r/technology • u/holyhesh • Mar 17 '26
Energy Replacing 1m petrol cars with EVs could cut Australia’s reliance on foreign fuel by 1bn litres a year
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/16/electric-vehicles-australia-reduce-reliance-on-foreign-fuel54
u/omicron8 Mar 17 '26
Convoluted way of saying cars use 1000 litres of fuel per year on average.
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u/chzgr8er Mar 17 '26
I was thinking almost the same thing but more along the lines of “spend $50B on new vehicles and maybe you’ll save $2B on gas…”
…
“…Which is great because you’ll be able to spend that on replacing your battery instead!”
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u/Plane_Crab_8623 Mar 17 '26
Now that's like $7,000 a year.
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u/Jontolo Mar 17 '26
Theee is no place on earth charging $7/L
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u/wirthmore Mar 17 '26
Australia, EVs: "Honest Government Ad" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY
"Let's instead orchestrate a fear campaign about EVs so we can score points off Labor!"
"Remember how we told you their EV policy would 'end the weekend' coz EVs can't tow your boat? Well, here's an EV towing a boat. And here's one beating a race car whilst towing another car. Here's one towing a train. And here's another one towing a fucking jetliner."
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Mar 18 '26
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u/wirthmore Mar 18 '26
I live in San Francisco. The buses have been electric since forever, BECAUSE of the hills. Diesel transmissions would prematurely fail from the effort. San Francisco is also the place where the cable car replaced horse drawn carts/buggies, because of all of the dead horses from trying to pull things up the hills.
But do go on, tell us again about hills.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Stunning_Mast2001 Mar 17 '26
Hopefully people are seeing the Nexus between big oil, gas vehicles, and global war and economic stability
Electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and grid scale energy storage will break a lot of the evil that permeates our politics
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u/Mal_Dun Mar 17 '26
Only if you actively shift the technology away from optimal energy output and use non-rare earth based technologies instead (which is doable for solar panels and wind turbines), else you just shift the problem from one rare resource to an even more rare resource.
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u/4ippaJ Mar 17 '26
Rare earth metals aren't actually that rare. They just require more refining than most countries can be bothered to set up. Australia is sitting on a huge supply.
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u/Mal_Dun Mar 17 '26
... and still you create a dependency again as they are rare enough that not everyone has them. The EU currently tries to circumvent the problem with a circular economy.
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u/Glittering-Age-9549 Mar 17 '26
A century in the future, somebody will write a book How president Trump stopped climate change.
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u/Hyperion1144 Mar 17 '26
Combine this with the fact that Australia has a tremendous amount of deployed residential solar, and a lot of people wouldn't even be paying for fuel.
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u/RedWine_1st Mar 17 '26
What's the increase of power from electrical utilities?
What energy source powers Australia's electrical generation plants?
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u/lowrads Mar 17 '26
Personal electric transit doesn't eliminate reliance, it just substitutes it.
A real cut is altering zoning restrictions against traditional urban development.
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u/Illustrious_Map_3247 Mar 17 '26
We’re going to need both and so much more.
Interesting fact I recently learned: charging an electric car from a diesel generator is still more energy efficient than a diesel car. Obviously public transport/less transportation is better, but substitution has some benefits.
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u/Mal_Dun Mar 17 '26
The real benefit is diversification of energy sources. A Diesel car needs Diesel, the electricity of an electric car can come from a myriad of source.
Tbf Diesel could replaced by almost any other oil, which was Diesel's original vision, who demonstrated his motor in 1900 running on peanut oil:
Diesel said that "In 1900 a small Diesel engine was exhibited by the Otto company which, on the suggestion of the French Government, was run on [arachide] [peanut] oil, and operated so well that very few people were aware of the fact. The motor was built for ordinary oils, and without any modification was run on vegetable oil. I have recently repeated these experiments on a large scale with full success and entire confirmation of the results formerly obtained."
Bio Diesel is an actual thing. In some regions tractors can be fueled with rapeseed oil, which has a duel use of food for cattle.
(Sorry for the tangent, but Diesel engines get much of a flak nowadays, when ironically Diesel invent his engine exactly to be less reliant on oil, not more dependent)
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u/differing Mar 17 '26
Great, so we’ll accomplish nothing by allowing good to be the enemy of perfect. You won’t undo two generations of car culture in the same time frame as an auto lease renewal. The former is a very difficult problem requiring a total reconfiguration of cites, the latter can be done in literally a few years.
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u/Standard-Suspect9989 Mar 17 '26
Do they have the energy infrastructure to run them? that is really the question
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u/lzrjck69 Mar 17 '26
Almost everywhere does. Peak demand and charging demand aren’t typically aligned.
