Now offering casual drive up parking at Adina Apartment Hotel, Surry Hills. Parking is accessible via Fitzroy Street and offers early bird parking as well.
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Adina Apartments, Surry Hills NSW
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Hotel Kurrajong, Barton ACT
Casual drive up parking is now available at Hotel Kurrajong. You can find this car park located at 8 National Circuit, Barton.
The smart building market is projected to reach $32 billion over the next two to three years, and technology in this space is progressing rapidly.
Australian tech company DIVVY is set to secure a slice of this market with its homegrown and developed internet of things (IoT) I/O Controller.
The DIVVY IoT I/O Controller is a world-first, all-in-one smart box, uniquely designed with built-in digital input pins and output relays.
It helps building managers automate car parking and property functions using smart building technology, offering the ability to control the on/off functions of low-voltage assets such as parking gates, door latches, turnstiles, or water pumps.
While it was built and piloted for the parking garage industry, the DIVVY IoT I/O Controller has the capacity to be used in new or existing smart building applications globally.
Built on the Microsoft Azure platform and powered by Azure Sphere microcontrollers, it leverages the IoT to gather digital input from sensors, translate information in the cloud, and generate straightforward output commands to control equipment.
While trends show that IoT adoption is increasing in smart buildings, even sophisticated software teams can be daunted by how to integrate advanced IoT technologies with legacy digital or nondigital equipment.
DIVVY Operations Director Peter McAlpine says while smart buildings are fast becoming reality, the fact remains that old equipment still exists in buildings and car parks everywhere.
“We needed a device that could connect this traditional equipment to the IoT and bridge the gap between the past and the future,” he said.
“We developed the IoT I/O Controller to offer our clients the highest level of building and data security, automation and control, allowing them to bring their buildings into the future.”
In November 2019, DIVVY was invited to display the IoT I/O Controller at the Microsoft IoT in Action event in Auckland, New Zealand. Microsoft recognised the Controller as a world first and approached DIVVY about a partnership.
After processing the Controller through their Tune Up marketing refinement program, Microsoft is now offering it as part of their Azure Sphere product suite to clients worldwide.
Pauline Hsiao, Microsoft Azure Sphere Solution Specialist, said,
According to a study by McKinsey, office buildings alone stand to gain between $100 billion and 200 billion (USD) per year until 2025 by investing in IoT technology.
DIVVY’s access technologies are tested in the field every month, processing in excess of 45,000 transactions across more than 75 buildings and several open-air facilities.
They are well poised to tap into the market for access control products which reached over $8 billion in 2019 and is estimated to be worth over $12 billion by 2024.
For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager on 0433 669 901 or at kat@divvy.com.au.
About DIVVY
DIVVY is one of the fastest growing parking software hardware companies in Australia whose application of marketing leading technology enables a better customer experience through all bookable assets.
DIVVY’s access technologies are tested in the field every month across 30,000 bookings—opening 80,000 boom gates or roller shutters per month and processing in excess of 45,000 transactions per month across more than 75 buildings and several open-air facilities
How the DIVVY IoT I/O Controller works:
1.The IoT I/O Controller is a self-contained box including both input and output ports, with mounting flanges that allow it to be attached directly to equipment or a wall. The box must be powered from a low voltage source (8-40 voltage) and uses Wi-Fi with the customer’s WAN. Inputs can be tied to any digital on/off sensors or equipment.
Two built-in outputs are relays that can directly control the on/off functionality of low-voltage equipment. Powered by the MT3620 module, the controller leverages the Azure Sphere operating system which provides an unprecedented level of security for IoT connected devices.
This secure solution provides device authentication and attestation, supports remote over-the-air software updates to maintain security in the face of evolving attacks, and automates error logging and reporting.
2.Data values are collected through a digital pins input and sent to the cloud. (No processing is done on the edge.)
3.Microsoft Azure IoT Hub is the integration point for input/output connectivity.
4.Once input data is validated, authenticated, and translated, a command is sent back to the I/O Controller where it is transmitted via two voltage relays to control simple on/off equipment functions.
