Ampol Pays $225 Million for Evie Chargers as EVs Outsell Petrol Cars

For the second month in a row, Australians bought more battery electric cars than petrol ones. In the same few weeks, the company behind one of the country's biggest servo networks agreed to buy one of its biggest fast charging networks. Put those two facts side by side and you get a fairly clear picture of where the fuel business thinks it's heading.

A gap of 269 cars

The September new car figures showed 26,287 battery electric vehicles sold against 26,018 petrol cars, according to VFACTS data reported by CarExpert. That's a gap of just 269 cars in a market of 108,778. Diesel was close behind at 25,173.

The gap is tiny, but look at the direction. Petrol car sales were down 36.2 per cent on September last year and diesel was down 18.4 per cent, while EV sales rose 117.7 per cent. The Tesla Model Y was the third best selling vehicle in the country. EVs had already edged out petrol in August, so September made it two months running.

Why now? The Electric Vehicle Council's State of EVs report, launched on 30 September, points to cost of living pressure and soaring fuel prices arriving at the same time as cheaper models. The council says most EV drivers in its own survey cut their annual fuel bills by more than 60 per cent. Worth keeping in mind that the council is the EV industry's peak body, so that's an industry figure rather than an independent one.

Here's what Ampol is buying

On 1 October, Ampol announced it had agreed to buy Fast Cities Australia, which trades as Evie Networks, for $225 million. Evie brings more than 1,030 charging bays. Add Ampol's own AmpCharge network and the combined business would run about 1,425 bays across more than 400 sites.

The deal still needs ACCC clearance, and Ampol is targeting completion in the first half of 2027. Until then, the two businesses operate separately.

Ampol chief executive Matt Halliday called EV charging "ultimately a question of disciplined investment at the right time". The company says charging sessions on AmpCharge rose 116 per cent in the first half of this year, and that EVs have averaged more than 20 per cent of new car sales over the past five months.

The backstory is worth a minute. Evie was founded in 2017 with energy investor Trevor St Baker as its main backer. In 2019 the Australian Renewable Energy Agency committed $15 million towards a network of 42 ultrafast charging sites along national highways. At the time, EVs were a rounding error in the sales figures. Seven years on, a fuel company wants the whole network.

A petrol company with motorists in its name

Ampol has a long history with Australian drivers. It began in 1936 as the Australian Motorists Petrol Company, faded out after merging with Caltex in the 1990s, and came back in 2020 when Caltex Australia renamed itself Ampol. For almost all of those 90 years, the job has been getting liquid fuel into cars.

Compared to other countries, Australia is late to this. BP bought British charging company Chargemaster in 2018 and turned it into BP Pulse. Shell bought London street charging company ubitricity in 2021. In Norway, the clearest example of where this ends up, 95.9 per cent of new cars registered in 2025 were fully electric.

To put this in perspective, Australia is nowhere near Norway yet. The EVC counts about 612,000 battery electric and plug in hybrid vehicles in the national fleet as of June, roughly 3 per cent of the more than 20 million vehicles on our roads. The other 97 per cent still need a bowser. But the new car market decides what the fleet looks like a decade from now, and right now about one in four new cars sold runs on batteries alone.

Ampol is growing on the fuel side too. In June the ACCC approved its purchase of EG Australia, the first complex deal cleared under the new mandatory merger rules, on condition that Ampol sell 41 sites to Dib Group, owner of Metro Petroleum. The ACCC said that without the sale, the deal could have substantially lessened competition in petrol or diesel retailing in 39 local markets.

What this means at the bowser

For this week's fill, very little. Your pump price is set mostly by Singapore refined fuel prices, the Australian dollar, federal excise of more than 50 cents a litre and your local price cycle. The NRMA had Sydney regular unleaded averaging 239.8 cents a litre on 19 October, with diesel at 280.1, and expected unleaded to ease into the mid 230s this week as wholesale prices fall. An EV sold in Brisbane doesn't move any of that.

The longer run is where it gets interesting. A servo pays rent, wages, tank maintenance and compliance costs whether it sells 10,000 litres a day or 7,000. If fewer litres go through, those costs get recovered somewhere: the shop, the charger, or the margin on each litre. Ampol's third quarter update on 19 October reported double digit growth in shop sales across its core network. The coffee and pies are already doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Competition is the other thing to watch. When one company owns both the servo and many of the fast chargers along the same highways, the ACCC's review of the Evie deal matters. The EG decision showed the regulator looks closely at local overlaps, and in that case it decided local competition needed 41 sites in other hands.

Then there's the tax side. Fuel excise is collected per litre, and it funds a big slice of road spending. Fewer litres means less excise. Victoria tried charging EV drivers by the kilometre, and the High Court struck the scheme down in 2023. No national replacement exists yet, and every month of falling petrol car sales makes that gap bigger.

And if you drive a ute or run a truck, don't expect much relief soon. The EVC says electric trucks and vans are still under 1 per cent of their markets, so diesel prices will keep hitting tradies and freight operators for years.

The bigger picture

Australia has changed its driving habits under fuel price pressure before. The oil shocks of the 1970s pushed buyers towards smaller, thriftier cars. This time the shock from the Middle East conflict has landed while a real alternative is sitting in showrooms, and the companies that sell petrol are buying a stake in that alternative instead of waiting to see how it plays out.

The thing is, most drivers will keep buying petrol for years yet. What's shifting is who sells it to them, what else gets sold alongside it, and how much competition there is on the corner.

What to take away