Australia’s EV transition is moving faster than our ability to see clearly now the ICE is gone.
That’s not just a curiosity for data nerds; it’s a growing risk for how we plan grids, precincts and public investment as electrified vehicles head towards a quarter of new sales. In our view, it’s time to put independent public‑interest statistics back at the centre of the story.
For decades, the Australian Bureau of Statistics ran the Motor Vehicle Census and related series, using registration data from state and territory agencies to build a national picture of the fleet by fuel type, age, vehicle category and owner location.
ABS also published “New Motor Vehicle Registrations” and “Sales of New Motor Vehicles”, buying detailed FCAI/VFACTS data, applying transparent methods and integrating them into wider economic statistics. That infrastructure allowed governments to ask public‑interest questions – how many diesels in each region, what ages of vehicles, which households – not just “who won in the showroom this month”.
That system has quietly been dismantled. The Motor Vehicle Census was discontinued after the 2021 release; “Road vehicles Australia” from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) now ‘replaces’ it as the official fleet snapshot, but only at a basic level.
BITRE’s work is valuable and keeps the basic counts going, but it does not have ABS’s whole‑of‑economy mandate or the same machinery for linking vehicle data to income, housing, energy use and geography.
At the same time, ABS removed the “number of motor vehicles” topic from the 2021 Census and has only recently begun to explore new ways of bringing NEVDIS vehicle data back into its 2026 Census planning.
These shifts reflect a simple reality: once Australia stopped building cars, governments became less interested in detailed automotive data, and ABS priorities were reshaped under ministerial direction and resource constraints.
The problem is that transport has come roaring back as a central planning issue, just in a different guise.
As The Driven and others have charted, EV sales are now “multiplying”, with battery electrics approaching one in four new sales. Once you add hybrids and plug‑in hybrids to battery electrics, total electrified vehicles approached 50% of new sales in June 2026. When the July data is reported, petrol and diesel will have passed the threshold to become a legacy option.
This is exactly the steep part of the S‑curve we’re now seeing in Europe, where high oil prices and climate policy have pushed EV share above 20% and made combustion bans politically durable – and Australia is beginning to trace the same pattern. When a technology transition reaches this phase, planning for grids, precincts and equity demands more than headline VFACTS numbers from a manufacturers’ lobby.
In our recent work on “renewable‑oriented design” for regional centres and rural precincts, we’ve argued that regions need to be planned around electrified transport and local energy sovereignty: where people live and work, what vehicles they use, how those vehicles interact with local generation, storage and networks.
The same logic underpins our precinct planning for freight, trucks and local service vehicles. You cannot do that well if your main lens on vehicles is an industry data product built primarily to track monthly sales races for members.
FCAI and VFACTS are useful for showroom competition, but they are not designed to answer public‑interest questions about grid load, regional access, or who gets stranded on expensive fossil fuels.
We argue governments should serve people, not industry balance sheets.
Public‑interest planning needs objective analysis grounded in independent, nationally consistent data. That means putting ABS – with BITRE as a close partner – back in the driver’s seat for vehicle statistics.
The building blocks already exist: NEVDIS gives a national view of registered vehicles; BITRE has stood up a replacement Motor Vehicle Census; ABS is piloting Census integration of vehicle data. What’s missing is the clear instruction and resourcing to treat electrified transport as a core statistical priority, not an afterthought.
We think the path forward is straightforward:
- – Re‑establish a modern Motor Vehicle Census‑style collection as a joint ABS–BITRE effort, tuned explicitly to electrification: detailed vehicle characteristics, fuel types, age and location, with regular public releases;
- – Embed vehicle and charging data into the 2026 Census and subsequent surveys, so planners can see how EV ownership intersects with income, housing, rooftop solar and regional disadvantage; and
- – Open up these datasets for serious analysis of grid impacts and precinct design, rather than treating them as background for industry press releases.
VFACTS and industry market reports may still have some value. But in a transport‑energy transition of this speed and scale, leaving the primary lens in the hands of a lobby built around the internal combustion is no longer acceptable. As of June 2026, FCAI’s VFACTS is no longer an adequate measure of the market.
If we want grids and precincts that are fit for an electric age – and a transition that works for Dave and Valerie in the bush as much as it does for an inner‑city EV driver – we have to rebuild the statistical scaffolding that informs government decisions for the public good, not just for the next quarterly sales leaderboard of which member sold the most cars.
As Brendan Jones lays out: this is the beginning of the end of the ICE age in Australia. We concur.
Editor’s note: In the meantime, you can find the most comprehensive EV sales data on this site. You can find it here: Australian electric vehicle sales by month in 2026 – by model and by brand