5.Data is collected and available via the cloud. The solution can be customized to include additional condition monitoring, customised edge processing, robust reporting and data visualization, and remote management and controls.
Practical applications of the DIVVY IoT I/O Controller:
1.In parking garages, the controller can be used to detect when a vehicle breaks a beam, to validate and translate information in the cloud, and to send a command to automatically raise the parking gate. Building managers gain not only real-time efficiencies, but access to data about garage access, peak parking times and more.
2.In parking lots, the controller could be connected to water level sensors and water pumps. When sensors detecting standing water surpass a preset threshold in the cloud, a signal will be sent back to the controller to activate operation of the water pump.
3.Inside an office, the solution can control access to the building or bookable areas when used in combination with an additional device. A smart device with screen and camera could detect the QR code of a user and send it to Azure for processing. If validated, Azure would send a signal back to the controller to operate an electronic door strike or turnstile entry system to allow entry.
4.The controller could also be used to control lighting or climate conditions in a room based on connections to presence detection sensors. When a sensor detects a room is occupied, it sends a signal to Azure for processing and logging, and a signal is returned to the controller with a command to activate the output to control the lights.
1. “Digital workplace trends in 2019,” Dimension Data, 2018.
2. “From Traditional Building Automation to Smart Buildings,” Sensative, 23 October 2019.
3. “Major Trends in the Global Access Control Market 2019,” Memoori, 4 December 2019.
Businesses everywhere have been faced with all manner of extraordinary challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc around the world. When restrictions came into force in Australia at the end of March, Suncorp turned to the DIVVY Enterprise parking management system to help them navigate the complex and rapidly changing situation.
Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services brands, has relied on DIVVY Enterprise to manage the onsite parking for their fleet of trade vehicles at their Brisbane and Sydney offices since 2018.
In late March 2020, Suncorp was one of many Australian businesses to transition as many of their employees as possible to working from home. Even so, there remained a core group of essential staff who needed to continue to work from the office.
At a time of heightened social restrictions, Suncorp wanted to help their essential employees avoid commuting via public transport. The onsite parking at their Brisbane and Sydney premises, usually allocated to their tool of trade vehicles, was offered up to their essential workers.
Suncorp were also quick to lease additional off-site commercial parking to ensure they were able to meet the parking needs of their essential staff.
The essential workers did not have access to Suncorp’s onsite parking before COVID-19. The sudden change to Suncorp’s parking usage meant an entirely new cohort of parkers had to be onboarded into the DIVVY system very quickly, so that they could access the car parks.
Over the course of the lockdown period, Suncorp would add more than 100 new users to the DIVVY system.
Because the DIVVY system is so user-friendly, they were able to do so without a hitch. A couple of weeks into the new working arrangements, Suncorp called upon DIVVY’s reporting functionality to reveal the actual usage of their parking bays during this period.
The reports issued by the DIVVY Enterprise system showed that as employees stayed at home as much as possible, actual parking usage was lower than Suncorp’s initial projections. Suncorp were able to relinquish the additional commercial parking bays they had leased at the beginning of the restrictions, thereby returning savings to the business, and transfer the staff who had been using those bays over to the DIVVY system to use Suncorp’s own onsite parking.
Suncorp’s onsite parking never reached full capacity during lockdown because DIVVY optimised the use of the spaces so efficiently. DIVVY managed the high number of parkers and the ad hoc, unpredictable pattern of parking usage without fault.
As restrictions ease and workplaces re-open, Suncorp are gradually transitioning their staff back to their offices, with groups of employees starting to return from mid-June. Subject to government advice regarding safe public transport usage, staff will be encouraged to return to public transport and onsite parking will revert to the tool of trade vehicles. Suncorp will continue to use DIVVY Enterprise to manage and monitor parking usage during the transition period as COVID-19 working procedures are wound down and the trade fleet return to their onsite parking.
Joseph Harmon, Fleet and Car Parking Manager for Suncorp, says,
‘Since 2018, Suncorp has depended on DIVVY to provide convenient and reportable parking management at our Brisbane Square and Shelley Street locations.
DIVVY Enterprise gave us the flexibility to start using our parking bays for a completely different sector of our team almost overnight, helping us to manage our business efficiently during a very unpredictable time.’
DIVVY was fantastic during the COVID-19 restrictions. It gave us complete and accurate visibility over parking bay utilisation and was so easy to use as we added more than a hundred new parkers to the system.
For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.
Discover how DIVVY Enterprise helped Suncorp make the most of their existing parking assets to deliver big savings for the business.
Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services brands, operates a fleet of trade vehicles and manages the associated parking. In late 2017, Suncorp commenced a trial with DIVVY Enterprise at their 123 Albert St, Brisbane premises. The challenge was to efficiently manage the parking for their trade vehicles at the site, where there were two-thirds fewer parking bays than vehicles. Suncorp had been managing parking manually via spreadsheets, and to meet perceived demand, additional parking was being leased offsite – at great expense.
DIVVY’s trial got underway and the manual spreadsheets were eliminated, with DIVVY providing precise, accurate real time reporting about vehicles entering and exiting the onsite parking bays.
It wasn’t long before DIVVY established the patterns of usage and it became clear how the trade vehicles and their parking could be managed more efficiently. As a result, Suncorp achieved thousands of dollars’ worth of savings by terminating all additional offsite parking, as with DIVVY’s real-time parking bay management it was no longer needed.
Suncorp also made significant savings by downsizing their trade vehicle fleet, after DIVVY’s reporting showed that the fleet could be streamlined without compromising the business needs.
As well as understanding what DIVVY could deliver in terms of efficiencies and cost savings, Suncorp was keen to trial the DIVVY user experience. Would it be a user-friendly parking management solution for their business? The outcome was clear – DIVVY had helped deliver significant savings to the business and the system was easy to use. The trial was deemed a success and Suncorp rolled DIVVY out to its Brisbane Square premises as well.
In mid-2018, hot on the heels of the Brisbane success story, Suncorp expanded DIVVY into 10 Shelley St, Sydney office. Just as in Brisbane, DIVVY’s reporting established that fewer parking bays could be made to work harder with the DIVVY system.
DIVVY showed that not only could Suncorp use their existing parking bays more efficiently through real-time management with the DIVVY system, but the number of bays under lease also exceeded requirements. Suncorp was able to reduce the number of parking bays, thereby returning even more savings to the business. As well as managing Suncorp’s parking bays efficiently, DIVVY reporting is enabling Suncorp to manage the internal cost allocation of the car bays without fuss.
Suncorp is using DIVVY reporting to allocate parking charges to business cost centres, based on how long staff park for. The data is gathered over a period and projections made, allowing costs to be appropriately distributed between business units.
Suncorp also plans to unlock the Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) reporting feature of DIVVY reporting this financial year, allowing maximum efficiency at tax time with minimum effort.
Joseph Harmon, Parking Administrator for Suncorp, says
“Suncorp started working with DIVVY in 2017, in our buildings in Brisbane and Sydney, as we were looking for a better system to fully utilise our larger leased car parks and provide more accurate FBT reporting. Suncorp uses DIVVY to provide convenient and reportable parking to our team members with tool of trade vehicles. The biggest change we’ve experienced since partnering with DIVVY is the ability to have online, accurate reporting of parking usage, along with better utilisation of our car parks. This enables our teams to book leased parks for specific time frames and provides greater flexibility and efficiencies for our business. We are currently looking at expanding the service to our other buildings”.
Suncorp is happy to recommend DIVVY to other businesses looking to improve their parking systems
For further information on this case study, please contact our sales team at sales@divvy.com.au
To help businesses navigate this difficult time, here are our top tips for reducing car parking costs during the coronavirus pandemic.
1. Pay less Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT)
Did you know that your business could be paying less FBT on employee car parking at the moment? If your staff car parking is not meeting all the ATO’s conditions, it could be exempt or receive a reduction from FBT – for example, if car parking is provided for less than 4 hours between 7am and 7pm.
If your company has staff working from home, and employee parking is going unused, it is worth investigating whether that parking is currently exempt from FBT. DIVVY Enterprise clients can determine exact car parking usage in an instant with DIVVY’s reports portal and potentially save thousands during this time.
