An unprecedented boom is underway in Australia’s electric vehicle market.
Almost 158,000 electric vehicles (EVs) were sold in the first six months of 2026, according to the Electric Vehicle Council’s latest report, released today. This is more than in all of 2025.
EVs accounted for one in four new cars sold in the first half of 2026, with their market share more than doubling from 12.1% in the first half of 2025 to 25.8% over the same period this year.
This surge has come amid extraordinary fuel price volatility during the US-Iran war, and at a time when Australians have more electric models to choose from than ever before.
But as hundreds of thousands more EVs hit Australian roads, is the necessary charging infrastructure ready to keep them moving?
What’s behind the sales boom?
Of all new cars sold in the first half of 2026, about 17% were fully electric, while another 9% were plug-in hybrids (cars that combine a rechargeable battery with a petrol or diesel engine).
Sales of both types of vehicles have grown remarkably quickly. Compared with the same six months last year, sales of fully electric vehicles rose by about 120%, while plug-in hybrid sales increased by about 112%.
The acceleration in fully electric cars is particularly striking. After a relatively subdued start to 2025, monthly sales climbed sharply through early 2026 and reached a record high in June.
If this trajectory continues, more than 200,000 fully electric vehicles are projected to be sold this year.
Australia also appears to have roughly caught up with the global average for EV uptake, after years of trailing behind.
Consumers are being spoiled for choice
Australians also have far more EVs to choose from. There are now 196 models on the market – 125 fully electric and 71 plug-in hybrids – up from 153 last year.
Importantly, greater choice also means more affordable models and new vehicle types. Chinese manufacturers are increasingly prominent in this more competitive market.
In September, the major Chinese EV manufacturer BYD launched the Atto 1 with a starting price of $19,990, pushing a new EV below the $20,000 mark for the first time.
A second-hand market is also developing, which is potentially widening access to EVs beyond new-car buyers.
Not all vehicles are electrifying at the same pace
Australia’s shift to electric vehicles, however, looks very different depending on what is being driven.
Almost one-third of new buses sold in the first half of 2026 were electric, compared with about 26% of passenger cars.
This makes buses the fastest-electrifying vehicle category in Australia.
At the other end of the spectrum, just 0.6% of new trucks sold in the first half of 2026 were electric.
This isn’t because there are none to buy. Around 30 electric truck models above 4.5 tonnes are now available in Australia. Yet of roughly 35,000 trucks sold in 2025, only about 200 were electric.
Alongside the booming sales, Australia’s charging network is expanding, too.
According to the EV Council’s report, there are now more than 4,200 public charging locations across Australia, containing around 11,600 individual charging points.
Of these, around 1,560 locations offer fast or ultra-fast charging. Over the past year, the number of these locations increased by 18%, while the number of individual charging points at them grew by 31%. Ultra-fast charging points, capable of delivering 100 kW or more, increased by 55%.
However, access remains uneven.
Nationally, there are around 144 fully electric vehicles for every ultra-fast charging point. But this is not uniform – there are 51 in the Northern Territory and 77 in South Australia, compared with more than 200 in Tasmania, Western Australia and the ACT.
And public chargers are only part of the picture. For many EV owners, the easiest and cheapest option is still to plug in at home while the car sits overnight.
But this convenience isn’t available to everyone. Apartment residents and households without off-street parking may have nowhere to plug in, meaning they are dependent on public, workplace or kerbside charging.
The next challenge is access and scale
The speed and scale of surge in EV demand because of the US-Iran war was impossible to foresee even a year ago.
Despite this year’s surge, EVs still make up only a small fraction of Australia’s total vehicle fleet, roughly 3%.
Australia would need around five million fully electric vehicles on the road by 2035 to remain on track to meet the national emissions target.
This means the fully electric fleet would need to grow roughly tenfold from where it stands today, the EV Council report found.
But if this year’s growth continues, two issues will become increasingly important: expanding charging infrastructure, and making convenient charging accessible beyond households with their own parking.
Freight remains an important missing piece. Battery-electric trucks are becoming increasingly technically and economically viable.
Turning their potential into widespread uptake, however, will require high-powered charging at depots and along freight routes. We also need to find ways to fit charging around tightly scheduled freight operations.
Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Over a century ago, Australian geologist Sir Douglas Mawson led a sledging expedition over hundreds of kilometres of ice into a remote part of East Antarctica. The party turned back after the tragic death of a party member. Fellow Australian Cecil Madigan led another group across sea ice into the region before also turning back.
These intrepid explorers never set foot on an ice sheet which may be crucial to our future. Even now, we don’t know anyone who’s been there. It’s time to change that.
This remote region is known as the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, an enormous area of ice covering 1,400 kilometres by 400 kilometres.
The reason it matters is because much of the Wilkes basin sits well below sea level. If all the basin’s ice melted, it would raise sea levels three to four metres, while torrents of meltwater would likely disrupt vital ocean currents and cause major upheaval to marine life and the broader climate.
As we explain in our new review, the region is vulnerable to change. Reconstructions of past warm periods show its ice sheet shrank dramatically when the climate was 2–3°C warmer – conditions we are rapidly approaching.
The ocean is the great enemy of Antarctic ice
If you walked on the Wilkes basin, you wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary – ice as far as the eye could see.
It’s what’s under the ice that matters. The underlying bedrock is up to 2,000 metres below sea level. Subglacial basins are huge ice-filled bowls of rock. Today, the ice is thick enough to keep the ocean out of the basin, but the ocean is always in contact with its edges.
Off East Antarctica, ocean temperatures tend to hover around -1.8°C. That’s cold, but the ice is much colder. Even a small boost to water temperatures due to ocean warming or changing ocean currents means the ice at the edge of Wilkes basin will melt more quickly and then flow faster into the ocean.
Some of the bedrock of the Wilkes basin slopes deeper as you move away from the ocean. As the ice retreats, the ocean can wash against more ice, melting it faster. At some point, the retreat of the ice down this slope will become self-sustaining and the melting unstoppable.
Signs of change
Much of the data we do have on the Wilkes basin comes from aircraft using ice penetrating radar. This revealed the basin’s shape and made clear its vulnerability. Satellite observations of the basin captured East Antarctica’s first known collapse of a fringing ice shelf into the ocean in the 1970s or 1980s.
But there’s much more we don’t know. We don’t know the pathways warm ocean water can use to access the ice. To understand this, we need to map the shape of the ocean floor. We also lack data on changing ocean temperatures. Without this data, we can’t reliably project how fast the ice will melt.
By contrast, we know much more about the Thwaites Glacier, another high-risk region of Antarctica. That’s because it’s been the focus of large international research programs for years.
An animation of the flow of ice within the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and the bedrock beneath the ice that makes it vulnerable.
Lessons from the deep past
During the Pliocene period three million years ago, global air temperatures were 2–3°C warmer than the modern pre-industrial period. Melting ice sheets retreated hundreds of kilometres inland, while global sea levels were 6–23 metres higher. Seafloor sediments show this dramatically altered Antarctica’s shape.
This is worrying, as the world is likely to reach a similar level of warming by the end of the century.
Future projections show this will lead to accelerating melting and the dramatic retreat of the Wilkes basin ice sheet. What we don’t know is the timeframe.
This visualisation shows the current ice sheet of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin ice sheet (left) and a reconstruction of the ice sheet during the warm Pliocene period (right).Author supplied, CC BY-NC
Why is it so hard to get eyes on the ice?
The Wilkes Subglacial Basin is among the least observed places on Earth.
That’s not due to its remoteness – it’s relatively close to Australia. Hobart residents are closer to its major glaciers than they are to Darwin. It’s due to the fact the basin is protected by a frozen ocean – unusually thick, persistent and compacted sea ice.
While satellite images can give some data, satellites cannot see through ice or oceans. Scientists will need to go there in person.
It won’t be easy. Accessing the Wilkes basin by sea would be impossible in anything less than the most capable ice breakers. No ship has ever been within 150 km of the Cook Glacier, one of the major Wilkes basin glaciers.
Even if an expedition gains access to some areas, scientists will have to use robotic sensors to comprehensively map the ocean conditions and the seafloor.
The good news is, the Wilkes basin is becoming reachable.
Australia, New Zealand and other Antarctic nations are now better able to traverse long distances to deliver fuel for airborne surveys and support remote field camps.
New technologies make it possible to drill more than three kilometres down to the bottom of the basin’s ice and take samples from the sediments and bedrock beneath.
