Australia’s light vehicle fleet is becoming cleaner as hybrid and electric vehicles become more popular.
The National Transport Commission’s latest report, Light Vehicle Emissions Intensity in Australia: Trends Over Time, examines just over 17 million light vehicles registered and driving on Australian roads in January 2025.
You can view the full report here, which takes into account data from 2003 and cars registered each year since then.
While the report discusses the increasing popularity of hybrids, plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), and electric vehicles (EVs), which we have covered extensively on this website, it also covers data that does not appear in VFACTS industry sales reports.
For example, emissions intensity – i.e. how much CO2 is emitted during operation of a vehicle – fell by 3.9 percent to 156.3 g/km for light vehicles first registered in 2024, after falling by 4.7 percent for the 2023 cohort.
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Across Australia’s light vehicle fleet, sales of new, cleaner vehicles and the natural wear and tear of older, higher-emitting vehicles have reduced the average emissions intensity to 190.8 g/km from 193.7 g/km a year ago.
Please note that these emission intensity figures reflect only exhaust emissions and not emissions during the manufacture and delivery of a vehicle.
Significant progress has been made in reducing emissions through the introduction of cleaner combustion engines and electrified vehicles. The average emissions value of all light vehicles registered for the first time in 2003 was 252 g/km, while last year it was 156.3 g/km.
Models made in China are playing a big role in cleaning up Australia’s light vehicle fleet, with vehicles from that country overall having the second lowest average emissions intensity of any country of origin, behind Romania, which accounted for fewer than 9,000 vehicles.
But while light vehicles are becoming cleaner overall, they are becoming larger and heavier.
The average mass of all light vehicles increased by 13 percent between 2003 and 2024, while commercial vehicles first added to the fleet in 2024 had an average footprint of 10.28 m, which was 1.6 m² larger than in 2003².
The report examines the emissions intensity of 17,392,433 light vehicles sold between 2003 and 2025, including SUVs, light trucks and vans. Excluded include 156,912 heavy commercial vehicles, 123,775 private imports and 62,597 vehicles whose sales were not reported to VFACTS.
Of the just over 17 million light vehicles on Australian roads using this method, just 240,417 – or 1.4 per cent – are electric vehicles (EVs), alongside 602,218 hybrids and 50,818 plug-in hybrids (PHEVs).
Despite significant growth in electric vehicles, hybrids and PHEVs in recent years, 95 per cent of light vehicles on Australian roads are powered exclusively by internal combustion engines. However, 17 percent of new registrations since 2021 have been for hybrid and electric vehicles.
The report also examined the top 15 vehicle brands among registered light vehicles, which together account for around 89 percent of all registered light vehicles.
Of these, Holden and Ford had the two highest average emissions intensities at 233.8 g/km and 226.1 g/km respectively; Suzuki’s was lowest at 154.2g/km, while Toyota was somewhere in between at 199.0g/km, just above the national fleet average of 190.8g/km.
