Warren Wilmot: BYD New Zealand General Manager on electric vehicle registrations increasing 165% in the June quarter
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What recent trends are seen in electric vehicle sales?
New data on what cars and how many cars we're buying. Two stories here. Story one, sales overall are up 19% for Q2, so that's good. Story two, EVs and plug-ins are up 165%, so they've now got a record 38% slice of the market. Warren Wilmot is BYD's general manager in this country. He's with us.
How did historical fuel crises influence car buying behavior?
Warren, morning. Good morning, Mike. You're loving life?
You could say that. I think Mr. Trump's the very best EV salesman in history at the moment, so he's done great things.
Do you reckon the war's been permanently good for EV sales? In other words, has this been a tipping point?
Look, I think we've seen it before in history. In the 1970s, we had a fuel crisis, and it switched the way consumers were buying large American cars like Fords and Holdens into small Japanese cars, and that was really what pushed the Japanese car industry ahead. And I think that's what we've started to see with EVs, and people are starting to see the benefit. And couple that with the huge leaps in technology we've got happening with EVs. A car is no longer a car. People are now seeing the benefit to switching to an electrified product.
Yeah. Are you transferring people or electric going to electric?
No, we're definitely seeing people switching to either a super hybrid or electric. The whole increased fuel price, what it did, people weren't buying a new EV back in March because of the cost of fuel. They were buying it because they thought that perhaps the fuel might run out or they might have careless days. And buying an EV or an electrified product has just given them that security and freedom.
Yeah. What's your split? Because the media haven't learned to conflate. I see these as two separate things. A plug-in's not a bev. What's the split?
At the moment it's about 50-50, but the sales data is quite skewed. You might have seen a big increase in the last couple of months, but we have been limited here in New Zealand about the amount of stock that we've got coming in. 716 cars last month. 420 of those were pure electric. The rest were our superhybrids. But I couldn't get certain models into New Zealand. We're very, very restricted. I mean, the fact of the matter is I could have sold three or four times the amount of cars we had.
See, that's interesting. I thought that one of the advantages was China happened to have just shed loads full of cars standing by ready to go. Is that not the case?
Well, the issue's not production. The issue's actually shipping. So, Mike, if you wanted to buy 10,000 cars, I can have them built within 30 days and ready to ship. But New Zealand is not an attractive place for what we call roll-on, roll-off shipping carriers to come. There's only really two regular boats down here. And what we're seeing is Australian car companies are now loading up these boats with cars, bringing them to New Zealand and then trans-shipping them back over to Australia. Because the Australian market, what we're seeing in New Zealand, is not even anything remotely what we're seeing in Australia. It's huge over there.
Okay. What's the gap to petrol? Is that closing? In other words, EVs used to be more expensive than petrol. Is that closing?
Yeah, absolutely. We've now got a car that's just over $30,000, and it gives you 220km range, which in Auckland, that's about seven hours worth of driving all around Auckland. But we're seeing price parity. That's going to happen even further. But at the back end, when you resell value, that's where we're seeing the real story come now.
What factors are driving the shift to electric vehicles now?
We first bought an Atto 2 in 2022. Atto's a small car. Yeah, sorry, Atto 3, a small car, right?
Yeah.
Those cars now, four years old, people are trying to sell them on trading for about $40,000 with 50,000, 60,000 Ks on them, and they're $49,990 new. So resale value for EVs has really, really increased.
What are they buying? Are they buying $30,000 and $40,000 cars, or $70,000 or $80,000 cars, generally?
Look, we're seeing it right across the range, and that's because we now have a range of cars for every part of the market, so... Our little small urban cars, we sold just over 100 Aero 1s, but we've also got a very big luxury 7-seater called the C-Line 8, and we're selling those as well.
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