2. Get an exemption on the Parking Space Levy
Sydney, Melbourne and Perth all have versions of the parking space levy (known in Victoria as the congestion levy), an annual tax payable by owners of parking spaces located in specific high-density districts.
As part of the NSW Government’s tax relief measures to assist businesses impacted by COVID-19, Revenue NSW have announced that PSL payments will be deferred until 30 September 2020. At the time of writing, the Victorian and Western Australian governments are yet to make similar announcements.
Now is a good time to investigate whether your parking spaces are eligible for exemption from the parking space levy. In NSW an unused casual car parking space – that is, a car space available for public parking – is excluded from the PSL calculation.
If your business has car spaces listed for public parking on DIVVY Marketplace that are not being used to their full capacity at the moment, investigate whether you are eligible to reduce your PSL payment. The DIVVY reports portal can provide the usage records required to apply for an exemption.
If you’re a building tenant with car parking on your lease, there’s a good chance your landlord is benefiting from the PSL deferral. Consider asking them to pass the current deferrals and savings on to you too.
3. Make money from your empty car parking spaces
You could be generating revenue from parking spaces left empty by staff working from home. If you have DIVVY access controllers installed in your car park, consider listing your empty car parking spaces for public bookings on DIVVY Marketplace. There are still people commuting to work who need safe and secure parking, and every Marketplace booking returns revenue to your business.
If your car park has a ticket validator or valet service entry system, your vacant parking spaces can be listed for public booking on our parking aggregator site Justbooked. List parking spaces for free and take advantage of a new marketing channel.
4. Get efficient with DIVVY Enterprise
The DIVVY Enterprise parking management system helps businesses get the most out of their parking at any time, and it can make life that bit simpler and safer during COVID-19.
DIVVY Enterprise uses contactless QR code technology to provide access to car parks, doing away with the unsafe practice of sharing physical access cards.
The ‘Free Up My Space’ feature offers the ultimate flexibility for staff parking management, even more, useful in rapidly evolving situations like the coronavirus pandemic. Employees with allocated parking who are working from home can make their parking space available for those staff that need to continue to travel into the office and who don’t normally have access to parking.
The ‘Book On Behalf’ feature makes it easy to enable access to parking for employees or others visitors who don’t usually park on-site, or who usually work from another site, but need access during COVID-19.
DIVVY Enterprise uses secure cloud-based technology so all these features, plus Enterprise’s multitude of other functions, can all be performed remotely, meaning staff working from home can continue to manage and monitor parking efficiently and with ease.
*Please note DIVVY does not provide financial advice and we recommend you seek advice from your financial advisory or accountant.*
We’re here to help. For more information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.
There’s no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic has touched the life of every Australian and had an impact on every Australian business.
Since the first lockdown in March, it has been a time of great change and uncertainty. As individuals and businesses, we’ve needed to draw on our resilience and adaptability.
Here at DIVVY, we’ve been focussed on looking after our team and supporting our customers. We’ve also been finding new ways to help businesses get back to work as they navigate the new normal.
Our car parks
Since the pandemic took off in Australia, we’ve been working more closely than ever with our building owners and parking listers. We’ve been staying abreast of their COVID-19 policies and procedures to ensure safe and healthy car parks.
Our Enterprise customers
Our Enterprise system is helping businesses with vacant employee parking to increase efficiencies during COVID-19. It generates reports quickly and easily. The reports help businesses investigate whether they are eligible for a reduction in Fringe Benefits Tax or an exemption from the Parking Space Levy. Click here to read more about how your business can save on its car parking spaces during COVID-19.
DIVVY Enterprise features like Book on Behalf and Free Up My Space allow businesses to manage changing employee parking needs as the pandemic evolves. The system uses secure cloud-based technology, so it can be operated from anywhere.
It’s been an opportune time for our Enterprise customers with parking listed for public booking on DIVVY Marketplace. The demand for public parking is on the rise as people return to their workplaces but choose to avoid public transport.
The contactless DIVVY pre-book parking system offers drivers peace of mind. There’s no handling of cash, pulling parking tickets, using payment machines or touching any shared surfaces at all with a pre-booked DIVVY car park.
