ASEAN didn't beat us on EVs. It beat us to the harder question.
Wishing everyone a good start to the week and hope everyone had a good weekend. Was amazing weather here in New Zealand...although slightly cold. We were in Taupo for the Taupo Half Marathon and spent a few days at Whakapu Bay where it got down to -4 C. Cold but beautiful!
There's a number doing the rounds this month, it may get quoted badly, so we thought we would write a quick piece on it.
Ember's latest work puts Singapore and Vietnam at roughly 40 per cent EV share of new car sales. Thailand at 21. Indonesia at 15 - which takes it past the United States for the first time.
The framing that follows almost writes itself: Southeast Asia has overtaken the West, and Australia and New Zealand are being left behind.
Half of that is right. The half about us isn't.
In June, battery-electric and plug-in hybrids made up 38.2 per cent of new passenger registrations in New Zealand - the highest electrified share NZTA has recorded for any June, and more than double the 18.4 per cent of a year earlier.
Australia's June figure was 35.8 per cent, against about 11 per cent twelve months before. On share, we are not trailing Singapore and Vietnam. We are sitting alongside them.
So if the numbers are level, the interesting question isn't who's ahead. It's how four countries arrived at roughly the same place by completely different roads - and what each of those roads leaves behind.
We bought our way there. They built their way there.
Ours is a consumer transition. Efficiency standards on the supply side, incentives and fuel prices on the demand side, a fleet turning over one household decision at a time. Australia's New Vehicle Efficiency Standard has done more, faster, than most of its critics predicted, and this year's review of it is quietly one of the more consequential things on either country's transport agenda.
Vietnam's is an industrial transition. In 2021 its EV share was under 0.05 per cent. Today almost every EV sold there is a VinFast, and the VF 3 is the best-selling car in the country. That is not a story about consumer preference. That is a domestic manufacturer, a state that wanted one, and a policy stack built to protect it. Indonesia has run a version of the same play, tying import tariff relief to commitments to assemble locally.
And in both, the vehicle actually being electrified is frequently not a car at all. It's the motorbike - pushed along by ride-hailing fleets and fuel costs rather than by any policy aimed at cars.
The difference to note is this....a transition delivered through household car purchases produces one kind of network. A transition delivered through industrial policy and two-wheelers produces another.
Same headline percentage. Very different transport systems.
Hanoi is the experiment worth watching
The part that interests me is this.
Hanoi set out to ban petrol motorbikes from about 26 square kilometres of its historic centre from 1 July this year, backed by a subsidy programme to replace something in the order of 450,000 of them. At that density, the most ambitious low-emission zone attempted anywhere.
By May, after sustained opposition from riders and charging infrastructure that didn't arrive on schedule, it had been cut back to 11 streets across roughly half a square kilometre.
A lot of people read this as a failure...but when you read the data behind it, I don't think it is.
Hanoi didn't discover that electrifying motorbikes was hard - Vietnamese riders have been switching for years. It discovered that removing an existing right of access from people whose livelihoods depend on it is a different order of problem, and that the charging network has to exist before the restriction bites, not after.
For me...it's like having a banh mi without the pate...it just doesn't work!!!!
Changing what powers a vehicle is a market problem. Changing who is allowed to use a street is a political one. We keep assuming the second gets solved by the first.
Which brings it home to our part of the world
Thirty-eight per cent electrified share fixes tailpipe emissions in a corridor. It does nothing for congestion, nothing for kerbside demand, and nothing about the fact that our roads are funded by a tax on a fuel fewer people buy every month.
New Zealand's answer to that last one - every light vehicle moved onto distance-based road user charges, legislated this year and live around 2027 - is the first honest admission that the system underneath is changing, not just the vehicles sitting on top of it. It is a bigger shift than any EV target we've set, and it has had a fraction of the attention.
Councils will feel it before central government does. Access, parking, kerbside allocation, who gets priority and who gets charged - those get decided one application at a time, by people who need a defensible answer this week, not a policy position in five years. That's where the real gap sits: not ambition, and not technology, but the absence of a consistent way to make a contestable decision and stand behind it afterwards.
Till next time,
Andrew
P.S. KA Advisory has been working hard in the background and will shortly release a global line of digital products and apps aimed squarely at helping clients and consultants with decisions such as the one above! More on that shortly!
Photo from the Taupo half below - Brown hat with vest is myself:)
Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.
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