MTA SA/NT CEO, Darrell Jacobs, recently presented the MTA's vision as the world and Australia makes decisions to decarbonise the automotive industry.

During his opening remarks, Darrell provided three sets of figures to the audience:

• There are 20 million cars on Australian roads today
• There are one million new cars sold every year in Australia; and
• Electric vehicles are six percent of these new sales

"Even if we hypothetically sold 100 percent electric vehicles each year and we have 20 million cars on the road, it's still going to take a little bit of time for EV penetration," he said.

With that being said — this alone does not mean that we should not necessarily prepare for electric vehicles — and the MTA is committed to helping your business do just this.

This includes enticing the future automotive workforce. We need to work with schools where we can change the paradigm from grease and spanners to technology, scanning tools and computers.

"I think the automotive industry has a real opportunity to change that thinking and attract a whole new range of people in our industry to work on really exciting and high-tech cars, trucks, and machinery," he said.