By Peter Jones, CEO, VACC and TACC
Every 9 September, World EV Day turns the spotlight onto the vehicles. I prefer to turn it toward the people who sell, service, and repair them.
No major industry in modern history has been remade as quickly as ours. In little more than a decade, businesses built around the internal combustion engine have absorbed electrification, high-voltage safety, over-the-air software updates, advanced driver assistance systems, new emissions rules under the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, and a consumer market moving faster than any forecast anticipated. Any one of those would have been a generational shift. They arrived at once, and largely without a manual.
What has happened since is the part worth celebrating. Faced with all of it, our industry did not dig in. It got to work. Workshops re-tooled. Technicians went back to study, often at night and at their own expense. Family businesses that have served the same suburb or country town for three generations backed themselves with equipment and training, trusting the investment before anyone could tell them when it would pay off.
I have watched apprentices learn new car systems that did not exist when their trainers qualified. I have watched workshop owners quickly pivot their business model rather than wind it up. I have watched dealers, repairers, tyre specialists and body shops work out how to service a vehicle few of them had seen two years earlier. That is not an industry being dragged into the future. That is an industry backing itself, and doing it while keeping every other vehicle on the road running.
And the next generation is arriving with real momentum. Today’s apprentices are entering a trade far more technical and varied than the one many of us started in — battery systems, software diagnostics and high-voltage safety alongside the fundamentals. They will spend their careers on vehicles that have not been designed yet. There has rarely been a better time to pick up the tools.
None of them should have to do it alone. VACC and TACC exist to make sure they do not. We are delivering the technical training, safety guidance and expert advice our members need to work on these vehicles with confidence, and helping them navigate the questions that come with it. That support will only grow as the transition does.
We also take that experience to government, and we do it constructively. Our members are not spectators to energy and transport policy. They are the front line of it, and they know sooner than anyone what a well-designed policy delivers and where a good idea meets a practical obstacle. That is valuable intelligence, freely offered.
We have had genuinely productive conversations with government at both state and federal levels, and there is real opportunity ahead — on workforce and training, on the skills pipeline, on making sure the regulatory settings keep pace with the technology. The VACC and TACC will keep bringing our members’ evidence to those conversations, because the best outcomes come from decisions made with this industry rather than about it. We are here to work alongside government to back the businesses that keep our states moving.
So on World EV Day, celebrate the technology. It deserves it. But save some of that recognition for the 5,000 member businesses across Victoria and Tasmania who have met the most disruptive period in automotive history with optimism, capital and sheer determination.
Whatever comes next, this industry will be ready for it. It always has been.
