Australia is much closer to the US than China in terms of public transit and EV infrastructure. In China, now the majority of new car sales are EVs. There are chargers everywhere and much of the time you don't need to drive because any decently sized city has robust and cheap public transit.

Australia isn't as car-dependent as the US but it's honestly not that far off. Perth, for example, is akin to Los Angeles in car dependence as well as cars owned per capita.

> I've never understood Americans and leasing.

It's complicated. It's not strictly better but it's not strictly worse either. It depends on if you want or need to drive a relatively new car vs holding on to a car until it falls apart.

Some will talk down leasing because new cars depreciate the most in the first 2-3 years, which is true. But leasing gives you the option of just handing it back or paying the balloon payment if the car hasn't depreciated as much as predicted (and priced in). This happened in the pandemic when car prices skyrocketed and, for example, used trucks were selling for at or above the MSRP of a new car for the same model because you simply couldn't buy the new one (at or below MSRP).

It's definitely not the density of major Chinese cities, but all major cities in Australia have plenty of EV chargwrs and public transport.

> Australia isn't as car-dependent as the US but it's honestly not that far off. Perth, for example, is akin to Los Angeles in car dependence as well as cars owned per capita.

You've picked the most isolated city in the world as your example, with a heavy lean to FIFO workers and disposable income. But even going with it, Perth has high public transport usage [1] and has halved its costs for patrons in the last year [2]. This was an election promise and important to people.

I'm sorry, but I think you're pulling things out of the air here, what you're saying simply isn't accurate.

1. https://www.pta.wa.gov.au/news/media-statements/public-trans...

2. https://www.wa.gov.au/government/media-statements/Cook%20Lab...

I'm sorry but if you think ANY Australian city has good public transit, it's because you simply haven't been to any city with good public transit. Pick pretty much any major city in SE Asia and compare.

> You've picked the most isolated city in the world as your example

Irrelevant. Public transport is within a city. It doesn't matter if that city is 100km from another city or 3000km.

> with a heavy lean to FIFO workers

FIFO workers account for <3% of Perth's population so irrelevant.

> Perth has high public transport usage

It does not. If someone works full-time or is a student they account for about 400 boardings per year. At 148M annual boardings that's 370,000 people averaged out in a city of 2.3M. And I don't even know how they're accounting for transfers (eg bus to train, ferry to bus or train).

All Australian cities have commuter oriented public transport where the goal is just to go between the CBD and home so that's what most people do. As soon as you want to go anywhere else, you have to go via the city, which kills its usefulness.

Also, all of these cities have substantially grown in recent decades to the point that they have significant public transport deserts. So inner Sydney has relatively OK train support but inner Sydney is horrendously expensive to live in. The majority of Sydney's population will live in Western Sydney now, which by comparison is a desert.

So you'll also find that even when people do use public transport, a lot of them are driving to a train or bus station first.

So, even if you can go into the city for work and you choose to do so, you still have a car because you want to go places that aren't work.

I didn't pick Perth randomly. I picked because I know Perth from back when Padbury was the limit of the city in the north and when Rockingham (let alone Mandurah) were basically separate cities and not just part of a seamless unplanned urban sprawl like it is now. I've known Perth from a time when more than half the suburbs that exist now didn't exist.

But what's clear to me is you simply don't know what good public transport is. Go to New York, even London, a whole bunch of European cities, any major developed city in SE Asia or pretty much any city in China (or even Japan) then get back to me.

LA has a rail system too. And buses. And they go downtown. In spite of that the density and the rates of car ownership and cars per capita are pretty similar to Perth. Or Greater Sydney. Because all of them are heavily car dependent.

Are they very heavily tariffed? You can get electric cars made by Dacia (European), Hyundai (Korean) and BYD (Chinese) for under 20k in Ireland. That’s well under the average cost of a new car (40k); hardly luxury.

(Granted, I assume average distance driven is _way_ higher in Australia than Ireland, which may make shortish-range cars less viable.)

EDIT: Was curious, looked it up.

> The BYD Atto 1 [also known as the Seagull and Dolphin Surf in some markets] is the cheapest electric car in Australia starting from $23,990 plus on-road costs

That’s 13k euro. There is no world in which that is a luxury car.

Whilst it may have an impact and change it, the fact remains currently EVs are significantly above a normal base model new car price in Australia and this has made them a relatively luxury item.

Also for clarity, I am stating it is a luxury item - i.e outside the spending of a normal household, not a luxury car, which has its own definitions in Australia.