ABC listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Electric Cars, Hydrogen Cars, even self-driving cars. This week on Download This Show, what does the future of driving really look like? Will we have enough charging ports in Australia, who's legally in charge if a driver's car gets an accident? And most importantly, is the next generation going to irreparably damage their relationship with their kids teaching them how to reverse park on a hill? Let's find out.
This is your guide to the future of driving. I'm Mark Fonell and welcome to Download This Show. Yes, indeed. Welcome to another episode of Download This Show. We are talking about the future of cars. And a big welcome to our first SS week, Jennifer Dudley Nicholson, Future Economy's reporter with the AAP. Thank you. And, well, man, I didn't say welcome yet, but yeah, no you're welcome. I'm keen. I'm so excited to be here. It's not It's not a staffy on the show.
And a big welcome in studio here, Toby Hagen, crucial to this episode, the editor of AV Central, welcome to Download This Show. I've got my welcome so I can say hello. Yes, you can't see. See, that's how it's done. That's how it works. OK. OK. OK. OK. Thank you. OK. the next bunch is the people who've been buying petrol and diesel cars for the last how many decades. You've got to convince them that suddenly an EV is a better option for them.
So it's a harder sell, I would argue. And Teslas led the way until now, but you're starting to sell a lot more competition kick into the market. Jen, one of the interesting bits of data to come out of this is that EV sales in rural and regional Australia is lower than Metro areas. To some extent that makes sense, but is that something that the car industry is actually going to have to kind of address directly? They will. And I think
part of that comes down to the type of cars as well. I mean, in addition to actually charging infrastructure, which is very important, the big holdout is euths. So we haven't seen as many electric euths. We have other styles of cars. And in terms of electric vehicles, like we saw that there weren't very many types of electric cars. And now there are a lot more types, but not of euths. There's one euth that you can currently buy in Australia that's electric. And so I think
that holds some people back. And then there's the issue of, you know, how am I going to charge this? You know, where are the local charges and that sort of thing? There's also a hell of a lot of money that you can save. And if you're pouring a lot of money into diesel on a regular basis, then electric vehicles make a lot of sense. And also they don't have as many moving parts. They don't require as much maintenance. That also makes a lot of sense when you're living far away from
a whole bunch of places where you need extra parts. Toby, why have we got an electric euth route? Also, why hasn't somebody made an album called Electric euth route? Both questions are vitally important to be answered. It's coming. You've just stolen my idea. I guess the focus for EVs early on in the EV phase has been the meta market. It's been mid-sized SUVs predominantly. And we've seen obviously some smaller SUVs, some luxury cars. And luxury, they got more margin
to play within the luxury car market. So in the luxury end of the market, the take-up is actually a lot higher, sometimes 20, 30, 40%. But you know, and something like euth is arguably the hardest car to make an electric vehicle. You look at the euth, it's sort of the Swiss Army knife of cars, people expected to not only these days do the family duties, they expect it to lift heavy things, tow a lot and go big distances. So all of a sudden you've got all these challenges packed in
for an electric vehicle. You know, I'd argue that probably the hardest piece of that puzzle is the charging infrastructure. Once you've got that charging infrastructure into those more remote areas, then it makes a euth a lot easier. It makes it easier to get around in. And certainly things like performance and towing capability in an euth and an electric euth, they're not the problem. The challenge is range. You suddenly, you know, you can halve your range or even get less
than half your range once you're towing a decent load on the back. So it makes it very tough for the euths. But keep in mind, the euth market in Australia, more than 20% of the car saw one in five is a euths. So it's a big slice of the market. On the one hand, you've got this problem of availability. There aren't that many models of euth available, but then the lack of infrastructure is dictating demand, which is probably what's keeping the share amount and models lower. Tell me if
I've just made that too simple. Yeah, it's chicken egg into some extent. And a lot of people talk about range anxiety. I think it's more charging anxiety. If you've got an EV with only 300 or 400 kilometres of range, if you've got a charger every 10 or 20 kilometres, you're not going to think about it. You're not going to worry. Most people are going to stop within three or four hours and
stretch the legs and get a drink or whatever. I guess we've got, you know, the main route, Sydney Melbourne and so on, Sydney Brisbane, you can find a lot of fast charges along there, but you still have to plan yourself. And that's another issue is the reliability of charges. It's been pretty rubbish in a lot of parts of the country, a lot of those fast charges. So all
those pieces of the puzzle have to come together. You've got car makers lining up waiting to do it, and particularly the Chinese brands are very keen to jump on board and sell as many as they can into as many market segments as they can, but as I said, the Yutera challenge. So yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because as we've seen, Tesla is sort of like the iconic electric car at the moment. And I think that they've priced it at a certain point, that he's
quite an expensive car. It feels like then there's got to be space in the next couple of years for essentially cheaper electric car screws. Is that something we're seeing, Jen? Yeah, I think that's something that we really started to see sort of halfway towards the end of last year as well. A lot of cheaper models came out and like these, we're not talking about cheap models. We're talking around the $40,000 mark, but that's much cheaper than you can get a Tesla.
