Australia should open Ford and Holden again with EV's, and PLS etc can feed them, make the Chinese even more hungry for Li
I miss not seeing a new HSV model every couple of years
Fyi, fwiw,
www.afr.com/companies/energy/big-battery-for-former-holden-factory-site-20210329-p57eyz
The final Holden Commodore comes off the line at the Elizabeth plant in 2017.
'All the bones are there': could a new electric vehicle be built in Australia?
With the right incentives, many believe Australia can still ride the electric revolution, reviving its car industry and slashing emissions at the same time
The situation is deeply frustrating to Electric Vehicle Council of Australia chief executive Behyad Jafari, who says he regularly talks to companies looking to manufacture EVs in Australia.
While critics charge that Australian labour costs are too high, Jafari says the actual work of manufacturing electric vehicles is half what it once was.
Rather than “guys bending metal” it’s more about building the robots that build the cars – and with a highly educated workforce, Australia is highly competitive.
“On paper, Australia looks really good to these companies,” Jafari says.
“The second thing they ask is a question about the competitive landscape. What are governments doing?
Essentially, they’re asking whether there will be a market for 50,000 vehicles in Australia – but we sell 7,000 electric vehicles a year here and there’s nothing in place to change that, when every other country in the world has an ambitious plan in place to change it.
“It’s not even an accident anymore.
It’s decided government policy that they should do nothing. They’ve entrenched that to the country as a whole, teaching us we can’t do these things. But the only reason we can’t do it is inaction.”
According to political economist Dr Mark Dean, that will have to change fast if Australia has any hope of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. A transition to electric would be required in a space of about 10 years – a feat that requires a plan.
“When you’ve mothballed the industrial-scale facilities that produce these things, you can’t just switch them back on,” Dean said.
“And Elon Musk isn’t a genius who came up with the concept for EVs. His success is based on decades of public investment.
“There’s a lot of work needed to achieve decarbonisation and it’s work we can do.
It would take a strong industry policy direction to identify something like this as a target, not a burden, and to whip up an economy geared to act on that. If we take risks, the rewards are enormous.”
The vision for a new electric vehicle sector in Australia is not without its supporters.
Ed Husic, Labor’s shadow minister for industry and innovation, has been promoting the idea lately, saying on Tuesday that it represented an opportunity for Australia.
“I certainly accept it’s a massive challenge, right, to do this, especially after the government chased out car-makers from the country, but I think Australians do believe that we have got a great track record on manufacturing, we’ve got a lot to offer and why couldn’t we make a big difference, a big push in this space,” Husic said.
“With the 17 million cars we have on Australian roads, we need to upgrade the fleet so that we can see cars and transport in terms of reducing emissions is a big thing. So a win on manufacturing, a win of emissions.
Why can’t we do it?”
Even on the local level there is support. In
South Australia, SA Best parliamentarian Frank Pangallo says he will write to Elon Musk to invite the world’s richest man to set up an EV manufacturing plant in the state.
“Of course we can build electric cars here,” Pangallo said.
“I’m no engineer, but I would say we already had the skills and expertise to build cars. We were building them for decades.
“The fact is that we know that we still have a great deal of infrastructure at the Holden site in Elizabeth.
We know it’s still there. It’ll be a great opportunity for a start-up or a company like Tesla to move here and save considerably on set up costs. I’ll be impressing that upon Mr Musk.”
If Tesla has a powerful hold on the popular imagination, Australia has its own EV entrepreneurs.
Greg McGarvie is the founder of ACE Electric, an Australian start-up with plans to build electric utes, vans and passenger cars. While starting from scratch has taken more time, he says it has meant the company could rethink the best way to build a car and investigate the most advanced manufacturing techniques.
His vehicles are stitched together with a method similar to that used to build the Boeing Dreamliner, where sheets of carbon-fibre composite – a material two-to-three times stronger than steel – are chemically welded together.
The company has already recorded over $2 million in reservations, enough that they hope to begin production on the first 300 vehicles later this year.
While McGarvie says he’s had strong interest from south-east Asia and countries as far afield as eastern Europe, Australian authorities have been slow to act. It took the South Australian state government to offer development support at the end of 2020 for things to really get moving.
“We can manufacture these vehicles. Easy,” McGarvie says. “The only condition is government making it easy to proceed and to actually support it. The reason China is manufacturing 1.2 million electric vehicles a year is because their government said we will support anyone who’s got the go to set up auto.
“This is already happening everywhere else, Australia is just playing catching up. In five years, 10-years-time, if you’re parked at a traffic light and a fossil fuel smoker sitting beside you, it’ll be like going into a hospital or nursery and lighting a cigarette.”
www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/28/all-the-bones-are-there-could-a-new-electric-vehicle-be-built-in-australia
Food for thought on the Road to Manono via South Australia
Frank
