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Have your say on light electric vehicles standards
Last year the number of electric vehicles doubled to more than 83,000 on Australian roads. These vehicles are supplied into Australia without appropriate safety features such as acoustic vehicle alerting systems (AVAS) that can directly impact road and pedestrian users and particularly those who are blind or have low vision in our community. Regrettably Australia is well behind in this technology which is already mandated across most major vehicle markets, including the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, China and the United States.
The National Road Safety Action Plan 2023-25 (the Action Plan) was agreed by all Infrastructure and Transport Ministers in December 2022 and identified a key action to develop legislation to mandate AVAS in light electric vehicles. This week the Federal Transport Minister took the welcomed and vital next step in releasing the public consultation paper to seek feedback on whether to have all new light electric road vehicles (including fully electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and hybrid vehicles) fitted with an audio alerting system. The outcome of this review will determine whether alerting systems should be mandated and when. This feedback will also assist in future heavy vehicle standards.
Guide Dogs Australia supports this important step and is actively campaigning for the introduction of AVAS. We will be making a comprehensive submission and campaigning Members of Parliament to act urgently on these reforms and to retrospectively fit vehicles that do not have these systems. It is important as part of this process they here your views directly as well.
If you would like to contribute to the review feedback you can via this link Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems for Electric Vehicles | Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts
