SUVs are Best-Selling Type of Car in Australia

Electric cars are not a success story in Australia (yet) and not even a tweet from Elon Musk can fix that. The Tesla founder chimed in on a discussion about Australians’ love of SUVs and other big cars on the social network this week, saying that the country could achieve 50 percent electric vehicles in 11 years or less.

The Australian opposition Labor party had previously unveiled a plan to bring that number of electric vehicles to the roads by 2030. The Coalition government has voiced their opposition of the plan and ran Facebook ads misleadingly suggesting to voters that the Labor party wanted to “tax their ute”.

According to data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, SUVs and light commercial vehicles made up 63.6 percent of all new car sales in Australia in 2018. Estimations from EV publication The Driven suggest that only around 2,700 electric vehicles were sold in Australia in that year, making up only 0.2 percent of all new car sales.