An enormous ship docked in Melbourne today. Its cargo could permanently change Australian motoring

The arrival of a purpose-built ship owned by Chinese car manufacturer BYD that docked in Melbourne on Sunday carrying 5000 vehicles has been described by an analyst as a turning point in the electrification of Australian road transport.

The BYD Zhengzhou, one of a fleet of eight car-carrying ships owned and operated by BYD, normally carries vehicles from China to South America but was dispatched to Australia following a spike in interest in electric cars in March.

“What we saw with the oil crisis in the Middle East was a really strong demand for EVs, in particular around March, and that was the main reason for us bringing the vessel to Australia,” said BYD Australia’s chief operating officer, Stephen Collins.

“That’s what really led to the vessel, and it really is leveraging what I would call BYD’s vertically integrated supply chain, which is arguably the quickest in the automotive world.”

The US- and Israel-led war on Iran, which all but blocked the passage of fuel shipments through the critical Strait of Hormuz, triggered an energy crisis that pushed up oil prices and led to a surge in demand for electric cars around the world.

Bloomberg reported that 206,200 electric cars were sold in Europe in March this year during the first four weeks of the war, a 44 per cent increase over the year-earlier period. In South Korea sales doubled, and in Italy they jumped 76 per cent.

Energy analyst Tim Buckley, the director of the think tank Climate Energy Finance, said BYD now controlled every aspect of its operations, from the mining of critical materials and the design and manufacture of batteries and parts, to the construction of the vehicles themselves and their delivery around the world.

As a result, it can rapidly respond to demand spikes, like the one caused by oil price increases created by the Iran war. As well as its factories in China, it has new plants in Thailand, Brazil and Uzbekistan, allowing it not only to serve rapidly growing markets across Asia and South America but to step around tariffs in some jurisdictions applied to Chinese-manufactured vehicles.

“It’s a turning point for EVs in Australia,” Buckley said. “It is an acceleration of the energy system transformation here in Australia.

“We’ve actually made really good progress in the last four years, but what the war in Iran has done is highlighted the critical security benefits of energy independence, which comes from the accelerated deployment of EVs, both in our passenger vehicles, in our freight, and in our mining sectors.

“I’m in awe of the vertical integration that the Chinese bat