Optimising bookable assets through smarter technology
For more than twelve months now, our employees have been entering and exiting our offices using contactless DIVVY access technology.
Contactless access has never been more relevant. We’ve seen an increased focus on our technology’s ability to provide contactless access to bike lockers, end of trip facilities, meeting rooms and more.
After witnessing the challenges faced by businesses during COVID-19, we took the booking platform technology that works so well for parking and adapted it for a range of new applications.
Queuing and Contact Tracing Platform
Our Queuing and Contact Tracing Platform allow any business that is visited by the public to communicate with its customers:
- its peak periods
- its busiest and quietest days
- in the event of queuing, the wait time to enter the venue
The Platform makes it easy for customers to plan their visit before they leave home, helping them to avoid busy periods, save time and visit with peace of mind.
The Platform has pre-book capabilities, enabling customers to book their visit in advance to avoid queuing. It allows businesses to control the time, duration and number of customers accessing their premises, and even manage separate areas within the venue. This helps businesses to adhere to venue capacity limits and maintain social distancing within their premises.
Our Queuing and Contact Tracing Platform can also capture visitor contact details quickly and easily. It makes it possible to track interactions and crossovers between visitors and employees, helping with contact tracing should it be required. For those businesses conducting health attestation questionnaires, our Platform makes it quick and simple to collect and store visitors’ declarations of symptoms.
Find out how DIVVY are helping Australian supermarket giant Woolworths take care of their customers with their Q-Tracker tool here.
Back to Work Module
To help businesses safely transition their staff back to their workplaces, we have launched our new Back to Work module. It allows businesses to manage how many staff will be in the workplace at any one time, as well as maintaining a digital record of staff attendance in the workplace.
Staff use the DIVVY app to book a day and time to come into work. The booking parameters – how many staff can access the workplace, on which days and at which times – are set by the business. Just like the DIVVY parking experience, staff use a QR code on their phone for contactless entry to the workplace.
It makes it easy for businesses to meet public health directions and comply with COVID-19 Safety Plans in their workplaces. The module has already been successfully adopted by TOGA Far East Hotels at their head office in Ultimo, Sydney.
We are here to help. For more information, please get in touch with our friendly team at sales@divvy.com.au.
Picture this. It’s 7.30am on a Tuesday. You jump in the car, setting out on your commute to work. Your car or your phone provides you with a warning about an earlier accident on your usual route and guides you on a detour specially designed to avoid the banked-up traffic.
Once you arrive at the carpark, the boom gate lifts as you approach – no pull ticket or access pass necessary. Your credit card will be automatically charged based on the length of your stay and frequency of visits. You’re then directed by your car or phone to the nearest available car space, one that is guaranteed to be the right size for your big electric SUV. Getting out of the car, you approach the lift as the doors open. There’s no need to rush – the lift knew you were coming and it’s waiting for you.
This is what our mornings will soon look like, thanks to the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes a totally interconnected world. It’s a world where devices of every shape and size are manufactured with ‘smart’ capabilities that allow them to communicate and interact with other devices, exchange data, make autonomous decisions and perform useful tasks based on pre-set, but adaptable, conditions. It’s a world where technology will make life richer, easier, safer and more comfortable.
The Internet of Things is simply the logical next step in an evolutionary process. The fact is that the technological building blocks of the IoT—including microcontrollers, microprocessors, environmental and other types of sensors, and short range and long-range networking communications – are already in wide-spread use today.
The IoT, which provides a platform for acceleration of the rate of development of existing technologies further, simply adds one additional capability – a secured service infrastructure – to the evolving technology mix. Such an infrastructure will support the communication and remote-control capabilities that enable a wide variety of Internet-enabled devices to work together, resulting in scenarios like your commute described above. And it is big business – a study by McKinsey estimates that the IoT will contribute between $40 – $100 billion to the Australian GDP by 2025.
Life with the IoT contributes to the rise of ‘smart cities’. A smart city uses data and technology to improve the lives of the citizens and businesses that inhabit it. The ‘smart’ in smart cities is about the ability of numerous interconnected devices to collect data derived from our actions, reactions, journeys, preferences, wants and needs, the products we buy, the services we use, the places we go to and the places we don’t go to, and deliver this data to a cloud location. That data is then distributed to analysts or AI-enabled servers that process the data, draw conclusions and deliver an improved life experience back to us.
