Soon, money won’t be the only thing you need to drive a supercar in Australia. Is this a good idea, or over-regulation?
If you have ever dreamt of taking a powerful car on a road trip across Australia, you may have to take on a series of additional tests and training to do so in the near future. That’s because lawmakers in the state of South Australia have announced plans to introduce stricter requirements and training for those who want to get behind the wheel of high-powered vehicles.
The policy calls for a special licence requirement for those who want to drive vehicles such as supercars, though the machines aren’t being banned from the country altogether. Think of it like getting your ‘Super’ licences on Gran Turismo. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas hopes that the shift in policy will result in fewer car-related incidents, while the proposal also aims to ban drivers responsible for deadly crashes from holding a licence until the case has been resolved in court.
The proposed change has come about after a crash involving a Lamborghini Huracan in 2019 that led to the death of a teenage girl. The driver was acquitted of the pedestrian’s death after pleading guilty to a lesser charge, but Malinauskas hopes that the new regulations, which are set to be presented before Parliament by the end of 2022, will help prevent incidents like these from occurring in the future.
What do you think of the idea? Is it good to have tighter regulation on who can drive what, or is this just another method of control over motorists?
See also: Controversial Digital Number Plates On The Way With GPS Tech
Elsewhere Down Under, petrolheads are also being targeted by a bank that will no longer hand out loans for ICE cars (including hybrids). Bank Australia has announced that it will stop giving new-car loans to customers for petrol or diesel-powered vehicles, including hybrids, by 2025 in an effort to increase EV uptake across the country.
Bank Australia claims that the decision was made in response to Australia’s low EV adoption rate of two percent, which lags behind the global average of nine percent in the rest of the world. However, it’s certainly a bold choice for the bank to tell its customers which cars they are and are not allowed to buy.
However, given the high cost of buying a brand-new EV, Bank Australia has confirmed that used-car loans will still be available on combustion engine-powered cars after 2025.
The bank is a relatively small operator in Australia, with around 185,000 customers, and it prides itself on its policies around renewable energy. It remains to be seen whether larger banks will adopt such an aggressive approach in cancelling combustion engine-powered vehicles, but what do you think of Bank Australia’s radical new policy?
Next up, check out Big Electric Cars Officially Aren’t That Green. Are E-Fuels The Answer?
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