The head of Australia’s largest car dealership group has dismissed fossil fuel and social media talking points about EV satisfaction, saying that once people shift to electric vehicles, they don’t come back to petrol or diesel cars.
The observation was made by Keith Thornton, the CEO of Eagers Automotive, which says 25 per cent of its sales this last six months have been plug in electrics, and half of all sales if you include hybrids.
Asked at the company’s results briefing this week if the sales momentum would continue, Thornton said it was hard to tell.
“It’s a little bit hard to use what happened over March and April and the fuel crisis period when the Iran conflict first occurred as any sort of extrapolated demand, because it was so extraordinary,” Thornton said.
“We’ve never seen anything like it. The one thing we have observed, though, is that the transition from a fully combustion engine car to a full electric vehicle, and that transition might include a hybrid vehicle, a plug-in hybrid vehicle, and ultimately a full battery electric vehicle, is a one-way street.
“Generally speaking, people transition to a lower emission vehicle and either hybrid and/or plug-in, and we’re not seeing a lot of people who have gone down that path, then selling out and coming back to combustion engine vehicles.
“Once you take a big step change, like has occurred in 2026, along that path towards a more plugged-in or a lower emission powertrain, people have sort of started the journey and it will only be a small fraction that will come back the other way.”
Thornton said new energy vehicles represented just 1 per cent of the market in 2020, and are now the fastest growing segment, and the company is happy it has been able to position itself withs several Chinese manufacturers to take advantage of the transition.
“A great example of positioning the business to win the trend,” he said.
“The NEV upside is significant. One of the drags on the opportunity, not on our performance, but on the opportunity, is at the moment, NEV still has had an overweight percentage of sales through the Novated channels, and the Novated channels are less conducive to allowing trade-ins to be captured. We are rapidly fixing that. That NEV opportunity is significant.”