MOTORING SERVICE BODIES BUY EV PLAY CHARGEFOX

State motor service bodies and insurers are throwing their financial and political clout behind electric vehicle charging stations, in a move aimed at accelerating Australia’s anaemic rollout of EVs.

A company owned by a group of motoring service bodies and insurers has bought electric vehicle charging infrastructure company Chargefox in a deal that values it at $56 million, powering ambitions to roll out 5000 new charging plugs by 2025.

Chargefox chief executive Marty Andrews said the buyout recognised Australia was at a “tipping point” in its electric vehicle take-up and more favourable policies under the Albanese government are expected to boost sales, which currently number only tens of thousands annually.

AMS is a company owned by motoring clubs and insurers across the nation, including NRMA and the Royal Automobile Clubs of Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

“We’re now on an exponential growth curve,” Mr Andrews said. “So we need to keep up with infrastructure to support EV uptake and to achieve that we needed a big capital injection.”
Chargefox has built a network of 1000 plugs in Australia and New Zealand – a handful of which are rapid chargers – since Mr Andrews and co-founders Tim Washington and Mark Wells set up the company in 2017.

But he said it was getting harder to expand the network fast enough to keep up with demand, hence the takeover and capital injection from Australian Motoring Services.

AMS is owned by motoring clubs and insurers across the nation, including NRMA and the Royal Automobile Clubs of Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

AMS was already a shareholder in Chargefox, and has bought out the rest of the company it did not own.
AMS chief executive Micheal Reed said it had a mutual goal with Chargefox to “reduce road transport emissions to zero and support the growing community of EV drivers”.

“We continue to see a large number of EV’s on the road and the number of Australians who are considering purchasing an EV in the future is growing year-on-year,” Mr Reed said.
“Combined, we’ll have greater power and opportunity to deliver infrastructure that Australians need to increase the uptake of EVs and therefore reduce road transport emissions.“

Mr Andrews believed the clout and lobbying power of AMS and its shareholders would also help convince governments to subsidise charging stations in rural and remote areas where it is not commercially viable to build currently.

“You need that to get the regional places going with EVs too.“
He stressed state governments were supportive of the EV market and that the new federal Labor government had some more forward-thinking policies aimed at boosting electric vehicle take-up, some of which came into effect on July 1.

The Albanese government has exempted some EVs from overseas import tariffs and fringe benefits taxes, which apply to vehicles provided to staff by their employers. These exemptions will apply only to EVs sold below the luxury car tax threshold – $79,659 this financial year – for fuel-efficient cars.
The former Coalition government campaigned against Labor’s pro-EV policies in 2019, claiming they would wreck the weekend.

A report from online asset finance broker Savvy found local EVs made up just 1.6 per cent of all new vehicle registrations last year. Although this was well up on 2020, it was still far below the global average of 9 per cent.

Mr Andrews said the expansion of the Chargefox network would help ease the psychological barrier for consumers concerned about how they would charge their EV if they were to purchase one.
“You need to keep the balance between the EVs and the infrastructure right because we can’t be successful if there aren’t any EVs on the road and there won’t be any EVs on the road if there aren’t many charging stations,” he said.

Mr Andrews was “very positive and confident” about the future of EVs in Australia, saying the election of climate-focused teal independents and more supportive policy settings would drive demand.