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Driving in New Zealand: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Sustainable Practice
7 min readMar 20, 2024

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Kiwis drive hybrids, pay almost $7 (US) per gallon for gas, and rarely stop for pedestrians.

There’s a lot of open road in New Zealand, especially on the South Island, but not a lot of shoulder on those open roads.

Every American traveling around New Zealand should know five important things: first, you need a car outside the big cities; second, they drive on the left; third, gas is about $3 (New Zealand) per liter (almost $7 US per gallon); fourth, drivers rarely stop for pedestrians; and fifth, speed limits are in kilometers per hour (hint: 50 kmh is a lot slower than 50 mph). But this dispatch is for environmental champions — those determined few who are doing what we can to save our planet. From a sustainability perspective, here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly about driving in New Zealand.

The Good: What’s Sustainable About Driving in New Zealand

I’ll start by giving credit for sustainable practices I’ve observed while driving here:

  • lower speed limits
  • hybrid vehicles
  • roundabouts
  • the transition to electric vehicles

Lower Speed Limits

Lower speed limits conserve fuel and save lives. Until the conservative National Party decided to “ accelerate NZ “ (encouraging drivers to waste fuel by driving faster) the highest speed limit in the land was 100 kmh (a little over 62 mph). In my time here so far, I’ve observed that almost all drivers respect that speed limit, probably because most “highways” in New Zealand are undivided roads with little or no shoulder and a single lane each way, so it would be utterly foolish to drive faster. Coming from the United States, where drivers ignore speed limits and throw caution to the wind, it was a nice surprise to see some common sense being exercised on Kiwi roads.

Hybrid Vehicles

The majority of cars in New Zealand are imported second-hand from Japan, which is an interesting sustainability story in itself. A result of this practice is that Toyota is by far the most prevalent brand of car on the road.

2023 vehicle registration data from the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.

Many of the hybrid vehicles Toyota made for the Japanese market in the 2000s are landing here in New Zealand. In the registration chart above, red bars are hybrid petrol (gasoline) vehicles, which far outnumber non-hybrid petrol vehicles (dark blue bars). Sharp-eyed readers will spot the teal bars for battery electric vehicles, most notably from Nissan, Tesla, and BYD (more on that below, under “Electric Vehicles”).

Roundabouts

The roundabout — loved by traffic engineers everywhere but hated by drivers in the United States — makes intersections statistically faster, more efficient, and safer. But you’ll never convince die-hard haters in the USA that they are a good idea.

A roundabout in Picton, a town with lots of traffic but zero traffic lights.

I’m not sure how the Kiwi traffic planners engineered it, but in the northern section of the South Island, from Pūponga to Kaikōura, we didn’t see a single traffic light. Roundabouts keep the traffic flowing smoothly, no electricity necessary. This was a welcome change from Christchurch and Dunedin, which are full of traffic and lights.

Electric Vehicles

From April 2022 to December 2023, New Zealand had a “ Clean Car Discount Scheme,” which imposed extra charges on high-emission vehicles and gave rebates for low-emission ones. That was scrapped as part of the 100-Day Plan put forward by the conservative government elected in the fall of 2023. Despite the change in public policy, enough groundwork has already been laid that electric cars are inevitable: Tesla has started building out its supercharger network in New Zealand and you can find chargers in every nook and cranny of the island nation.

An electric parking spot in Tākaka. The yellow sign to the left of the charger advises drivers to be alert for livestock, tractors, and milk tankers on local roads.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see many battery-electric Nissan Leaf and Tesla cars and to learn that you can easily rent a Tesla while you’re visiting New Zealand. In Dunedin, I saw a BYD dealership, something we don’t have in the United States because our high tariffs keep out cars made in China. The fact that BYD and other Chinese car manufacturers are not locked out of markets on this side of the world means that a lot more affordable new electric vehicles will probably start sharing the road with the aging fleet of petrol-powered hybrids already puttering around the North and South Islands.

The Bad

What’s not sustainable about driving in New Zealand:

  • fuel costs
  • lack of transportation choice
  • narrow roads
  • one-lane bridges
  • right-hand drive vehicles (driver sits on the right-hand side)

You could argue the high cost of fossil fuel and the relatively low cost of electricity is actually a good thing, since it could encourage people to drive electric vehicles. But most New Zealand politicians don’t see it that way — they just threw out taxes on fuel and rebates for electric vehicles. I imagine that Kiwis feel the cost of driving is too high — but they have no choice. Outside of the large cities, there is sparse public transportation and few safe bicycle lanes.

A silver lining: while I find cycling on the narrow country roads in New Zealand to be harrowing, this makes the country’s 23 Great Rides all the more amazing. Bicycle touring on New Zealand roads is daunting for even an experienced cyclist, but the loops of the Great Rides keep cyclists mostly on well-maintained off-road trails through beautiful parts of the country safely separated from car traffic.

New Zealand could be a paradise for road trips by bicycle, except for the fact that their roads are so narrow. It’s very common to round a bend and find a bicyclist holding up traffic because there is no shoulder to ride on and simply not enough room to safely pass. Bridges in New Zealand are even narrower: many are one-lane, where traffic in one direction must stop to allow the opposite direction to pass. I noticed many places where a wider bridge would eliminate a lot of stop-and-go traffic.

Driving on the left side of the road (in right-hand drive vehicles) puts New Zealand in the minority globally.

This map from Rhinocarhire shows which side to drive on around the world.

The extra tooling and logistics required to manufacture two versions (left-hand and right-hand drive) of the same car, such as the Tesla Model Y ( the best-selling car globally in 2023), is a waste of time and effort. For right-hand drive countries, it might be a more efficient use of resources (although it seems dangerous to me and is specifically prohibited by New Zealand law) to do what they do in the US Virgin Islands: import left-hand drive cars and drive them on the wrong side of the road.

The Ugly

Here are a couple of things that are really not sustainable about driving in Aotearoa:

  • the number of cars in New Zealand
  • passengers per vehicle trip

There’s only one country on Earth that tops the United States in cars owned per capita. Yup, it’s New Zealand, with either 869 cars per 1,000 people or 889 cars per 1,000 people, depending on whose statistics you believe. With that many cars, it’s not surprising that the driver was the only occupant in the vehicle in two-thirds of all trips for cars and light trucks.

Final Thoughts: Cars and Culture

Having lived in Japan, the place where most cars in New Zealand spent their youth, I’m struck by how two island countries could be so similar geographically yet so different culturally. Japan loves cars — but it also loves trains and bicycles. Although New Zealand imports its cars from Japan, it seems to have imported its car culture from the United States. Driving in New Zealand feels very similar to driving in America, just a little slower and on the wrong side of the road.

Dispatches from New Zealand

Every other week we’re sharing a dispatch from New Zealand, showcasing interesting sustainable practices that differ from how we do things in North America. The alternate week we’re continuing to publish our series of practical action guides.

Last year, we explored the pathway to sustainable movement, energy, and goods. We’re exploring the pathway to sustainable food for the next few weeks. From the standard American diet to a healthier plant-centered diet and from industrial farming to regenerative agriculture, stay with us on the journey to sustainability.

References and Further Reading

Originally published at https://sustainablepractice.substack.com.

New Zealand
Cars
Sustainability
Environment
Travel

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Sustainable Practice
Sustainable Practice

Written by Sustainable Practice

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Sustainable Practice helps you measure and improve environmental sustainability, to meet current needs in ways that protect our ability to meet future needs.

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