LPG! Now you have got me started!
Our Government, in it's wisdom. allows companies to export billions of Litres of LNG overseas for as little as a cent or two a litre. That is the most shocking criminal exploitation I have ever heard of. Then they say we don't have enough gas for domestic use, so we must Frack our land and ruin our most precious water resources to get more for domestic use, and so another multinational company can charge us exorbitant amounts for destorying our agricultural land and potential.
We should have reserved a big chunk of that NG for domestic use and changed to running most of our road fleet on LPG 30 years ago to rid us of reliance on imported petrol. Natural Gas is readily converted to LPG, but many vehicles can be converted to run on NG directly from the domestic supply.
Of course, there are many vested interestes that don't like that idea, including any governments addicted to Fuel excise.
Unfortunately, the window for converting to LPG has well and truly passed us by due to Government incompetence. And this just when liquid LPG fuel injection technology for cars has started to mature (catch up with efficiency gains made by injected petrol cars).
A change to electric powered cars is going to rely on a serious commitment from governments for enabling legislation and incentives for the consumer and industry. But is is hard to see any govenment that is addicted to fuel tax wanting to rush into it.
I am pretty sure electric will happen anyhow, but it will be very slow and be driven by outside forces, overseas legislation and industry, and Australia will be severely disadvantaged in the long term, as usual, with no domestic industry. We will again be hostage to overseas interests and developments.
I see a company is trying to gear up to build electric cars in Australia. Unfortunately, they won't succeed without a
lot of government driven incentives and investment. The rules of mass production (huge volume = low costs) still applies too, like it did with Holden/Ford/Toyota. To simplify, if it costs $100,000,000 to build a factory to produce cars, and you build 1000 cars, the capital cost for each car is $100,000,
before labout and materials costs. But if you can build 1,000,000 cars, the capital cost is $100 dollars per car. That is purly and simply, why the Australian car industry died and has almost nothing to do with Australian Labour costs. We could not make and sell enough cars for them to be cheap enough to compete, simple!.
We need visionary government with long term commitment to Australia's best interests, not short term personal and political gain.
Unfortunately, such a government is a Unicorn.
Meanwhile, I will continue to travel the land in my 18 year old 'Bitsaremissin' petrol van with 485,000Km on the clock that costs me nothing in depreciation, but only normal running costs, and sucks up 13-14L of petrol every 100Km. And there is still no economic incentive for me to change it to run on LPG or buy into electric.
