New emissions laws bring Australia up to date
BUYING ADVICE
NEW EMISSIONS LAWS BRING AUSTRALIA UP TO DATE
Long overdue emissions targets are not as evil as their critics have been shouting.
Australia’s new National Vehicle Emissions Standard (NVES) has been vilified by some self-interested parties, but it doesn’t no more than bring Australia kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Russia is now the only country in the world without a vehicle emissions standard.
If you believe the rhetoric from anti-emissions-control voices – including some 4WD makers – you’d believe that Australia has adopted a radical stance, but it’s easy to verify that the NVES is no harsher than any other international regulation.
We won’t bore you with the details of the legislation, but, in essence, it’s a law that applies successively heavier fines on a vehicle maker who fails to achieve an average grams of CO2 per kilometre across its entire range of vehicles it sells per annum in Australia. The details are available here:
In the case of the 4WDs that a most of us buy for off-roading – body-on-frame wagons and utes – that target started at 210g/km for 2025 and was set to decrease to only 110g/km by 2029. No 4WD diesel ute or wagon can meet the 2025 target, let alone the 2029 one.
However, it’s important to note that the assessment is done across a maker’s entire vehicle range that it sells in a year, including passenger cars, so the CO2 output of a diesel ute that may emit up to 280g/km can be balanced by selling a couple of fully-electric cars that have no tailpipe emissions at all. The average CO2 emissions across those three vehicles are: 280g/km ÷ 3 = 94g/km.
In between straight petrol land diesel vehicles are hybrids – particularly plug-in (PHEV) types. For example, the 2025 Ford Ranger PHEV produced a claimed 66g/km of CO2 and that let it easily meet the 2025-2029 targets.
Nine years ago we forecast that PHEVs would become the thing in the Australian real-4WD world and that prediction bore retail evidence in late 2024, with the release of the BYD Shark ute.
GWM Cannon Alpha PHEV
Another alternative that 4WD makers have is to buy carbon credits from makers who have low-emitting vehicles. An example is Tesla that has made almost as much out of selling credits to combustion-vehicle makers as it has from new car sales. The gradual electrification of the world’s new vehicle manufacturing has reduced that demand, which is one reason why Tesla’s share price has been declining. Of course, Musk’s antics haven’t exactly helped, either!
The most anti-NVES noise has come from vehicle makers who’ve had their collective heads in the sand for the past five years, constantly lobbying for more lenient emissions rules, rather than investing that time and money into making modern products.
Given Nissan’s now-vanished Leaf electric-car lead and Toyota’s dominance of the petrol/hybrid car market, it’s unbelievable that both of them were out-manoeuvred by the Chinese, in the production of PHEV 4WDs.
The Chinese 4WD ‘invasion’ was encouraged by traditional 4WD brands’ denial of what was happening and BYD, LDV, GWM and JAC were quick to capitalise.
All the Chinese brands have balanced fleets of zero- or low-emissions vehicles and conventional petrol and diesel products, so they can easily juggle sales to ensure NVES compliance for the rest of the decade.
When Chinese brands dominate the Australian 4WD market in the next few years it will remind the grey-haired brigade of the days when USA and Pommy 4WDs were displaced in a relatively short period by better designed and made Japanese products. As was the case with US- and UK-based makers, the Japanese brands will have only themselves to blame.
Advertisements
