“As part of the $2.1 billion the Morrison Government has committed to future fuel and vehicle technologies,we are supporting domestic battery electric vehicle manufacturing and the infrastructure that will allow Australian motorists to charge or re-fuel across urban and regional Australia,” the spokesman said in a statement.
Tritium’s decision to expand in the US comes after Biden set an ambitious target for half the vehicles sold in the United States be electric or plug-in hybrids by 2030.
However,to achieve this goal,the White House doesn’t just require more Americans to switch from gas-guzzling cars - it also requires a network of hundreds of thousands of charging stations.
Until now,Tritium’s biggest factory was in Brisbane,making about 5000 units a year. But after the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed Congress,setting aside $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations,shifting to the US was a no-brainer because it instantly led to a shift in the company’s revenue mix,Hunter said.
At the start of last year,70 per cent of the company’s revenue came from Europe and only 20 per cent came from the US,with the remaining 10 per cent from the Asia Pacific. But by the end of last year,after the bill had passed,43 per cent of the company’s revenue mix was coming from North America,43 per cent Europe and 14 per cent from the Asia Pacific.
”President Biden’s transport electrification policies have contributed to enormous demand for Tritium’s products here in the US - and that directly led us to pivot and change our global manufacturing strategy,” Hunter said earlier during the announcement at the White House.
Today’s announcement was painted as win for the US President who has made rebuilding American manufacturing a central plan of his economic agenda,including pushing for billions of dollars of public and private investments in the electric vehicle industry.
In addition to wanting half of all vehicles on the road to be zero-emission vehicles by 2030,Biden’s plan also involves building a highway network of 500,000 charging stations across the US and converting an estimated 600,000 of its government fleet to alternative fuels.
Figures from the Environment America Research and Policy Centre show that more than 300,000 plug-in vehicles were sold in 2019,up from virtually none just a decade earlier.
But according to the Alternative Fuels Data Centre,there are only about 46,000 publicly available charging stations across the US and industry experts have previously estimated there would need to be at least five to 10 times that rate for the President to achieve his targets.
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Nonetheless,Hunter said she believed Biden’s goals could be achieved. Like Australia,she said,North America had “vast amounts of space in the middle” in places such as the midwest,Arizona,Texas and Nebraska,which were well suited to trucks rather than sedans and sports cars.
But there was not much price disparity between electric vehicles and internal combustion vehicles,she said,which meant that switching was relatively easy.
“And then you have $7.5 billion to deal with the infrastructure roll out,” she said. “I do think (Biden’s goal) is realistic and achievable.”
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