Kia says it will have a range of affordable EVs on the market in Australia within three years according to Kia Australia chief operating officer Damien Meredith. He says affordable electric cars are coming very soon and they will not need government subsidies to encourage people to buy them.

“There will be a fair bit of movement over that in the next couple of years,” he says. “We might be able to grow sales – not dramatically of course – to go in with confidence with the product we’ve got, based on marketing not based on government legislation or government concessions. We won’t be asking for any government subsidies or anything like that.”

Meredith says Kia has real belief in “what we’ve got coming”, and that “we’ll back the market” by importing electric cars as opposed to hybrid or hydrogen-powered models. “You’ll find that we’ll have a few EVs in play in three years time. We’re not going to sell thousands of these cars straight away. But we’re taking the EV course rather than anything else.”

“Our view is that we will move into a range of EVs rather than go through the steps of hybrid and plug-in hybrid, we’ll move straight to EV over the next couple of years. It’s our view that EVs in the medium term are the way to go. We’re betting on that.”