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Australia has a very, very competitive new car market.
Our total new car sales each year is dwarfed by other nations around the world, but there are only a handful of countries where there’s as much choice for new car buyers as here.
Nations that have their own automotive manufacturers can be pretty patriotic, so places like Korea or France are full of Korean and French cars — respectively, of course.
If you’re a car brand in Australia, you’ve got another manufacturer nipping at your heels on the sales charts in any given month. Except for you, Toyota.
We’re still catching up when it comes to electrification in some ways, but hybrid power has been well and truly embraced here in Australia.
There are still plenty of hybrid models that, for one reason or another, manufacturers deem unsuitable for Australia.
Risk-averse Euro brands, low-volume cars for other markets, or cars that just don’t seem to suit Aussie tastes, here are a handful of the hybrids we miss out on.
Mazda isn’t afraid of decision paralysis.
Some brands opt to streamline their line-ups in the interest of cost-saving or even simplicity, Mazda Australia will take just about everything it can get its hands on. As recently as October 2024, Mazda Australia Managing Director Vinesh Bhindi told CarsGuide that as long as a model is available and there’s a market for it, it’ll be on offer.
“When you look at how Mazda Australia has operated, we've got the broadest range of products from the Mazda portfolio. So we're not shy on getting products that could be available to us,” he said.
So the fact there’s no Mazda CX-50 hybrid SUV here in Australia is a little disappointing, then.
But it’s not Australia’s fault.
The SUV, which borrows a 2.5-litre petrol four-cylinder engine and battery from the Toyota RAV4, is built with the steering wheel on the ‘wrong’ side to be sold in North America and China.
Australia’s an important market for Mazda globally, but in the past we’ve proven we can’t be trusted with anything too out of the ordinary when Mazda offers it up - remember the MX-30 EV? Mazda Australia pulled the plug on that in late 2023, with not many more than its initial allocation of 100 units having been shifted.
BMW and Mercedes have had a very hot and cold relationship with hybrids and plug-ins — are their buyers who are conservative, or the product planners?
Given the popularity of the BMW 3 Series — it’s second in the premium mid-size sedan category behind the Tesla Model 3 — it seems a little odd that BMW doesn’t offer the 330e plug-in hybrid available overseas.
The 3 Series has overtaken the Mercedes-Benz C-Class to lead the traditional premium sedan space in Australia, another BMW model has also outsold the once-dominant Benz — the BMW i4 electric Gran Coupe.
At the beginning of 2024, BMW Australia said it would focus more on the i4 when it comes to electrification at the same time as it culled the 330e from its line-up.
That’s not to say the plug-in hybrid sedan won’t return. BMW Australia told CarsGuide at the December launch of the new 1 Series that electrification is picking up and looking strong. But time will tell whether the plug-in 330e is too niche for our market.
In an update for the model overseas this year, the 330e gained a larger 19.5kWh battery for a claimed electric-only driving range of between 85km and 101km, up from the 12kWh and 57km before.
That could be the uptick in ability it needed to be more appealing here.
Internationally, Renault’s got hybrids deluxe on offer - pretty much everything on offer in its home nation is electric or hybrid if you want it as such — but it’s quite the opposite here.
The French brand offers about 30 variants across several models, but none of them hybrid.
But despite hybrids making up about 14 per cent of total new vehicle sales in Australia (and higher when you exclude commercial vehicles), Renault Australia said hybrid just isn’t right for it yet in terms of market positioning.
“We are in a market where people are looking for value as opposed to looking for aspiration, so to speak. So to add cost into that, which a hybrid drivetrain would do, it’s probably not the right moment,” Renault Australia General Manager Glen Sealey told CarsGuide in September 2024.
The Captur, Arkana, even little Clio, are available as hybrids in Europe, and there’s a Grand Koleos available with hybrid power for Korea. But when it comes to electrification, the Renault Megane E-Tech ‘small SUV’ and Kangoo E-Tech small van are the only offerings, both fully electric.
Will Renault’s hybrids show up in the future? Maybe, but for now, the focus is on full-EV.
“So for us full electrification is probably more of a priority than hybrid,” said Sealey.
“That’s not to say we won’t do hybrids, we’ve just, today, got a very efficient engine in that 1.3-litre engine that’s better than some hybrids out there.”
One of the most popular cars in the world since being introduced in 1974 is a little different now than it was back then — but not much.
In Australia, the plug-in hybrid Golf offered overseas is almost unheard of, as petrol-powered variants make up the entirety of the iconic hatchback’s sales here.
In eHybrid guise the Golf makes 150kW thanks to a 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine and electric motor driving the front wheels - it’s about the same as a Golf GTI’s outputs from just a couple of generations ago. But there’s a 200kW GTE version too, which is well into hot hatch territory.
Thanks to a 19.7kWh battery, the eHybrid can travel a claimed 143km under EV power, and the GTE a still-impressive 131km. DC charging up to 50kW should also mean they can be charged relatively quickly.
It sounds like a good time, but the issue is that only 681 plug-in hybrid passenger vehicles (non commercial or SUV) have been sold in Australia to the end of November out of the 175,758 total passenger cars sold in that time.
If it was an SUV — 17,272 PHEVs out of a total 577,077 — maybe it would have a better chance. Alas.
Speaking of which, the RAV4 hybrid is consistently one of Australia’s most popular cars. But there’s an even more electrified version that North America is keeping from us.
You have probably heard of the Toyota RAV4 Prime, which offers up about 70km of EV driving thanks to an 18.1-kWh battery, which powers three electric motors to aid the familiar 2.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine.
It has a claimed fuel consumption of about 2.5L/100km, converted from the EPA’s rating of 94MPGe in the USA, which beats the standard hybrid’s 4.8L/100km claim here under WLTP testing.
Mitsubishi’s got a strong grasp on the PHEV thing here in Australia, and even though Toyota’s said numerous times it wants to offer a ‘multi-pathway’ approach to decarbonisation for its customers (i.e., not just going all-electric) there are no Toyota PHEVs currently on offer.
The high price and low uptake of the bZ4X electric car might have given the brand a spook when it comes to offering up new tech at a higher price, but early in 2024 Toyota did flag an intention to dive into plug-in hybrids.
"I think hybrids and plug-in hybrids are going to be the flavour of the month over the next two years," Toyota Australia's sales and marketing chief, Sean Hanley, told CarsGuide in January 2024.
It’s been about a year since then, so will RAV4 Prime news hit our shores in the next 12 months?
Of course, there are plenty more hybrids revealed during the course of 2024 (or even earlier) that we haven’t seen locally, but will.
For a start, it’s hard to rule out a lot of hybrid models from recently established or incoming Chinese brands, who have the manufacturing power and relatively fearless approach to offering electrified and electric models here in Australia.
Then there are hybrid versions of models that Australians (to some extent) have a proven affection for, like the Subaru Forester hybrid, bound for Oz in 2025, the hybrid version of the Suzuki Vitara, or even the Porsche 911 T-Hybrid.
Perhaps all slightly different in their market offering, but each a pointer than hybridisation isn’t done growing in popularity yet, and as such, more efficient ways to use petrol engines might be Australia’s answer for some time.
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