What the model found
Petrol prices made a sizeable contribution to Australia’s inflation over the year to September 2026. In a new analysis prepared for the Electric Vehicle Council (EVC), Endgame Analytics estimates that rising automotive fuel prices added 0.77 percentage points to annual inflation. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported headline inflation of 4.3 per cent for that period.
The EVC release says automotive fuel prices rose 23.6 per cent over the year. Endgame then asked a different question: what would the inflation calculation have looked like if all household driving had used electricity instead of petrol? Under its assumptions, the answer is 3.75 per cent rather than the unrounded 4.34 per cent in the ABS data, a difference of 0.59 percentage points.
That is not a claim that Australia’s actual inflation rate was lower, or that replacing every car tomorrow would immediately change the official number. It is a counterfactual calculation designed to isolate direct household driving costs. The EVC’s own notes say the ABS keeps consumer price index weights fixed between updates, with the next update due in January 2027.
The assumptions matter
Endgame removed automotive fuel from the CPI basket, substituted the electricity needed to drive the same distance, rescaled the basket and applied the past year’s price changes again. Its charging-cost assumption is that electricity for an EV costs 80 per cent less than petrol for equivalent travel. The model uses a mix of 80 per cent home charging on an EV tariff and 20 per cent public charging. Drivers who depend mostly on public fast charging should not assume the same cost difference applies to them.
The analysis also leaves out vehicle purchase prices and indirect costs such as fuel-related freight. Those omissions are important for anyone treating the model as a personal buying calculation. The EVC is an industry representative body advocating faster EV adoption, and its policy argument is separate from the arithmetic of this illustration.
One household example, not a universal bill
The release offers a small-SUV example for a household travelling 15,000 kilometres a year. It estimates that the rise in petrol prices added $442 to that vehicle’s annual fuel cost, while higher electricity prices added $48 to the cost of driving an EV the same distance under the model’s charging mix. Those are changes in annual running costs, not the total cost of owning either vehicle.
Someone weighing up a switch still needs to compare the price of the vehicles, their actual electricity tariff, access to home charging, public charger rates and the distance they drive. The release does not provide a personalised savings estimate or a comparison of otherwise identical cars bought at the same price.
The broader point is narrower and defensible: households that replace petrol purchases with electricity are less directly exposed to swings in petrol prices. That does not remove exposure to electricity prices, nor does it make the transition cost-free. Readers should use the EVC scenario to understand one source of inflation pressure, not as a promise about their next car’s annual budget.