hmmm. Seems Australia sits way above them in Tesla adoption
Funny, I'd like to make a similar chart for EV purchase
rates, but Australia doesn't even make the list
Iceland EV sales were 3439 in 2018:
In 2018, A Stunning 19% Cars Sold In Iceland Were Plug-Ins
Australia sold around 2700 in 2018:
Australia's EV sales remained at pathetically low level in 2018, data shows | The Driven
.... despite being 73 times the population and 75 times the area. E.g. you're nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive to serve,
yet you buy fewer EVs than we do.
Now, you buy more
Teslas than we do, because - and I can't believe I need to mention this - believe it or not, most people aren't going to buy a car that they need to
personally import to the country and
ship halfway across the North Atlantic for service, a car which they can't even Supercharge near the country's largest city. You buy more Teslas because
Tesla is there. They're not here.
But will be soon, thankfully. And interest is huge. Iceland is going to be a mini-Norway for them.
We have similar incentives to Norway - the tax structure renders a Model 3 about 30-40% cheaper than competing cars with a similar retail price, gasoline is usually nearly USD $2/l / $8/gal but electricity is cheap, there's a variety of side incentives (and growing - they're even looking at congestion charges, which EVs would be exempt from), our power is almost 100% renewable but we have zero oil production, people are generally environmentally-minded, a single service centre can be located near 75% of the country's population, and the government plans to ban all ICE sales in 2030 and then start a phaseout of registration renewals for ICE vehicles.
There's a reason Tesla is coming here. Before deciding, they engaged in discussions with our government, and left convinced that this was going to be a very big market for them.
If you want to interest Tesla more, your country needs to get onboard with EVs in general. They just haven't yet. Not enough, at least. And it's a real shame, because Australia has great production resources for EVs. If Australia became as hardcore as Norway, I bet Tesla would not merely become widespread there.... I bet they'd position a Gigafactory there, to additionally export to south Asia and perhaps Africa. You're the world's largest lithium producer, the world's second largest rare earths producer, you have the largest proven nickel reserves on Earth, you're the fifth largest copper producer, etc etc. It's just calling for a Gigafactory - if you could only get a larger portion of your ~25 million people on board with the idea of EVs.