There is no shortage of discussion on the possibilities presented by the IoT. From smart buildings to home automation, from fitness trackers to connected gyms and from info-bots at airports to border security search and discover, there are myriad ways our lives could be changed by the mass use of interconnected sensors embedded in everyday objects.
From the perspective of parking, the IoT solutions offer real benefits. Ultimately, it means that people will spend less time in cars. This will contribute to an uplift in productivity and will give people more leisure time. Fewer vehicles on the road means a reduction in traffic congestion, which means fewer accidents and less stress. It also means less pollution. Additionally, less time spent circling looking for a car park means less vehicle emissions.
So, we see that individual customers as well as the greater community benefit when parking is enhanced by the IoT. But what can the IoT offer building owners? Data. And with data comes insight. The days of installing ‘dumb’ parking access control devices are numbered. Property owners are already realising data streams about visitors to other parts of their buildings thanks to IoT integration, and they rightly expect the same level of insight from their carpark.
Car parking in the age of the IoT has the capacity to offer a rich stream of data relating to building tenants and visitors and their habits and needs. This can give our property owner customers the ability to build-to-demand and to design the buildings of the future – truly smart buildings.
As a tech-based company, DIVVY considered how to best deliver our products into the smart cities environment and soon realised that smart cities need not only best-in-class tech devices, but the connectivity that only IoT platforms can provide. We made the choice to build our complete parking access control platform and hardware management software solution in the Microsoft Azure IoT platform. Microsoft’s Azure IoT operating system provides an unprecedented level of security for IoT connected devices.
We have also released a new input / output controller built with a Microsoft Azure Sphere IoT chip included as the secure core of the device. We’re proud to say that this world-first controller was designed and developed in-house at DIVVY here in Australia. We recently released the new device at Microsoft’s IoT In Actionconference in Auckland, which we attended in conjunction with our partner Avnet, a global leader in electronic components, services and embedded solutions. DIVVY is Microsoft’s very first Australian partner to provide an IoT turn-key product with an embedded Microsoft Azure Sphere IoT secure chip.
What is the likely impact on the parking industry as a result of IoT development and the continued advance of smart cities? In a word – collaboration. If other industries are a model for us to consider, then it is likely that in the future each parking company will narrow its focus to its specialty skills – whether they be hardware, software or other – and collaborate with other existing companies in the sector who can provide the complementary skills to make up the whole package.
This may seem unlikely at present as we all rush to protect our market share in the existing environment. However, if we look at the auto industry in the US or Europe, the global aircraft industry, or almost any of the transport industries across the world, we find that major contracts are supplied by collaborative partners that each provide the element that they do better than others and together, they deliver to the customers’ expectations.
Today’s consumer has an unprecedented level of choice. Smart phones and tablets provide access to mapping and aggregation platforms that hand power to the consumer when selecting their transactional partner for every dollar they spend. User experience and customer journey are already the judgement criteria for the goods and services we, as members of the parking industry, provide.
The parking industry’s ability to seamlessly integrate with all of our customer’s touchpoints will depend on our ability to evolve, collaborate and embrace the IoT platforms that will enable us to become an integral part of the core infrastructure of the smart city and an asset to the smart populace.
For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.
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A message from DIVVY’s CEO on COVID-19
I’m sure you’ve been hearing from a lot of your businesses and suppliers you work with this week regarding their plans for COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and things to be aware of. And although this can feel overwhelming, we’re also aware that the more information people have in times like this, the more people are aware and informed of how they can make conscious decisions for their own health and well-being.
At DIVVY and Justbooked, we have implemented a couple of policies that we want to make you aware of so that you have the information you need as one of our building owners, parkers or listers.
