Which states buy the most electric cars? EV sales in Australia broken down by state for 2022

Last year saw a lot of change in the electric car space for Australia, with the most notable being the changeover at Federal and many state levels to a new government that puts EVs as a high priority, and has gradually introduced incentives and plans to improve electric and hybrid car uptake.

The representative body for the Australian automotive industry, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) has this year begun tracking electrified vehicle sales more closely and started with a summary of 2022’s data.

It allows us to see not only which states have bought the most electric cars, but which have the highest percentage of EV uptake compared to their total new car sales.

It should be noted that sales lifted massively after the new financial year kicked off - coinciding with the introduction of EV rebates for new buyers in some states and announcements from the Federal government.

In the three most populous states, Victoria, NSW and Queensland, rebates that were mostly introduced around the middle of 2022 had the strongest showing in terms of changing EV buying habits.

In Queensland, EVs jumped from 0.97 per cent of new cars bought to 4.28 between Q2 and Q3. In Victoria, it went from 1.04 to 4.41 per cent. NSW also saw a similar jump, 1.0 per cent to 4.88.

But in the territory with the nation’s capital, EV buying went up from its already comparatively healthy 3.55 per cent to 12.71 in Q3.

It was indeed the ACT that topped the nation, by more than half the next closest state, in terms of EV uptake as a percentage of its new car market with almost eight per cent of cars sold being fully electric.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the larger, more sparsely populated states have the lower uptakes, with the NT only recording 68 sales of EVs in 2022, less than one per cent of its total market for the year.

Of course, the Tesla Model 3 was the most popular new EV sold last year, amassing 10,877 new registrations, followed by the Model Y (8717), BYD Atto 3 (2113), Polestar 2 (1524) and MG ZS EV (1119).

	Total vehicle sales	Total EV sales	EVs as percent of state total sales	Percent of national total sales	Percent of national EV sales
ACT	16,228	1280	7.89%	0.12%	3.83%
VIC	287,314	9496	3.31%	0.88%	28.42%
NSW	338,012	10798	3.19%	1.00%	32.32%
TAS	19,157	571	2.98%	0.05%	1.71%
WA	105,905	3078	2.91%	0.28%	9.21%
QLD	235,591	6696	2.84%	0.62%	20.04%
SA	69,373	1426	2.06%	0.13%	4.27%
NT	9,849	68	0.69%	0.01%	0.20%
Total	1,081,429	33413		Total: 3.09%	100.00%