A note on where the electric utility-vehicle market may actually be decided.

After twenty-five years in global automotive, industrial products and services, I have come to believe that one truth outlasts every technology cycle. You can build the best vehicle in the world, but if you cannot support it where the customer works, you do not really have a product. You have a promise.

I think the electric utility-vehicle market is rapidly rediscovering that century-old truth.

The question that is already answered

The manufacturing question, the one that dominated the last decade, is close to settled. A handful of manufacturers, most of them Chinese, now build batteries and vehicles at a scale and cost that older carmakers are struggling to match. In 2024 BYD sold 4.27 million vehicles, a sevenfold increase since 2020. The IEA expects global electric vehicle sales to reach roughly 23 million in 2026, about 28 percent of all cars sold, with China accounting for close to three quarters of the electric cars produced and more than 80 percent of battery cell production. These companies can build the vehicles, and they can build a great many of them.

The question that interests me more is the one that begins after the vehicle arrives.

In industrial and commercial vehicles, the sale is only the visible part of the business. The real contest is parts, service, training, warranty and uptime. And those things do not globalise the way manufacturing does. They remain stubbornly local. The technicians, the diagnostic tools, the high-voltage training, the parts networks, the warranty models tuned to hard commercial use, none of this exists yet at the depth diesel enjoys after decades of accumulation. Everyone is building it at once, and no one has finished.

So the hypothesis I keep returning to is this. Global EV manufacturers can scale production faster than they can scale local industrial support. That gap may decide who wins the electric utility-vehicle market.

What Europe revealed

Consider what happened when BYD, the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world, entered Europe. The manufacturing was never in doubt. The local execution was. According to Reuters, BYD ended 2024 with just a 2.8 percent share and 57,000 vehicles sold across the region, well below its ambition to lead the European EV market by 2030. In Germany, Europe's largest market at 2.8 million vehicles a year, it sold fewer than 2,900 cars. The company had failed, on its own executives' account, to sign up enough dealers or hire enough people who understood the local market.

The most revealing line came not from BYD but from one of its partners. Tim Albertsen, chief executive of the leasing firm Ayvens, told Reuters the company was taking the problem seriously, then added a caution that reads almost like a thesis in itself. "What the Chinese do well in China doesn't always work in Europe." The manager BYD appointed to run Germany put it more bluntly. "The basics," she said, "are still missing here."

Closing the Gap

Here is the part a competitor should never underestimate. BYD answered. It moved fast, poached senior executives from Stellantis and other European carmakers, and set out to expand its German dealer network from 27 locations to 120. By the first quarter of 2025, European sales had more than tripled to over 37,000 vehicles against about 8,500 a year earlier.

These are not companies that fail quietly and go home. They have the capital and the will to fix what they get wrong. The lesson is not that global brands cannot build local support. It is that even the strongest of them had to stop and build it by hand, and that took real time even for a company with almost unlimited resources.

The same pattern, market by market

The shape repeats wherever these vehicles land. In Australia, BYD grew from just over 2,000 sales in 2022 to 52,415 last year, up more than 150 percent year on year, reaching 100,000 local sales in under three and a half years. The aftersales base strained to keep pace. Repair times lengthened, parts were delayed, and some owners reported waits of months for a single component. The company has been candid about it. Its local chief operating officer, Stephen Collins, has said the back end, service, parts and warranty, is critical to long-term success, and that the company has work to do. BYD is now building a 20,000 square metre parts warehouse in Melbourne, claims a 95 percent parts fill rate, and is expanding its dealer network toward 150 by mid-2026.

Newer entrants describe the same reality in almost identical language. Xpeng's Australian distributor has noted that availability of stock and parts is a permanent challenge, with some components available same-day and others taking up to six weeks to arrive from China, even as customers from Darwin to Hobart expect full national support from day one.

Even Tesla, with almost 140,000 vehicles on Australian roads and more operational experience than any EV company alive, has had to keep investing in local service as its fleet grew, moving parts management in-house and opening a dedicated Melbourne warehouse to bring down what it calls key-to-key time. Its own people describe the state as imperfect and the investment as ongoing. If the most established EV company in the world is still building this muscle, the newer arrivals are further back than their sales figures suggest.

These are not stories of collapse. They are stories of retrofit. The vehicle arrives first. The ability to support it follows, sometimes years later.

The gap is not theoretical

If you want a sense of how underbuilt the support layer still is, look at the repair ecosystem. In Australia, the Guardian reported that only around one in ten repairers is certified to service electric vehicles, and that some EVs are being written off after relatively minor accidents because the mechanics, parts and battery-assessment capability are not yet in place. Research from NRMA Insurance found that 62 percent of EV owners are concerned about the lack of qualified EV repairers in their area, and that 90 percent of owners and intending buyers consider it important that their insurer has access to qualified EV repairers. That is the consumer market, where a delay is inconvenient. The commercial market, where a delay is downtime, inherits the same shortage with far less tolerance for it.

