we don't believe in just providing subsidies to the wealthy to enable them to buy electric vehicles while poorer people or those on lower incomes, particularly in the outer suburbs and regional areas, won't be able to afford it—I have to say that this amendment is actually sending the wrong message. If the purposes of this bill are to increase the uptake of EVs and get high-emissions vehicles off the road, then ensuring that hybrids are off the road, that they're not going to be part of this, is sending the wrong message. It doesn't actually deal with the reality, particularly the uniquely Australian reality. The most popular vehicle in Europe—I can't remember the name of the car—is basically the size of a Corolla; it's a small vehicle. Here in Australia, the most popular vehicle is a HiLux and the second most popular is a Ranger. Then we have the RAV4 and, further down the list, the D-MAX. Four of the top 10 best-selling vehicles, by a long way, are four-wheel drives and dual-cab utes. So those opposite are sending the wrong message to people.

A subsidy—make no mistake about it; that's what this is—for electric cars, the owners of which will then fail to contribute to road maintenance by avoiding taxes, is emblematic of this modern Labor party. This is a policy that will achieve no environmental benefit. It will give a tax break to the wealthy, hurt everyday Australians and be widely impractical; in short, it checks all the boxes of the ALP policy handbook. There's no doubt that Australians will adopt EVs.