Any remnants of ancient ocean species in the sediment can be used to trace how far and how quickly the ice retreated during warm periods when the ocean entered the Wilkes basin.
Unfinished business
Scientists once thought Antarctica would take centuries to change. But that was too hopeful. Land ice is melting faster, sea ice is shrinking and the floating glaciers known as ice shelves are melting faster from beneath.
Doing fieldwork on the Wilkes basin will require a years-long multinational effort across oceans and land.
But we cannot wait another century to understand the threat posed by this enormous reservoir of ice.
Matt King receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Government's Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, CSIRO, and ACCESS-NRI.
Nancy A.N. Bertler receives funding from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Victoria University of Wellington, Earth Sciences New Zealand, and the Royal Society of New Zealand.
The Town of Cambridge, home of Perth’s popular City Beach, will have to foot the bill for the heavy machinery and labour needed to take the whale carcass to landfill.
In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, crops have been killed by drought and frost.
Severe frosts have destroyed food crops such as taro, sweet potato, bananas and sugarcane, leaving some local communities scrambling for food.
El Niño is producing similar conditions as previous frosts – including those of 1972, 1997–98 and 2015–16 – that left thousands of Papua New Guineans without food and water.
This may seem like a faraway, albeit worrying, problem for those in Australia. After all, we typically talk about climate change through the lens of heat and drought.
But for Australian farmers, frost risk is a growing concern. This is particularly true as the strengthening El Niño – a naturally occurring weather phenomenon that drives variations in temperature and winds across the Pacific – threatens to bring increasingly fierce and frequent frosts to farming regions.
How frost forms
Radiation frost, commonly known as frost, typically forms after a cold, clear and windless night.
Clear skies, rather than cloudy ones, allow more heat to be released into the atmosphere. This causes the temperature of the soil and air to drop. Dry conditions can speed up the cooling process because parched soils store less daytime heat. While moist soil can retain more warmth and buffer the effects of subzero temperatures, it can’t completely protect crops or plants from severe frosts.
Cold air is generally heavier than warmer air, meaning dense cold air flows into valleys and other low-lying areas. These are known as frost hollows. Calm conditions stop this cold air moving or mixing with warmer winds.
Chilly temperatures can indicate when frost may strike. Depending on where you are, if the minimum forecast temperature is 3°C or below, you could be in for a frost. This is because the ground can drop below 0°C even when the official air temperature is higher.
In cereal crops, such as wheat, barley and oats, the biggest risk is reproductive damage. During the process of flowering, crops produce delicate reproductive structures that together form the grains we eat and feed to livestock.
If frost hits during flowering, the freezing temperatures can kill these parts of the plant, potentially wiping out an entire crop in one night. This can leave farmers without enough grain to sell and then cover the cost of growing that crop.
The extent of damage depends on various factors, including the timing, length and severity of a frost. However, growers can reduce their frost risk by selecting crop varieties that flower outside the main frost window. Researchers are also working to identify genes that could make future varieties less susceptible to frost. However, none of these traits make a crop immune to freezing temperatures.
For Australian farmers, severe frosts are a growing concern.
The Birchip Cropping Group, Australia’s biggest farmer-led agricultural research organisation, reported in August that northwest Victorian crops were on track for an impressive harvest after an unusually wet start to winter.
However, growers immediately turned their attention to potential risks – particularly damaging frost. Their worries were well-founded, with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology issuing multiple frost warnings across the country. Some farmers in the southern Mallee have reported minor crop damage and at Wickepin North in Western Australia. But thankfully this year, most Australian growers appear to have dodged the frost bullet.
For Australian farmers, staying informed is key. To protect their crops and businesses from the effects of frost, grain growers can identify potential frost hollows, choose crop varieties that flower at different times, and keep an eye on short-term weather warnings. They should also check their paddocks after a night of cold, clear weather.
Governments in Australia and across the Pacific can support farmers by funding local weather stations. They should also continue to invest in crop research to identify varieties that are more resistant to frost, as well as drought and extreme heat.
Papua New Guinea’s mountain communities are struggling to salvage what’s left of their crops. Australian farmers can avoid the worst effects of frost, but only if the government continues to fund the forecasting services and research they urgently need.