Why this matters more for work vehicles

For a consumer buyer, the gap is an inconvenience. A slow repair is frustrating but survivable. For an industrial buyer it is something else. A ute, a light truck, a mine-site light vehicle, a council or utility fleet asset is not bought as a lifestyle product. It is bought as working equipment. When it is off the road, someone loses labour hours, contract capacity, site access or production time. Industrial fleets do not buy global scale. They buy confidence that the vehicle will work on Monday morning, and that someone nearby can fix it when it does not.

It helps to remember what the incumbents actually are. A HiLux or a LandCruiser on an Australian mine site is not supported by Toyota alone. It sits on top of decades of accumulated infrastructure. Regional dealers run dedicated mining departments with in-house mine-spec fit-outs, on-site technicians and field support. Independent suppliers hold over a thousand critical spares for those two models alone, stocked across Perth, Kalgoorlie, Adelaide, Mount Isa and Sydney specifically to keep downtime low. An electric ute entering that market is not competing against a vehicle. It is competing against an installed operating system built over half a century.

The decision that actually matters

This is why, for a global manufacturer entering industrial vehicles, the choice of local partner is not a distribution decision. It is the entire support system. When a global commercial-vehicle maker enters a market like Australia through an established distributor, what it is really buying is a dealer footprint, a service network, a parts pipeline and regional credibility it could not build alone in the time available. The distributor is not the channel to the customer. The distributor is the product's ability to keep working.

None of this means local automatically wins. Local operators have failed too, sometimes precisely because building and supporting industrial electric vehicles demands more capital, more warranty depth and more endurance than a smaller company can sustain. The honest formulation is narrower. The market may favour companies with genuine local industrial support capability, whether they are local manufacturers, specialist distributors, or global manufacturers that successfully localise. The advantage belongs to support depth, wherever it sits.

The window

Which returns me to the observation underneath all of this. The industrial electric vehicle market is about to test whether global manufacturing scale can beat local operating depth. The giants have the capital and the reach to close the gap, and as BYD has shown, they will. What they do not have, and cannot buy quickly, is time. The support layer is built market by market, workshop by workshop, part number by part number, and while it is being built the window stays open.

Whether that window favours the fast, the local, or the genuinely well-supported is the question I want to sit with next.

References

Global EV production and scale
IEA, Global EV Outlook 2026, Executive Summary. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2026/executive-summary
BYD UK Media, 2024 financial results (4.27 million vehicles sold in 2024). https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/byd-reports-its-financial-results-in-2024-revenue-hits-777.1-billion-yuan,-up-23-year-on-year.html
CnEVPost, BYD full-year 2024 sales. https://cnevpost.com/2025/01/01/byd-sales-dec-2024/

BYD Europe
Reuters, "China EV giant BYD reboots Europe operations after strategic stumbles," 23 April 2025. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-ev-giant-byd-reboots-europe-operations-after-strategic-stumbles-sources-2025-04-23/

BYD Australia sales and aftersales
CarExpert, BYD reaches 100,000 Australian sales. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/byd-notches-up-100000-australian-sales-in-less-than-3-5-years
CarsGuide, "BYD's plan to fix its biggest problem." https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/byds-plan-to-fix-its-biggest-problem-100297
CarExpert, BYD acknowledges "work to do" in aftersales. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/byd-acknowledges-work-to-do-in-aftersales-experience
EV Central, BYD dealer network expansion to 150 by mid-2026. https://evcentral.com.au/byd-confirms-tsunami-of-new-models-for-australia-led-by-expansion-of-byd-shark-6-line-up/

Xpeng Australia
CarExpert, "Chinese brand improving Australian parts supply, but says there's a disconnect in expectations." https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/chinese-brand-improving-australian-parts-supply-but-says-theres-a-disconnect-in-expectations
CarExpert, Xpeng Australia customer support commitments. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/xpeng-australia-makes-customer-support-promises-as-it-builds-for-the-long-term

Tesla Australia
Fleet EV News, "Tesla Steps Up After-Sales Support in Australia." https://fleetevnews.com.au/tesla-steps-up-after-sales-support-in-australia/

Incumbent industrial support benchmark
Kalamunda Toyota, Mining and Resource Sector. https://www.kalamundatoyota.com.au/fleet/mining-resource-sector
Autoline Parts, mining light-vehicle parts supplier. https://autolineparts.com.au/

EV repair and technician gap
The Guardian, "Australia's skilled mechanics shortage forcing insurers to write off EVs after minor accidents," 26 April 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/26/australias-skilled-mechanics-shortage-forcing-insurers-to-write-off-electric-vehicles-after-minor-accidents
NRMA Insurance / IAG, research on consumer concerns over skilled EV mechanics. https://www.iag.com.au/newsroom/community/nrma-insurance-research-reveals-consumer-concerns-over-ev-mechanics