New Zealand may need to have a used electric car market before New Zealanders will start buying electric cars, university researchers say.
Rebecca Ford, deputy director of the University of Otago's centre for sustainability (Csafe), has just completed a study of the electric car market in New Zealand, and found New Zealanders were ''keen'' on buying electric cars.
She also identified the obstacles to New Zealanders buying electric cars, which were largely similar to obstacles identified around the world: cost, charge time, and range.
However, an added hurdle for the New Zealand market was the car market's skew towards used cars, she said.
Csafe director Janet Stephenson, who has done research on the car market in New Zealand, said it was ''exceedingly well-known that New Zealanders do have tendency to buy used vehicles''.
In the survey of about 2000 people, 6% said they would be ''almost ready or totally ready'' to buy an electric car, with 28% saying they were thinking about the purchase.
Both those numbers increased ''substantially'' if the hypothetical price of an electric car went down, as it would if they were used, Dr Ford said.
And analysis of the survey data showed that of the factors considered, car price was the most important, while car age was the least.
Drs Ford and Stephenson thought used electric cars could find their way into the New Zealand market by companies or government organisations buying them as part of their vehicle fleet.
Roughly half of the new cars bought in New Zealand were for fleets of companies or government organisations, the researchers said.
Dr Ford said fleet cars ''tend to only be kept in the fleet for a limited number of years before they're sold on''.
That was how many cars entered the New Zealand used car market, she said.
And that could also be the key to introducing electric cars to New Zealand, Dr Ford said. Dr Stephenson said without electric cars entering corporate and government fleets, ''sitting back and waiting for them to trickle through to the secondhand market is going to be very slow''.
Dr Ford said there was a ''threat'' that New Zealand would get ''left behind the rest of the world'' by getting into the electric car market too slowly.
When asked whether the Dunedin City Council would consider buying electric vehicles as part of its fleet, spokesman Mark Wright said the council had two hybrid cars right now.
''The overall fleet comprises 119 vehicles, many of which are specialist vehicles and not available with hybrid or electric power.''
DCC group chief financial officer Grant MacKenzie said the council was ''in the process of developing a vehicle replacement policy at the moment ... which may or may not include hybrid and fully electric options''.