Electric cars outsold petrol in Australia, where Chinese cars pay no tariff
Australia is the one rich market where Chinese cars pay nothing at the border
Australia charges nothing to import a car built in China, where a car from a country without a trade deal pays 5%. It has no domestic car industry left to protect, no anti-subsidy investigation running, and no minimum-price talks with Beijing. That makes it the closest thing the industry has to a controlled experiment, and August returned a result worth reading in Brussels.
EVs took 24.9% of Australia's market against petrol's 25,824 cars
Australia registered 108,760 new vehicles in August 2026, up 4.9% year on year, and 27,078 of them were electric. That is 24.9% of the market and a 169.4% jump on the same month last year. Petrol came second on 25,824, diesel third on 23,608, then hybrids on 18,662 and plug-in hybrids on 10,591. It is the first month in which electric cars have outsold every other powertrain in Australia. The share is still a long way from Norway's 98.7%, but Norway spent two decades of tax exemption getting there.
Tesla's Model Y led on 6,414 units and Geely's EX5 beat the Hyundai Kona
The Model Y was the country's best-selling vehicle of the month on 6,414 deliveries, ahead of the Toyota RAV4 on 5,470 and the HiLux on 4,833. Below them the shape of the list has changed. The BYD Sealion 7 took sixth on 2,213, the Chery Tiggo 4 seventh on 2,012 and the Geely EX5 eighth on 1,947, which put it ahead of the Hyundai Kona, the Kia Sportage and the Mazda CX-5. The GWM Haval Jolion was ninth and the Zeekr 7X tenth. Five of Australia's ten best-selling vehicles in August wore a Chinese badge, and the one on top was a Tesla.
Geely grew 1,023% while Volkswagen fell 38% and Citroen sold nothing
The brand table splits cleanly. Geely sold 4,504 cars, up 1,023.2%. Zeekr sold 2,120, up 2,309.1%. Omoda Jaecoo rose 340.6%, BYD 68.8% to 8,231 and Chery 28.2%. Tesla climbed 162.6% to 7,685 and finished third overall. Against that, Volkswagen fell 38% to 1,629, Audi 49.7% to 713, Cupra 60.6%, Porsche 30.8%, Mercedes-Benz 24.3% and Renault 24%. Citroen and Jaguar registered nothing at all. For scale, BYD needed until this year to reach 2% of the Belgian market for the first time. In Australia it is running at 7.6%.
Chinese cars enter Australia at 0% and the EU at up to 45.3%
A car shipped from China to Australia clears customs at zero under the free trade agreement in force since 2015, in a country where the general rate on an imported passenger car is 5%. The same car shipped to the European Union pays the standard 10% import duty plus the countervailing duty set in October 2024: 17% for BYD, 18.8% for Geely and 35.3% for SAIC and for anyone who did not cooperate with the investigation, which takes the top of the range to 45.3%. Brussels has since weighed the same treatment for plug-in hybrids, and in January 2026 it published a framework that would waive the countervailing duty for manufacturers accepting a minimum selling price per model.
Australia's fleet CO2 limit fell from 141 to 117 g/km in 2026
Price is not the only force at work. Australia's New Vehicle Efficiency Standard began on 1 January 2025 and started counting towards penalties that July, and its fleet-average target tightened from 141 g/km to 117 g/km for 2026. Selling an electric car earns a manufacturer credit against that target, so brands have a reason to push electric stock whatever buyers walk in asking for. The first six-month results named Mazda with a liability of 25.4 million Australian dollars, Nissan 10.8 million, Subaru 7 million and Hyundai 4.2 million. All four were down again in August: Nissan by 33.4%, Subaru by 36.7%, Hyundai by 15.3% and Mazda by 9%.
AutoNext Take
Australia is not an EV success story. It is a tariff experiment with the tariff removed, and August is the first clean reading off it. Chinese brands and Tesla took essentially all of the market's growth while nearly everyone else divided a smaller remainder than they held a year ago. Volkswagen sold 1,629 cars. Geely sold 4,504, having sold roughly a tenth of that last August. Geely's product did not improve tenfold in twelve months. It arrived at a price with no duty standing in front of it.
So the figure worth tracking is not Australia's EV share, it is what is left of the European brands' share of Australia. Taken together, from Mercedes-Benz down to McLaren, they added up to roughly 8,400 cars in August, under 8% of the month. Brussels meanwhile has a framework that would trade the countervailing duty for a minimum price per model, which defends the price and not the volume. If Europe's brands are still near 8% of the Australian market at the end of 2027, the duty was doing less work than the Commission believes. If they are nearer 4%, Australia was the rehearsal.