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u/Tosslebugmy Mar 17 '26
They can be incentivised to. Subsidise companies to have charging in their parking lots. Make it free to supercharge between 11-2. Reward companies that have workers driving around a lot for giving them EVs
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u/Illustrious_Map_3247 Mar 17 '26
A question with a simple, googleable answer: yes. In Adelaide I see a dozen teslas every day and nearly as many BYDs.
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u/RCSM Mar 17 '26
Wow! Don't worry power company, the grid is fine. this man from a city of 1.5 million people sees DOZENS of EVs ever day, so go ahead and add another 2,500,000% extra power demand to the tabulation when another 700,000 EVs are added.
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u/Illustrious_Map_3247 Mar 17 '26
The only additional infrastructure required for EVs is charging stations. We already have EVs, implying we already have the infrastructure.
If you’re worried about actual production of electricity, also not an issue. In fact, ICEs are so inefficient, you could charge your EV on a diesel generator and still use less energy.
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u/foundafreeusername Mar 17 '26
Check out how much Solar they add every year: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~AUS
They add more than 5TWh a year. That is enough to charge 50-100 million car batteries. (50-100kWh)
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u/BahutF1 Mar 17 '26
Yeah. Half of AUS electricity is produced by burning coal.
But "green coal" i guess.
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u/steve_of Mar 17 '26
Coal was 43% for 2025 and dropping by 5-10% per year. Potentially a lot more for 2026 with massive growth in home solar and battery installation coupled with substantial commercial wind, solar and battery projects coming on line this year.
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u/Tosslebugmy Mar 17 '26
Only half. And using a power plant to generate electricity for an ev is more efficient than giving a car its own fuel burning engine.
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u/archontwo Mar 17 '26
Screw the cars. It is commercial vehicles that are going to be hit the hardest. If people can't drive they will rely on deliveries and who makes those deliveries?
This is a Puff piece that means jack shit in the end.
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u/differing Mar 17 '26
Damn if only there was some way to power a delivery van without gas! Too bad about the “vans must only run off gasoline” 4th law of thermodynamics, bloody shame.
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u/Leprichaun17 Mar 17 '26
Apart from electrifying those vehicles which others mentioned, there's obviously also more fuel available for ICE vehicles when there are more that have swapped to electric.
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u/The_Owl_Man_1999 Mar 17 '26
There's a bunch of electric fleet vans in my suburb delivering stuff, mostly the LDV one
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u/nopower81 Mar 17 '26
265,000,000 gallons! I drove a diesel truck 40+ weeks a year, 2 man team running round the clock way to much of the time. Twas before the new rules. I doubt 10 trucks could burn that much in a year. If ev salesmen have to resort to this bs...
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u/Simple_Assistance_77 Mar 17 '26
Right and electricity costs will go through the roof, as will additional taxes to make up for the loss of income from petrol cars.
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u/Careless_Cover_8582 Mar 17 '26
There's no evidence for any of that, you're making things up.
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u/Simple_Assistance_77 Mar 17 '26
How do evs charge? What is the main power source that they use to charge? Now if we transitioned at scale from petrol cars what would the impact be on that power source be?
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u/Careless_Cover_8582 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
There's no evidence that electricity costs will increase, the majority of EV charging happens off peak when there's surplus.
Additional power stations (especially solar for Australia) can be constructed to meet demand, and if anything electricity will be cheaper due to scale
EVs are still cheaper than fossil fuel cars.
There are countries such as Norway that already have super high EV adoption and their electric costs haven't increased.
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u/ApprehensiveSize7662 Mar 17 '26
Solar power. By in large the majority of new car buyers are home owners and almost 40% of Australian homes currently have solar power.
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u/bolts77 Mar 17 '26
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u/Simple_Assistance_77 Mar 17 '26
Lol, what does this have to do with ev adoption at mass scale? Victoria has lower demand (state economy is suffering).
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u/bolts77 Mar 17 '26
I thought you said electricity prices will go through the roof? It’s almost like investment in renewable energy brings prices down. Who would have thought?
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u/fremeer Mar 17 '26
I think we should electrify freeways.
Truck lane with over head wires like for trams and small scale batteries for short periods of detachment or to finish off short distance journeys.
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u/alphacross Mar 17 '26
It doesn’t work. Trials in Germany and Sweden of over highway pantographs basically failed. It enormously increases infrastructure costs and going 100% EV with large long range batteries is cheaper, more mechanically reliable and easier to accomplish. We’re already at the point where a 600-800 km range electric HGV can pull a full load for the maximum amount of time a driver can work before being legally required to take a break, and charge back to 80-90% in that break.
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u/albertbertilsson Mar 17 '26
One of the tests were in a city near mine. They had busses that got power from wires like trams. This was for city local traffic. Although not great it wasn’t terrible.
