BMW North Shore and AEVA Sydney organised a BMW test drive day today. The entire range of BMW plug-in cars were on offer including an i8, i3, 330e and X5 xDrive40e. It was a great day, I would highly recommend taking a test drive.
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The Drive
We drove from North Shore to The Old Tin Shed at Yarramalong for breakfast then back via the old Pacific Hwy. The Sydney driving wasn’t the best to put the EV’s to the test, but the windy roads of the old Pacific Hwy and adaptive cruise control on the Freeway made for a great test drive.
The Cars
We got to drive everything excluding the i8 and the i8 was a sought after commodity today, with everyone raving about their experiences. Maybe next time.
The 330e was our unexpected favourite today . We’ve known about the i3 with Range extender, but not as much about the 330e. The 330e is a mid sized car, with all the mod cons you expect in a new car.
It was also great to have available the latest i3 with the larger battery pack, all the i3’s available to drive today were Rex (Petrol Range extenders) but the 2 with the larger battery packs managed the trip without starting the petrol engine. The one with the small capacity battery did start up the range extender on the trip back, you could notice the bit of extra noise, but it still performed well.
Thanks to all the work put in to organise this day from BMW and AEVA Sydney.
Another successful Hunter Electric Vehicle Festival. Recharging NSW is always keen to support this event as it combines both advocacy (the festival) and STEM (the EV Prize) in one event. This year as well as having a stall, we also helped out our local public school in the mini EV Prize.
The EV prize: where High school students are encouraged to design, construct and race a push bike converted to electric powered.
The Mini EV Prize: this year Primary school students also had an opportunity to participate. Designing, constructing and racing, solar powered race cars (about the size of a remote control car).
The Hunter Electric Vehicle Festival: had stalls showcasing local business electric transport and solar innovation.
The Hunter Electric Vehicle Festival was a great way to meet other electric vehicle owners. The majority of the electric vehicles on display privately owned, as well as extras that came to visit. The festival gave owners an opportunity to meet each other as well as share real world stories of how amazing and easy electric vehicle ownership really is. We also met some Zero motorcycle owners who decided to perform a Kramer Experiment, visiting from Sydney.
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Beyond Zero Emissions Launch
Coupled nicely with the Hunter Electric Vehicle Festival, Beyond Zero Emissions launched their electric vehicle report the Saturday night. With guest speakers from Hyundai, Tom Farrell Institute and Lake Macquarie city council. Our very own Kymberly joined them afterwards as a panellist, it soon became apparent that (based on the questions) the technology is not the issue. If we want electric vehicles to succeed we need to get more expert opinions from physiological and sociological fields of study.
Nissan is celebrating 5 years of the LEAF and Tesla Australia is celebrating 1 year in Australia. With the upcoming New year I thought it would be good to look back at the history of electric vehicles in NSW.
Growth
Lets look at growth in NSW Tesla don’t share their data with VFACTS, the industry body for new car sales reporting but RMS/RTA do keep registration statistics on how many cars of a particular brand are sold and what type of fuel they use. Using those statistics we can look at how many “pure electric” vehicles are on the road in NSW. The first production EV was the Mitsubishi i-MiEV launched in 2010 before then the 44 or so vehicles registered as electric with the RTA/RMS where most likely conversions.
NSW Pure Electric Registrations
What’s included in this count? RMS count petrol/electrics separately so this count doesn’t include plug-in hybrids like the Outlander PHEV, Holden Volt or BMW i3 Rex. What it does include is listed below with their official release dates.
Release Dates :
2010 August Mitsubishi i-MiEV (Limited selective client release)
2014 December BMW i3 (excluding the REX hybrid version)
2014 December Tesla Model S (The amount of registered Tesla’s is shown in red)
Performance
If we look at registrations since 3rd Quarter 2011 when electric vehicles began sales to the general public we see 524 registrations to date at a rate of 33 vehicles per quarter. Breaking it down further we see three district rates of registrations:
2009-2011 – 7.8 Registrations per quarter.
2012-2013 – 28.5 Registrations per quarter.
2014 Q1-Q3 – 5.3 Registrations per quarter.
2014 Q3-2015 Q3 – 66.5 Registrations per quarter.
With the release of Tesla Model S we see Tesla alone contribute 52.5 Registrations per quarter, all other makes and models only managing 14 per quarter since 2014. The best performing quarter is the fourth quarter of 2014 with 87 registrations 65 Tesla 22 others. The worst performing quarter since the release of the i-MiEV first quarter of 2014 with only 4.
Insights
Tesla has landed on our shores and has been welcomed with open arms with the fastest “selling” electric vehicle in NSW. Nissan/Mitsubishi was a steady seller until 2014. However Nissan have not released an updated model since 2012 in Australia, maybe it’s time for a new model LEAF that sell overseas. Mitsubishi also no longer have i-MiEV at dealerships, concentrating their efforts on the Outlander PHEV.
In terms of charging standards we’ve seen Tesla enter with their own version of a type 2 socket which is Mennekes type 2 compatible. Where as everyone else has been type 1 J1772 it’s a bit hard to gauge a direction while 30% of pure electric vehicles are Tesla we don’t have accurate numbers for other type 1 J1772 plug-in vehicles like the Holden volt, Audi a3 e-tron Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, BMW i3 REX, BMW i8 and the hybrid offerings from Porsche.
Over the last year we’ve seen a significant growth in electric vehicles, installing a type 2 socket universal charging station to suit all vehicles at your office, shop, restaurant, church or sports field will further enhance the growth of electric vehicles. Please contact us to discuss further.
We are on the road again this time come say hello at Goulburn connects the 15 November 2015, from 10a.m. to 4 p.m. at the GMC Recreation Area in Braidwood Road, Goulburn. We’ll have our Keba P20 charging station on display and joining with Canberra EV to advocate the benefits of electric vehicles.
So there are two events; the conference where we are presenting Friday morning. and Saturday the expo (free entry). Which we’ll have a stall at so come down and talk Electric Vehicles.
