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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

That's too bad. At first sight NZ has great geography for mass scale EV adoption. Temperate climate and distances not exceeding 1000km. Why are they flopping this much? Are there no significant savings to be had by switching away from gas to electric propulsion in NZ? I'd love to hear some Kiwis comment on this situation.

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I wouldn't be surprised if new National government has been heavily lobbied by Toyota to push hybrids instead of EVs. Introduction of Road user charges means EV or PHEV owners frequently pay more for road use than hybrid owners.

They already succumb to tobacco lobby pressures and might even offer tax breaks for tobacco's new products when plan was to be smokefree soon.

The new scheme is significantly worse for PHEVs. They have to pay road user charges (a per mile cost, usually limited to vehicles like EVs that don't pay gasoline tax) but they also have to pay the gasoline tax.

This is the new government reversing some of the things the previous government brought in.

I believe NZ EV buyers will be people buying to commute within a city or town. Most EV purchases are secondhand imports from Japan with limited mileage. While you do see EVs out in the wild, they will generally only be the new ones (Teslas, BYDS mainly) as there are not many places to charge outside of a city.

> Most EV purchases are secondhand imports from Japan with limited mileage

While Leaf is still super popular, most are actually new cars - mostly chinese and Tesla's.

> there are not many places to charge outside of a city

There are quite a bit to the point that owning old Leafs is feasible.

When I visited the South Island last year and rented a (gasoline) car I was struck by how little infrastructure there was even in the towns. And on the freeways there was almost nothing by the side of the road between towns every 30-50 miles.

Yep the South Island is bigger and less populated. The north island is very suitable for EV’s and there is a strong deployment of EV charger infrastructure.

All in all, north island driving distances are just pretty small. And the roads so windy you need a rest before you’d run out of juice.

Drastically different to Australia where you can drive at 110km/h in a dead straight line for hours on end.

My uninformed take as a Kiwi is that most cars here are second hand imports from Japan, so we need imported EVs from Japan to pick up.

Also, most people dont buy new cars, and the temperate climate means old cars live a long time, so our rate of replacement must be pretty low.

I think you are right here. Among people I know with EVs, they’re predominantly Japanese import Nissan Leafs.

With the clean car rebate, a Tesla Model 3 was comparable to a Toyota Camry, which saw a lot of these added to the fleet.

Any changes in the makeup of Japan’s fleet will eventually flow on to New Zealand.

I'm curious what fast charging standard is going to be standard for where Japanese used cars dominated market. Japan still stick with CHAdeMO for local market despite it's dying outside of Japan. I think it's quite bad for used car export economy.

Many new chargers here still sport chademo plugs

Hardly anyone has the money for a brand new car

Overall car sales in January were actually a bit up from January 2023 - and a bit down from January 2022.

The drop is very specific to EV cars.

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