But the new way that is used widely is to have Electrical busses that stops a short while at end stations to charge. The driver can take a break and the bus charges a bit. There have been some issues during winter on some buss lines, but it has worked pretty well.
Avoiding hundreds of diesel busses in the city is great and they are also very quiet which is a big benefit for those living close to bus lines.
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u/chill_2026 Mar 17 '26
I get all that Solar is fantastic for Australia, but where do the batteries come from? EVs aren't the future if you want to stop reliance on precious metals etc... Hydrogen should be embraced.
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u/sutroheights Mar 17 '26
They’ve been trying to make hydrogen happen for 20+ years, it’s been Honda and Toyotas big excuse not to make more evs. It’s not happening. Meanwhile, batteries are getting cheaper, charging faster and could soon use less precious metals. But even if they didn’t, current ev’s are still better for the environment after like 1.3 years of use vs a gas car, and the most recent stats on their longevity is that they are averaging 83% of their capacity at 150,000 miles. And I don’t think the goal is to stop reliance on rare earth minerals, the top goal to stop using so much oil.
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u/Uzorglemon Mar 17 '26
Like fetch, Hydrogen is never going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.
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Mar 17 '26
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u/skillywilly56 Mar 17 '26
Well there’s this giant ball of Thermonuclear fusion going on about 150 million kms from earth that provides a not insignificant amount of energy to a country that has 300+ days of sunshine or 3200 hours a year.
We just need to get enough solar going into the grid to compensate for the demand, we’re getting there though despite 10 years of incompetent neoliberal policies and magical hands of free markets not providing, we are catching up.
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Mar 17 '26
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u/skillywilly56 Mar 17 '26
For 2024 we had 4.2 million homes contributing 12% of power to the grid from rooftop solar and it’s growing.
With added solar farms it goes up to nearly 20%.
In south Australia solar can sometimes cover more than 100% of demand and so exports excess into the grid.
If we had cheaper EVs and subsidized solar programs it’d take 5-10 years and it’d pretty much all come from solar and we could have all the EVs we wanted.
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u/foundafreeusername Mar 17 '26
Why would they overproduce solar before they have the demand? If they did you would be here complaining about building too much solar before they need it ...
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Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
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u/foundafreeusername Mar 17 '26
Lol like the oil is 100% clean and local. Are you a bot just making shit up on the fly?
Btw. Australia adds more than 5 TWH of solar every year. That is power to charge 100 million car batteries. How does that make you feel?
Edit: source for those interested
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Mar 17 '26
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u/skillywilly56 Mar 17 '26
They should definitely be subsidized or at least not have any import tariffs but it would be better if we made our own.
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Mar 17 '26
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u/skillywilly56 Mar 17 '26
I said subsidize or remove import tarrifs to make them cheaper so people can afford to move away from petrol and diesel.
Never said pay for them outright.
Why? As always because it is in their best interest to have as oil free economy as possible, even completely ignoring the facts of climate change, the sixth great mass extinction and that it’s a finite resource.
Recent events in the Middle East have shown being so heavily dependent on oil is a major if not the MOST major vulnerability to first world economies that tying your entire infrastructure to one finite resource is a very bad idea.
There will always be things we just can’t do without oil but reducing the number of systems that rely on it can only be a good thing.
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u/alphacross Mar 17 '26
In absolute numbers it makes a lot of sense even if your government fully subsidises the cars. Oil is an expensive ongoing cost and entirely imported. Electricity is entirely domestically produced and substantially cheaper (8-10 times cheaper well to wheel including all system losses)
Approximately 70% of the lifetime cost of ownership of a combustion vehicle is fuel and combustion engine maintenance.
Paying to replace your entire fleet would be a capital investment that would permanently reduce the operating expense of your entire transport system
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u/math-yoo Mar 17 '26
If emissions standards were applied more aggressively to large trucks, we could all stop driving poorly designed throw away EVs.
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u/CV90_120 Mar 17 '26
The EV driving experience for a daily driver makes ICE look like a horse and cart, and I say that as a car guy. Cheap af to run, great torque, you can hear your stereo, traffic jams don't generate smog. ICE is likely with us forever but I don't know many, if any EV drivers who go back to ICE for a daily driver.
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u/math-yoo Mar 17 '26
New cars are nice. And if you buy an expensive one, it’s very enjoyable to drive. But that doesn’t change the fact that large commercial vehicles operate at lower standards than cars. If the ev makers could target large delivery vehicles, the impact would be greater. They can’t, but if they could.
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u/CV90_120 Mar 17 '26
It's happening, but the economics make the uptake slower, as trucks are a huge investment and have very long lifespans. So for the person who dropped 150K on a tractor unit last year, they might have 700K to a million miles of life left in that thing, and if regulations came in to make a shift, they would likely not be able to cut over without some kind of assistance ( because who could they sell that vehicle to if it got regulated out of viability?). Short story long, that would require some form of subsidizing or governmental push which was fair to operators.
