The following description was taken from NTC: Carbon dioxide emissions intensity for new Australian light vehicles 2020 :
Every year since 2009, the National Transport Commission (NTC) reports on the carbon dioxide intensity performance of new passenger and light commercial vehicles sold in Australia to help inform governments, fleet managers and consumers about the collective impacts of our buying choices on carbon dioxide emissions intensity. The popularity and availability of electric and hybrid vehicles in Australia is slowly changing the emissions intensity of the nation’s car fleet, with growing efforts across industry, governments and individuals to support more efficient vehicles.
Almost all governments purchased at least 10 per cent of their fleet as either electric or hybrid vehicles in 2020, while nine out of 10 new taxis were hybrid and the total number of hybrid sales almost doubled. This year’s report reflects a number of significant policy changes including the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries’ (FCAI) adoption of a new method for calculating carbon dioxide emissions intensity of the light vehicle fleet. The voluntary reporting scheme sets individual targets for vehicle makers extrapolated across the next 10 years.
This methodology has been designed to align with international approaches, and as such comparisons with earlier NTC reports is more difficult. This year’s report provides more detailed information on electric vehicles – both battery electric vehicles (BEVs)
and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) – as well as separate graphs and data on hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) for the first time. One of the key findings of the report is that if people who purchased new vehicles in 2020 had chosen the best-in-class for emissions performance, Australia’s average carbon emissions intensity would have dropped by 93 per cent for new passenger cars and light SUVs, and by 50 per cent for new heavy SUVs and light commercial vehicles. This is due to the increasing availability of battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric and hybrid electric vehicle variants in the Australian market. However, despite a 17 per cent increase of battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles sales in 2020, they still only represent 0.12 per cent of the nation’s 18.1 million cars and light commercial vehicles, and as such have had little impact on materially decreasing overall emissions intensity. In comparison across the world 1 per cent of the global passenger fleet are electric vehicles (BNEF, 2021).