Ask around an EV owners’ forum about insurance and you will collect two contradictory answers within about 90 seconds. One camp insists electric cars cost a fortune to cover because nobody can repair them. Another camp shrugs and says nothing changed at all.

Both groups are partly right, which is why the question keeps circling.

Here is the honest starting position. Almost every Australian insurer treats a battery-powered vehicle as just another car, sells it exactly the same products as a gas equivalent and applies the same policy wording. The differences that matter sit underneath that surface, in repair economics, in where cover stops around your driveway and in the number written on your certificate. Below we work through each of them.

Nobody sells a dedicated “EV policy” in Australia, and the absence is deliberate rather than an oversight.

Insurers structure motor products around what can go wrong: collision, theft, fire, storm, vandalism and damage you cause to somebody else. None of those risks changes because a battery replaced a fuel tank. So the same tiers apply. Comprehensive at the top, third party fire and theft below it, third party property damage underneath and compulsory injury cover sitting outside all of them as a legal requirement.

That means the first decision facing an electric car owner is identical to the decision facing everyone else. How much of the vehicle’s value are you prepared to carry yourself, and how much do you want an insurer carrying?

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