So we're seeing a lot of even the new makers that are coming out this year or like European makers who are bringing their cars to Australia are dropping the price to be competitive around that area. And I think it's really changing the makeup of the electric cars that we see. So Tesla is still leading in terms of sales in Australia, but we're seeing they're definitely facing some competition from the likes of BYD, which is a Chinese manufacturer, and we're seeing some of the
European brands and the likes of MG catch up as well. There's a lot of car makers coming from China as well who are lining up and saying they're going to launch electric vehicles in Australia over the next few years. And so I think we'll see a lot more of that competition. And I think that's healthy for the market. What do you think we're going to say over the next, what sort of stands out as being interesting to you in terms of the trends? I think this, the influx of new brand is going to be,
it's unprecedented in the Australian market. We're looking at more than a dozen new brands are planning to launch over the next eight or not months in the country. And previously, if we'd say one or two new brands, you'd go, wow, new brands coming to the country. We would have dedicated 15 minutes on the show to add a guarantee. Suddenly you've got this enormous influx of
brands coming in. And they're all going to want to carve themselves a slice of the market. And to do that, something's going to have to give you either you've got to grow the market or someone else is going to have to pull back on sales. I know in Europe certain more makers actually propose to tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. Yeah. Why? Well, I guess if you look around the world, Europe has a thriving car industry and they're trying to protect that industry. America's
similar. So America's talking about significantly taxing Chinese made vehicles coming into the country. Australia these days, we haven't had a manufacturing, a vehicle manufacturing industry since 2017. So we don't have any of those issues. So we're effectively an unregulated market. We're a free market for them to come into. It's a pretty appealing market for those new brands to come in.
Why are they cheaper? Because I guess one of the reasons I asked is because we've seen sort of a sporadic stories about people needing to take care of their batteries when they put in solar in their houses. And it's a different way of of powering yourself around the world. Is there something particular about those manufacturers that does make them more affordable than say a Tesla about how they made? I think there's been a really big focus in China to sort of
seize this opportunity. And so they saw that the market was kind of moving to electric vehicles. A lot of countries have quite ambitious targets around reducing emissions and doing that with electric vehicles. And so the Chinese government put in a lot of incentives to kind of get this manufacturing market sort of off the ground. And like Toby said, we don't have the same issues around tariffs in Australia with these cars coming in. And so it's a large manufacturing
country where companies are being incentivized to create these things. And so there's a lot of competition. And that makes them quite inexpensive because there's low margins. And so punish me with your cheap prices. And as long as they meet all of the Australian standards, which they have to do, there are lots of different, very specific vehicle and safety standards that they have to meet to come into Australia. And so we're seeing a lot of competition, which is not a bad thing.
