Asked to name the single biggest challenge in commercial motor insurance, Anthony D'Oca did not pick pricing, capacity or catastrophe exposure.
"If I was to have to pick one out of 4 or 5 key factors, it would be in particular the evolution of electric vehicles and their significant acquisition of market share," said D'Oca, general manager commercial and people risk at QBE Australia Pacific.
27,089 battery electric vehicles were sold in Australia during August 2026, representing 24.9 per cent of the entire new vehicle market and a 171 per cent increase on August 2025, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries. It was the highest monthly battery electric total the country has recorded.
D'Oca put QBE's own fleet exposure above that.
"We're now seeing 2 out of every 3 vehicles in our fleet, in new fleets, being electric," he said.
The underwriting problem is not the vehicle. It is everything that has to happen after a collision.
"And that leads to significantly greater complexity along the supply chain, not only on acquisition of vehicles, but parts, repair, repair networks and other supply chain challenges, particularly given that a lot of the supply chains are not in Australia any longer," D'Oca said.
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That dependency has been measured. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA), citing research by UK automotive specialist Thatcham Research, recorded that electric vehicles cost up to 25 per cent more and take 14 per cent longer to repair than internal combustion vehicles, in its industry paper on electric vehicles and insurance published in May 2024. The same paper recorded the absence of a local battery repair network, meaning most batteries removed from electric vehicles need to be returned to the manufacturer overseas.
Those findings are two years old and describe a market where battery electric vehicles held a fraction of their current share. The constraints have not eased. The volume of vehicles exposed to them has multiplied.
Repair duration is where this reaches a client. A vehicle waiting on an imported component is a vehicle not generating revenue, and for an operator running to a schedule the downtime cost can pass the repair cost well before the claim settles.
It also makes two things underwriting variables that were not previously treated as such. The first is location, because a fleet operating at distance from a certified repairer carries transport time on top of repair time. The second is vehicle choice, because lead times differ sharply by manufacturer and a fleet standardised on a recently arrived brand has a different exposure from one that is not.
Neither appears in a fleet's claims history. Both can be established before a renewal rather than after a loss.
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D'Oca said approximately 85 per cent of QBE's motor business is written through brokers, and that QBE has taken its response upstream rather than repricing after the fact.
"Also work with the OEMs or the original equipment manufacturers to understand their supply chain plans and how they're going to provide not only the vehicle flow, but also the parts, how they're going to enrich their repair networks and the level of knowledge and technology to improve the repair experience for our customers," he said.
He was direct about where the consequence of a slow repair lands.
"Longer lead times on repairs usually means that the insurer... picks up the reputational damage rather than the actual supplier," he said.
That is a commercial argument as much as a service one. An insurer carrying reputational cost for a delay it did not cause has reason to build repairer capacity before the claims arrive and D'Oca said that work runs through QBE's own repairer network. Each electrified vehicle entering a commercial fleet likely carries a repair profile that the fleet's own claims history does not yet describe.
