Greig Epps: Imported Motor Vehicle Industry CEO on the drop in EV sales in New Zealand

The New Zealand electric vehicle market has run out of charge.

New Motor Industry Association data shows just one in eleven new vehicle sales are electric, compared to last year where it was one in every four.

Imported Motor Vehicle Industry chief executive Greig Epps says it's left many importers with excess stock.

However, he says hybrid sales, on the other hand, continue to stay strong.

"43 to 45 percent of the used imports that we're bringing in this year have been hybrids. Hybrids are a really solid technology."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
New stats on our EV market the show they can
barely give them away these days. News figures suggest this
year just one and eleven cars are electric, that includes hybrids.
By the way, which I'll get to this is left
important stuck with a lot of stock they can't move,
the important motor vehicle industry boss Greg Epps as well.
There's Greg morting to you.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
I think, Mike, how's it going very well?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Indeed, the car market generally versus the EV market specifically,
can we differentiate the two out or not? Really?

Speaker 1 (00:27):
This year? No, not really, Mike. It's been it's been
pretty hard across the board. You know. Imports have been
down this year, they're down from from last year, and
a lot of a lot of the guys in the
industry are really just hanging on.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, the lack of difference. This is my bug bear
because I'm a car guy. So when I see reportage
of the so called electric vehicles, electric to me is
a BEV. Everything else is a hybrid, and they've got
to be delineated out, don't they, Because a hybrid is
a completely different experience from a bear, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
It is? What the government's done is they've said anything
that plugs in. So you have your beds, as you say,
your battery electrics, and then you've got your plug in hybrids.
Sere the ones that have both the petrol engine and
a battery. And then you have your petrol hybrid, which
is the first self contained system that is just you

(01:19):
put petrol of it, but it has the regender battery.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Is the plug or the architecture required to plug something in?
Is that the hindrance or not.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
It's a bunch of things I think that really have
put us in a in a bad spot here. One
it's been the economy, it is the infrastructure, it is
the cost of putting in. For example, you can do
the trickle recharge and just plug into your normal wall socket,

(01:50):
but that's that's not really the best way to do it.
So people are really encouraged to put in the charging
ports those sorts of things. And then there's just the
charging across the country, where while that's been built out
pretty well over the last few years, where we nowhere
near that sort of coverage of charging to make people

(02:12):
feel comfortable about using evs all the time.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
And then we got the international issue with any number
of manufacturers now saying what's we got ahead of ourselves.
That sends a message. But I'm sitting there thinking maybe
maybe not, and I suddenly see four evolvo or whatever,
going yeah, no, it's not quite what we thought it was.
I'm going to go, oh, well, I won't worry then,
aren't I.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, you see, everyone's actually heading to hybrids now. About
forty three forty five percent of the used imports that
we're bringing in this year have been hybrids. Hybrids are
really solid technology that've been around. They reduce carbon output
by about half of the normal vehicle. And I think

(02:51):
EV's just just weren't there. You know, we went into evs.
They're a great solution for the future, but the world
wasn't ready to supply US evs at a cost that
New Zealand would afford.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Couldn't agree more well done, Greg, appreciate it very much.
Greg IPPs the FI at five hundred E. They pause
production of that in Europe. That's the latest announcement from
Fiat over the weekend. Stillantus owned Fiat. They can't sell them,
so they've stopped making them for now, and when they
can sell them, they'll presumably restart making.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Them for more. From the mic Asking Breakfast.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
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