No, absolutely. And the other big part of this is batteries. So batteries are the most expensive part of an electric car. And China is sort of leading the way on that battery technology. Look at a brand like BYD for example, it's the only car maker that manufactures its own batteries. So they were a battery manufacturer that decided, hang on, we'll start making some cars almost 20 years ago. They thought we'll start doing some cars. And having the ability to manufacture
own batteries is an enormous advantage. How do curiosity? What happens when a car battery gets old? Like what are these car batteries? What do we do? So they're highly recyclable, 94, 95% recyclable, depending on who you talk to. The materials in them are still valuable. So the lithium and so on in there is still valuable. We don't have a thriving recycling industry in Australia at the moment because we don't have enough electric cars coming off the road. So there's roughly almost 200,000
EVs on the road at the moment. And the vast majority of those EVs are still on the road. Once you start getting that scale, those cars coming off the road, once they're more of them getting crashed, more of them are dying from natural causes, then all of a sudden you'll have that benefit of that recycling industry kick up. Jed, there was a term that came up earlier, range anxiety or charging anxiety. The simplest way of solving that is to have more charging
ports. I would assume around the country what's stopping us from from doing that? Or do we have enough and people just aren't using them? What's going on there? Yeah, it's interesting. Like I've talked to a few people about this and someone made the point that you don't want to have too many because then it gets in the way and it's also sort of overbuilding. I guess it's rolling out,
the charging points are rolling out gradually to meet demand essentially. We will obviously have to make a lot more of them by 2030 and 2035 when we see a lot more electric vehicles on the road. But it is a gradual process. And like Toby said, we are still at the point when you buy an electric car and you decide to go for a long distance, then you do have to plan that out and you do have to have a look around it. In terms of charging locations, they increased about 70% last year.
I spoke to one large supplier manufacturer and they were saying they basically doubled the number of charging points that they have in Australia last year. So it is ramping up and we are seeing a lot more of these. We're also seeing weirdly petrol stations get involved because they don't care if they're selling overpressed chocolates to a person with an electric vehicle or a
petrol vehicle. There are a lot more options around and I think that we'll see a lot more at places like workplaces and shopping centres and some of those long charge areas where we don't have to have super fast charging but we can kind of have incidental charging. We do need that support though particularly for people who don't have off-street parking because apartment dwellers do have a bit of an issue where we don't want to see cables running out over windows and over footpaths and
round trees like we have in some other countries and maybe some parts of cities already. And so that is an issue that's going to have to be addressed over time as well.
Tubby, there is a psychological relationship. The more charging places you see, you diminish the anxiety over whether or not I can charge a car which suddenly means an electric car becomes like oh yeah no I could do that and I know that partially because I saw a charging station set up at the back of my office and was like oh so if I could charge it at work and suddenly it became a more realistic conversation. There is a relationship between
you know even just people seeing them. Absolutely. I would have been lucky enough to drive in Norway which is leading the world on electric vehicles and you don't have to think about it over there. There is charging stations everywhere. Every car park you go into, every petrol station you drive past everything has charging stations so you don't do not even have to think about it. So you can just say absolutely that plays into it. Download this show is what you're listening to. It is your
guide to the weekend media technology and culture. This week we are focusing on the future of driving. We have talked a lot about electric cars but there are other ways in which cars of the future may be powered and one thing I thought was worth pointing out is hydrogen. Now there are various proponents of hydrogen bound cars throughout the industry. Most of whom are in the manufacturers themselves. A few of these have actually suggested that hydrogen may have a much bigger role to play