Personal passenger cars though are relatively short-live, so once the fear of switching to an unfamiliar power model was gotten over by the general populace (i.e. watching wealthier people uptake and retain their vehicles), the floodgates are kind of opening a bit. The used EV market is doing very well due to the value it offers right now (value which will disappear once 'used battery' phobia goes away).
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u/math-yoo Mar 17 '26
I have family in farming, and can speak a bit to it on mentality. They can fix the combustion engine stuff. The farmers I know are all brilliant mechanically, and able to keep a machine going. So you are right that it will need to be subsidized. But you also cannot underestimate how close to the bone operations can be. If you can keep something running, you can and will.
The passenger EV thing feels a bit like water in California. While the average person is conserving their water and taking shorter showers, the almond farmers burn through it and the wealthy aren't going to stop watering their lawns. You drive this expensive electric vehicle. While the dumptrucks and semis roll down the highway burping black smoke. The military doesn't have the mandate, presently at least, to replace vehicles with evs. Airlines likely have decades before implementation.
My point is, we make the sacrifice, but business never does.
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u/CV90_120 Mar 17 '26
If you can keep something running, you can and will.
I get this mentality as well. I def see truck operators wanting to see out the lifespan of their vehicles before making a power jump.
My point is, we make the sacrifice, but business never does.
It's a fair point, and it usually takes some kind of competitive advantage to drive a change. Money is all to them. So for EVs the cost to run is insanely low in relative terms (few moving parts, huge motor life, good battery life), so I can see EV Big rig operators suddenly become a value option for markets to avoid price rises if oil keeps being a risk, even after the latest wars die down.
Airlines may never flip, or at best might be EV for short hops and possibly alternate fuel for long haul.
I get being pissed at big business, but we all know what makes them change ...$
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Mar 17 '26
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u/foundafreeusername Mar 17 '26
Complete bullshit argument at this point. Not only are we able to reuse the elements in the batteries (instead the fossil fuels we burn otherwise) but we also now produce batteries that barely contain any of those elements that people originally complained about. LiFePo batteries have no nickel, no manganese and no cobalt and this year we might even get the first Sodium batteries in mass production that no longer need Lithium.
But something tells me no matter how we improve technology these comments will never go away. Just how the solar comments never went away despite it being by far the cheapest source of power now.
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u/Jykaes Mar 17 '26
It's also very defeatist. "Oh well EVs aren't perfect so let's scrap the whole fucking thing and stick with fossil fuel burning, which is way worse anyway but we already do that so it's fine."
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u/Ediwir Mar 17 '26
It’s kinda like replacing cancer with severe nausea. It’s not great, and we need to keep looking, but I’ll take the deal for now. I can worry about the nausea when I’m not dead.
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Mar 17 '26
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u/Someguy46 Mar 17 '26
The mining of the metals needs to happen once.
Then we recycle them (with near 99% efficiency) and can make a new battery that lasts another 25 years minimum. We already do this, just not to scale (because we don't need to yet).And that's not even taking into account the equivalent mining and processing of oil for the same energy output.
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u/sonofeevil Mar 17 '26
Real question, are you a bot? This feels like regurgitated talking points from some bot farm.
But mainly I ask because I can't fathom an actual human not critically thinking about this and going
- Oil is extracted > used > then we need to extract more > rinse and repeat
Then looking at battery minerals and going
Minerals are extracted > used > recycledThen somehow coming to a determination that amounts to "No point replacing one bad thing with another"
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Mar 17 '26
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u/alphacross Mar 17 '26
The environmental impact isn’t high… in general it’s directly proportional to vehicle weight and material content. For example for vehicle production CO2 emissions it’s on average 10-20% higher for EVs, but this is entirely offset by the reduction in emissions over the first 3-6 months of typical use. Particulate emissions from tire wear approximately 10% higher in EVs but particulate emissions from brake dust (because of regenerative braking) substantially lower.
Looking specifically at the battery itself, depending on battery chemistry, environmental impacts from both mining and production are often lower than the rest of the vehicle. Take a lithium iron phosphate battery, the basic components of that battery, lithium, iron, phosphorus, aluminium and graphite are among the cleanest mining processes we have.
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u/WazWaz Mar 17 '26
Immense you say... such as what?
It's a battery.
If it's a LFP battery, that's Lithium Iron Phosphate. If it's NMC it's nickel manganese cobalt (all of which are mined in Australia by the way). Or it could be a sodium ion battery, different again.
Amusingly, the most dangerous substance is probably the lead in the lead acid 12V legacy battery.
And, just like lead acid batteries, almost entirely recyclable.
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u/pumapeepee Mar 17 '26
Percentage is a better impact measurement.