We currently have no staff who have reported a COVID-19 diagnosis, however as we feel a strong sense of responsibility for all of our staff and customers we have taken all reasonable measures to protect them in these uncertain times. We have implemented a 14-day quarantine policy from Wednesday 25 February 2020 for all staff who had traveled overseas or were living with people who had traveled overseas. Since actioning this policy, we’ve had some of our people working remotely but this has now been escalated and from Monday 16 March 2020, most of DIVVY’s staff have been asked to work remotely where possible.
Our staff are being encouraged to change external meetings to video conferences unless required to be onsite and those staff who are required to travel to site are following up with contractors and suppliers on their building policies for COVID-19 before travelling to these sites to ensure they’re working a safe environment.
What does this mean for our customers? Right now, this should not have any impact on the services DIVVY & Justbooked provide and we’re working as hard as possible to ensure we deliver our best service for you during these times. We’re taking measures to protect our staff from the spread of infection and we want you to know that our team is working with our building owners and listers everyday to keep up to date with their policies that they’re following to offer a safe and healthy workplace and car park for their building visitors.
If a building reports a case of COVID-19 we will inform all our DIVVY Users who have had bookings in the previous 30 days to ensure they’re notified immediately and can action their own plan. We’ve already had to undertake this process for two buildings that DIVVY offers parking and are monitoring for any future cases.
We thank you for your understanding during this time and if there’s any questions you have about any of this please feel free to touch base with any of our DIVVY or Justbooked team members who will be more than happy to assist.
For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.
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Australia’s Electric Vehicle Future
And it’s closer than you might think. Electric vehicles already comprise 56% of the market in Norway and 25% in Iceland. Britain recently announced a ban on new petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles from 2035. Car manufacturers are embracing the change, with Mercedes-Benz ceasing development of combustion engine vehicles to focus on electric vehicles. Honda has confirmed that they will no longer produce petrol cars in Europe from 2022 and Volkswagen are planning to cease production of petrol cars entirely after 2026.
The future of cars is electric.
With the international manufacture of internal combustion engine vehicles in decline, and no car manufacturing industry of our own, Australia’s electric vehicle future is in no doubt. New figures from the Electric Vehicle Council show that sales of electric vehicles in Australia tripled in 2019, whilst sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles fell by 7.8% in the same period. Despite this increase, electric vehicle sales in Australia were still far lower than in a majority of developed countries, comprising only 0.6% of our market (compared to 15% in the Netherlands or 4.7% in China).
Unlike in the EU and China, the Australian electric car market has not received governmental incentives or support. Despite this, government analysis last year predicted that even without policy support to spur change, half of new cars sold in Australia in 2035 will be electric vehicles. Australian drivers clearly consider the reduced environmental impact of electric vehicles worth investing in.
Electric vehicles are currently more expensive than their internal combustion engine counterparts, and it is expected that there will be a rapid uptake in Australian electric vehicle ownership once their price becomes competitive. The falling price of lithium-ion battery packs is the key factor to achieving price parity with petrol vehicles, and the cost of batteries has been steadily falling since 2010 thanks to global investment in electric vehicle battery production. Bloomberg predicts that price parity will occur in 2025 and electric vehicles will become as cheap as their petrol equivalents.
Another barrier to the adoption of electric vehicles thus far in Australia is ‘range anxiety’, with a lack of public charging infrastructure limiting the uptake of electric vehicles. Groups such as Infrastructure Australia, the government’s independent infrastructure advisor, have been calling for the expedited roll-out of a national charging network to ensure a seamless transition to an electrified transport sector.
The NRMA recognise the direction in which the industry is heading and have positioned themselves at the forefront of the electric car’s future. They have committed $10 million to build one of Australia’s largest electric vehicle fast-charging networks, comprised of more than 40 chargers across regional NSW and free to use for NRMA members. Meanwhile, the transport industry awaits the government’s National Electric Vehicle Strategy, due to be finalised in mid-2020.
At DIVVY we have an ethos of future thinking, and are developing exciting, cutting edge technology to improve peoples’ lives and drive sustainable practices. Here at DIVVY we are excited for the electric vehicle revolution and are actively investigating how best to position ourselves to facilitate this seismic shift in the transport industry and how we can support our current and soon to be electric vehicle-driving DIVVY users.
We look forward to playing our part in Australia’s electric future. For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.