in the future driving than electric cars. What do you make of that Toby? Well at the moment we haven't seen that and the challenge hydrogen has got. There's a few challenges hydrogen has got. The first one obviously is the infrastructure is getting hydrogen around the country. We currently have electricity going to every corner of the country. It's a real place. It's very easy to access. The other one is cost. So the cost of fuel cell electric vehicles. So a hydrogen, a hydrogen fuel cell
car is a type of electric vehicle. The only difference is instead of a battery pack you've got a fuel cell which does a chemical reaction to create electricity and then powers the same electric motor that that a normal battery electric vehicle has. Those fuel cells are very expensive. So being able to manufacture it at a price that's competitive with a battery electric vehicle is so far what has created the challenge. The other thing that Toyota in particular is working on is hydrogen powered
internal combustion engine vehicles. So basically adapting an internal combustion engine vehicle to run on hydrogen which doesn't really work too well. One of the big challenges that hydrogen has to create the hydrogen to create green hydrogen through electrolysis you lose about a third of the energy. So suddenly you've had this massive energy loss to create the hydrogen. You then lose more energy by putting into the hydrogen fuel cell and if you then put it into an internal combustion
engine instead of a fuel cell an internal combustion engine is not at all efficient. You lose 60 odd percent of the energy is not actually used to move the vehicle. So suddenly you're not using much of the energy to move the car. So there's big challenges there for hydrogen. I think the single biggest challenge for hydrogen is cost. You've got so much work happening on battery development,
on battery technology, on more affordable battery electric vehicles. So the the chair of Toyota, not that long ago, said he believed that the chair of battery cars would peak at 30 percent with hydrogen and internal combustion engines making up the rest. Why push that argument? So actually I really like what Toyota is doing in trying to explore different parts or different
alternatives to battery electric vehicles and that's terrific if they can make it work. As I said the reality at the moment is they haven't been able to make it work from a financial perspective. But Toyota also has some fairly specific use cases. They pretty much own our back Australia. Most people out there drive toyotas. People would potentially get range anxiety out there. So Toyota sees an opening for some of its more hardcore off-roaders and long
distance vehicles. Highlux is land cruises those sorts of things. So I think for them they can see a use case where in some scenarios it will work and potentially that is longer distance more remote driving and potentially for trucks for example, for heavy duty trucks going long distances that's where hydrogen might work. So yeah there's challenges there but as I said I think it's good that the car makers are exploring other alternatives and if they can make that
work that's terrific but at the moment they're struggling. I'm not going to lie. The combination of the words hydrogen and combustion if I can very specific. Hindenburg, shape, image in my mind. Jim do you think that hydrogen has a role to play in the next 10-20 years of driving? Not necessarily with cars. I think we're more likely to see it with those sort of long haul trucks. I think we're more likely to see it with really large specific vehicles that
need to be need a really large energy source in order to power them. We don't you're talking about sort of charging stations. When you think about hydrogen refueling stations I think we have less than 10. So we're not talking about huge distances. I was speaking to someone from a scientific organisation who tried to organise. I think it was a hydrogen car trip between Brisbane and Adelaide and they had to have people meet them along the way with various sources of fuel to make that happen.
And I don't think that is ideal. I don't think that people just have hydrogen canisters lying around and I don't think they should either. I think that is bad. When we're talking about sort of sales of hydrogen cars because Toyota has spent a lot of money in investigating this technology and making this happen. We so far this year we've sold three in Australia. Actually they haven't sold them. They've leased them. Well they've leased them exactly.
