Right now, our transition to electric cars is on pause. The true believers have already bought their EV, downloaded the charging apps and bored everyone senseless with the length of their “range”.
It’s not just the executives at Tesla who are scratching their heads. Anecdotally, the number of people who actually drive a car is falling – fewer 17-year-olds have a driver’s licence, compared with almost 100 per cent just two generations ago. My 27-year-old daughter, who lives just a few minutes walk from a train station and two bus routes in Sydney’s inner west, plans to do her driving test in the next month. But she doesn’t own a car and has no plans to get one.
The vast majority of us travel by car because we already own a car – it’s a habit. Most Australians live in metropolitan areas, where 50 per cent of all trips – by car, train, bus or. In addition, post-lockdown, many of us work from home at least some of the week. I don’t have off-street parking and my car can spend days marooned outside the house, gaining a thick covering of dust and blossoms.