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    • Why Aftersales Is the Weakest Link in Every EV Strategy

    Why Aftersales Is the Weakest Link in Every EV Strategy
    Australia's EV market is not struggling at the front end. It is struggling at the back end. Sales are growing. Infrastructure is expanding. Consumer interest is real. But underneath that story, a different one is forming: quieter, slower, and far more consequential. Organisations are not losing ground on EVs in the showroom. They are losing it in the workshop.
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    The sales curve is outrunning the service infrastructure

    Growth in EV sales is not being matched by growth in EV service capability. According to the Mining and Automotive Skills Alliance (MASA), Australia faces a shortage of 28,000 skilled automotive technicians, with 14,000 apprenticeship positions currently unfilled. By 2030, the industry will need 79,000 mechanics and 32,000 of those roles are projected to remain vacant.

    The EV-specific data is more direct. In 2023, the Certificate III in Automotive EV Technology, the dedicated EV qualification in Australia, recorded just 68 enrolments nationally. In the same period, thousands of electric vehicles were sold and registered. Only 41% of advertised EV technician positions were filled. The gap is not theoretical. It is measurable, and it is widening.

    When a customer brings an EV in for service and the workshop lacks the training, tooling, or diagnostic capability to handle it with confidence, something more than an inconvenience occurs. The customer is left with a difficult question: will this vehicle be properly looked after? That question, once formed, reshapes the ownership experience and eventually the resale decision.

    Depreciation is not a market problem. It is a service problem.

    Electric vehicles in Australia are depreciating approximately twice as fast as equivalent petrol vehicles, according to data published by drive.com.au. The reasons are often attributed to rapid model evolution, battery range anxiety, or charging infrastructure uncertainty. These factors are real. But they do not tell the full story.

    Residual value in any vehicle category is shaped by the confidence a secondary buyer has in what they are purchasing. With combustion vehicles, that confidence is built over decades of predictable servicing patterns, familiar diagnostics, and a well-established secondary market. With EVs, those foundations do not yet exist at scale and aftersales is where the gap is most visible.

    Battery health transparency is a clear example. For a used EV buyer, the state of the battery is the single most important factor in the purchase decision. Yet in the Australian market, standardised battery health reporting remains inconsistent across brands and dealer networks. When secondary buyers cannot easily assess battery condition, they price in uncertainty. That uncertainty becomes depreciation.

    The same pattern applies to service records, software update continuity, warranty clarity, and the overall legibility of how a vehicle has been managed during its first ownership cycle. When these signals are fragmented or absent, value erodes, not because the vehicle is faulty, but because its history cannot be trusted.

    What the BYD decision reveals about the market

    Earlier this year, BYD announced it would expand its in-house servicing footprint in Australia, moving away from a reliance on external network partners for maintenance. The decision reflects something the industry is only beginning to acknowledge openly: the existing aftersales infrastructure is not yet equipped to deliver the ownership experience that EV customers expect or that EV residual values require.

    BYD is not alone in this. Across the Australian market, brands are confronting the same structural gap. The aftermarket is investing, the AAAA Future Readiness Index confirms that workshops are beginning to gear up for EVs, with growing investment in EV-specific tools and training. But the pace of that investment has not kept up with the pace of adoption.

    The result is a period of genuine vulnerability: a market where EV sales are accelerating, but where the systems, skills, and processes required to support those vehicles through their full ownership lifecycle are still being built.

    A story from the field

    A dealership group operating across two metropolitan markets introduced EVs into their aftersales workflow without a dedicated training programme or updated diagnostic tooling. Service bookings for EVs were handled through the same process as ICE vehicles. Within twelve months, first-visit resolution rates for EV-specific issues were significantly lower than for the rest of the fleet. Customer satisfaction scores for EV owners declined. And when those customers came to the end of their first ownership cycle, trade-in valuations for their vehicles came in below book value, reflecting not just market depreciation, but the absence of a clean, credible service history.

    The vehicles themselves were not the problem. The ownership record was. This pattern is not unique. It is the predictable outcome of applying an ICE-era operating model to an EV-era product.

    The vehicle-centric shift: technology as an enabler, not a solution

    There is a temptation to treat this as a technology problem, to assume that the right platform, the right software, or the right data integration will fix what is broken. That assumption misses the point.

    Technology can enable the shift. But the shift itself is operational. It requires organisations to stop managing their aftersales business around the customer and start managing it around the individual vehicle.

    This means treating each VIN as a living asset with its own history, its own service trajectory, and its own residual value profile. It means that service decisions, parts allocation, diagnostic outcomes, and warranty records are captured and structured at the vehicle level, not averaged across a fleet or a model line. When this happens, the ownership record becomes legible. And when the ownership record is legible, secondary buyers can assess what they are purchasing with confidence. Confidence reduces uncertainty. Reduced uncertainty protects value.

    The technology that enables this kind of vehicle-centric operating model exists today. However, technology is only useful if the surrounding operations are designed to make use of it. The real question is not which system to implement. It is whether the organisation is willing to reorganise around the vehicle rather than the transaction.

    Where to start: small changes, significant returns

    A vehicle-centric aftersales model does not require a full organisational transformation from day one. In practice, the organisations that move fastest are not those that redesign everything at once, they are those that identify where the gaps between current operations and vehicle-level management are smallest, and where the returns are largest.

    A structured diagnostic of current aftersales operations will almost always surface a small number of high-impact opportunities: a service record process that could be standardised with minimal effort, a battery health check that is currently optional but could be made routine, a handover protocol between workshop and front-of-house that is inconsistent but easily fixable.

    These are not glamorous changes. But they are the changes that accumulate into a credible ownership record, and a credible ownership record is what separates an EV that retains its value from one that doesn’t.

    The organisations that will define the next phase of the Australian EV market are not necessarily those with the best product at the point of sale. They are those that build the most reliable, transparent, and vehicle-specific ownership experience across the full lifecycle. That work starts now and it starts small.

    The real race starts after the sale

    But the weakest link in every EV strategy operating in this market today is not the product. It is the ability to service, document, and protect the value of that product after it leaves the showroom.

    That is not a marketing problem. It is an operational one. And it is where the next competitive advantage will be won or lost.

     

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