They can only do that around their hydrogen refueling station in Melbourne. So it can only be a certain distance away from that. And last year there were six. So when you compare that to more than 87,000 electric vehicles I feel like the the horse to back is probably the other one at this point. And that's a big distance to make up and a lot of a lot of things have to happen in order to convince people. Even though Toyota is a very popular brand, the most popular brand in Australia,
I think they might struggle on this one. Download this show is what you're listening to. We are talking about the future of cars. Mark Fnall is my name. I guess this week future economy supporter at the AAP, Jennifer Dudley Nicholson and Toby Hagen, the editor of EV Central. And of course it's not just the driving that we will do. We were also looking at a future where
the cars will drive themselves a couple of weeks ago. I was in the US, I was in San Francisco and I got stuck in a traffic jam and I was sitting there thinking gee this is going for a long time. And I just kept on going and going and going and then I sort of got out and I looked around the corner and there at intersection was this very strange looking car. It looked like a very ordinary looking car except it had a hood on the top. It looked like a helmet and kept on spinning going
around and around and around and around. And then on the side it had these little bops sticking out and they were spinning going around and around and around. And that's what I realized. I was stuck behind a broken down self-driving car by a company called Waymo who used to be part of the Google Universe. And then once you notice them, you saw them everywhere in San Francisco and it's the weirdest thing. These like slightly star wars drone looking cars. Just driving around
with no one in them and you're like why are you here? What is your purpose? You're not even taking passengers. It did in that moment strike me that the whole concept of self-driving cars is a thing that you know if adults that have grown up driving Toby might be a struggle. Conceptually to get that head around what do you see is the future of self-driving cars. It's funny you mentioned it might be a struggle and I've asked people this too and said how are
people going to accept it? And their argument is the younger generation they accept technology they learn to live with it and they learn to trust it. So the younger generation they're not worried about. The older generation probably our generation is the most challenging one once you get to then retirement age and people who potentially can't drive well the option is you either sit at home or catch a taxi or you get in a self-driving car. So they'll effectively be potentially forced
into it. But in terms of the future of it I mean obviously the brands are all working towards a Tesla in particular is super keen to make it work they can see massive potential for obviously revenue and so on. The challenge all of them are hitting is it is far harder than any of them had anticipated. So you know it was four or five years ago that they were saying oh this technology is here now it's ready in the next year or until you'd be jumping in driverless cars.
We are still many many years away from what you would consider a true driverless car. I'm talking no pedals, no steering wheel. Sit in the thing let it go and to put it in perspective there are six levels of driverless cars so you've got level zero which is nothing. We're at level two now with sort of self-steering and auto-breaking and that sort of stuff and level five is the no pedals and no steering wheel. So we've got a long long way to go to get to level five.
Janet we actually going to have to take kids out of drive cars. Look I did have a think about this at one stage because I did a story years ago and I was told within three years autonomous cars definitely. I promise you that was a lot longer than three years ago. So I love that this generation thinks that they might not have to drive but I think they will and I think they should. They might not have to drive manual cars because apparently to my great disappointment they're no longer
as popular or as common as they used to. I've heard it's a driving manual car. Like you used to it. I learned like I have to have panic sweats thinking about hill starts with manual car but they're great so we won't be inflicting that on the future. So maybe they've evolved a little bit beyond clutch control. The rest of it I think that they will definitely have to work out how to
override one of these vehicles if we do get to that point. And in terms of level of autonomy that we've seen so far, if you've driven a reasonably modern car it probably has things in it where maybe it can follow the car in front of you, maybe it can scan the signs and tell you what speed that you should be going at and those sorts of things. But if you've driven one of those cars you probably know how many times it beeps when it doesn't need to be. Oh I hate it. There are about 95%
right but this technology needs to be 100% right. It needs to get it right all the time. I've always been curious about and they may not actually necessarily be an answer to this yet but you know if a driver's car is involved in an accident where does the legal liability lie? Look how does that work in other places where they have been experimenting with this stuff?
Well I'm not sure about the states. Obviously the only parts of the states and some parts of Asia and so on where they can use this technology and in most instances in a lot of instances they do have a driver behind the wheel when they're testing the technology. There's two main ways to do
driverless cars. So one is to map the area that is working in absolutely perfectly. So they do are fencing and so they can only work in this town or city or whatever it is and they map it absolutely to the millimetre and the car knows exactly where it is and how to deal with things and so on. The other way is to get the car to adapt to the environment and that's the approach that Tesla's taking. They've said if you look at the road environment now it's all done on visual.
It's all everything you can see the car has to respond to that basically so they're getting their cars to work purely off cameras. So how do I make it work? Well you know I don't know it's there's a heck of a lot of work to do and take a country like Australia. It's impossible to go on map every centimeter of Australia and say okay we'll get that absolutely perfect once you get to those remote areas it's a challenge. And a couple weekends are bad rain and suddenly the
quality of the roads is entirely different to what it was last month. Well that's the other thing is potholes. I mean there's plenty of cars now that will do your basic self-driving and so on but none of them will spot a pothole so they'll happily charge straight into one of those and all
of a sudden you've got issues. You know it's amazing what humans do behind the wheel and how much they can process and adjust adapt to and getting a computer to get that right every part of the time is enormous but in terms of who's going to be at fault you know Volvo came out two or three years ago and said when we do driverless cars when we get up to sort of level three or four and we start taking over completely they said we will we will be the ones who who will pay for any issues.
If there's any problems it's our fault but at the moment there's not a carmaker around that says that all the level two driving we've got now you're the one behind the wheel you're the one who has to fill out the insurance forms and so it was your fault. It's interesting the the thing you're saying about the beeping before because level two for me is the uncanny valley of driving. It is a car that is like yes it's smart but then it's thinks it's too smart for its own good it beeps for no
reason a year for a Honda Civic from 1992 when I drive this thing. They can drive you crazy they and sometimes they take over when you do not want them taking over so the technology has a long way to go and I actually think part of the issue here is we've got you know incap the new car
assessment program which is now stipulating carmakers have to have this technology so the carmaker is tick the box and say right we've got Linda Parchew we've got all this other stuff they've actually made sure it works and like it's sure they just tick the box and say yeah we've got it so it does the test but it doesn't do what it needs to out on the open ride and that's the biggest
challenge here is getting it to work 100% of the time. Part of the regulations too say that you know that you can't turn it off and so if you happen to buy a car with a lane departure you know guidance system where it beeps even when you're definitely inside the lane dammit then yeah you're just going to have to put up with those beeps or every time you get in the car you're going to have to remember how to turn it off. Yeah you can turn them off but you've got to do it every time you get
in the car. It's a fascinating experiment between my car is smarter but also it's so dumb
and it's a little bit like an analogy for the wider autonomous driving environment. I think we have seen some interesting trials involving smart infrastructure so like you know smart streetlights where they communicate with the car for instance and those sorts of things and that can potentially make it smarter but that's a really wide rollout that's going to be involved in that and then you've got to make sure that you know your traffic lights are also have a decent internet connection
and good luck being involved with that. There's just so many things involved but at the same time the car manufacturers can see this opportunity where cars can drive themselves and they're not going to get distracted by text messages or noisy kids in the car and they're not going to get drunk and go out you know the wrong time on a on a particular night. There's so much promise but we're just not
there yet. Download the show is what you're listening to we are only a few minutes away from the end but just before we go the ACC has officially become the nation's first state or territory to announce a date for the end of petrol and diesel vehicle sales that is the year 2035. How far for the rest of us is that actually going to happen Jim? I'm so looking forward to whether it does or it
doesn't because you see so many predictions either way. I would say that the ACT isn't exactly alone in this so we've got there's about seven countries who've said 2030 so five years earlier and there's another 13 countries who've said 2035 as well. I think that there will be a natural progression towards electric vehicles over time when people realise you can hone off the lights
with them really well. I didn't say that out loud. No, didn't say it wrong. I don't need any competition but I think that we will see like a natural progression towards this and maybe by 2035 it won't be such a big deal. However there are a lot of people who right now you say that too and it makes them cringe and very scared and talk about their diesel. You it's quite a lot and so it's going to be a potentially controversial time but hopefully by then we're far more progressed towards this goal
and maybe it won't mean quite as much. Yeah that's right. I think it'll end up being a natural thing as you say it's almost like landline phones. You don't have to put an end date on them because most people go hang on those alternatives. I'll just get a mobile or a smart phone. People will
start realising that they do have benefits. They do have advantages and I think most of the populations not in that boat yet but give them another five years of going in their mates cars and seeing how they work and suddenly they'll say hang on a minute these things are actually all right. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Toby Hagen, editor of EV Central. It was an absolute pleasure to have you on the studio. Thank you so much. Pleasure. And Jennifer Dudley Nicholson,
future economies reporter with the AAP and serial quiz show past. Thank you so much for being on download this show again. Bless you, that was a correct answer. I will catch you next week for another episode of Download this Show. I'm Mark Vannell. Goodbye. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.