Is the real problem with EV adoption in Australia a lack of infrastructure or ignorance?

Readers Blog

The Federal Energy and Environment Minister, Josh Frydenberg, stated recently that a lack of national EV charging infrastructure is one of the main hurdles for the growth of electric vehicles in Australia.

From where I sit as an EV owner, I believe it’s probably not. The hurdle is more likely our understandable ignorance as to how the majority of EV owners can or will charge their cars.

Conventional cars have become incredibly fuel efficient. Generally, we fill ’er up maybe once a week – often less. And when that little fuel light comes on again, we head to a nearby servo, pull in, fuel up, queue up to pay and goon our way. Fortunately, it’s only ten or so minutes out of a busy week.

Now think about that EV driver wasting time driving way out of his or her way to find one of the very few charging stations… Hoping to heaven’s sake it’s available and then hanging around for the many hours it takes to recharge. Only, it just doesn’t happen that way – for most EV users in any case.

It’s a new day The modern EV driver wakes up in the morning with their car already charged and ready for that new day.

Depending on the car it will have 200 to perhaps as much as 500km of range available. The bottom end of which more than covers nearly every Australian’s daily driving needs.

Indeed, the EV driver doesn’t usually need to find somewhere to charge during a normal day and instead arrives home, plugs in the car and goes inside. The next day the car is ready and charged again. All the infrastructure required for daily driving is in the garage.

Think about it this way, if a petrol fairy dropped by every night and topped up our cars with enough fuel to drive 400km for our daily driving, we would likely never need to visit a servo again.

Where things become more challenging for EV owners is if they are apartment dwellers or use inner-city on-street parking. Obviously, it’s a bit hard to wake up in the morning with a charged car if you can’t plug it in.

But that’s where the shopping centres, hotels and restaurants come into play – many of which are installing EV chargers, in part, to attract customers. Plug in at a hotel and, depending on the type of charger, you could add 200km of range on the car whilst having dinner. Weekly grocery shopping, there’s another 50-100km. Park the car at a public car park with a charger – there’s a full charge while you’re at work.

By way of example, Circa 1860 Accommodation and Source Dining in my home town of Kyneton (Vic) have together installed four EV chargers to attract customers to their businesses.

Thinking about the petrol fairy again — if he or she never turned up at home but put five litres in the tank when you’re at Woolies, 20 litres when you’re at the pub and filled ’er up when you were working, you’d still never normally go to a servo.

What if I can’t find a charging station on a road trip, you say…

There’s petrol stations located in every suburb and town where you can buy whatever fuel you need. Although as little as a decade ago, it was difficult to get 98RON outside of the larger suburban stations.

Sometimes on a road trip you’d need to fill with lower octane and drive carefully until you could get the good stuff again.

Fortunately for EV owners, electricity is electricity. An EV can charge off practically any source of electricity, from the ubiquitous 10 amp power point to 15 amp RV points at caravan parks, 20 and 32 amp three phase at show grounds and workshops and the various public charging networks. It is almost impossible to not have somewhere to charge.

Yes, the time it takes to charge varies depending on how much electricity can be supplied. If there is a bigger issue here it is that EVs all use different plugs and to charge an EV driver needs the right adapter.

No problem, organizations (and car clubs like the Tesla Owners Club of Australia) run free adapter loan programs so members wishing to go off the beaten track can borrow the adapters to complement their travels.

Think about it — every single power point can charge an electric car. That’s a lot of infrastructure already built.

Road trips may take longer, but why would this matter? If you’re going to road trip to Alice you’re probably going to want to take your time, stop regularly and take in the amazing scenery. If you’re time poor, you’ll do what we all do – fly.

One of the great misconceptions is that we Aussies need to regularly cover vast distances. The truth is the average Aussie drives less than 100km a day. Way less… It’s a distance easily covered by every current EV.

Perhaps it is our ignorance of how EVs charge and how we actually use our cars, and not a lack of infrastructure, that’s really slowing EV adoption.

Mark Tipping is a Tesla Model S owner and committee member of the Tesla Owners Club of Australia