Road trip

[Geoff (Gold Coast)]

Just completed a road trip from the Gold Coast to Canberra and return. With 2 adults, normal baggage and supplies, aircon on, and cruising mostly at 100 km/h we got a consistent reduced max range of 400 km. This was as I anticipated.

My strategy was to start each day with as close to 100% as possible and then to top up to only around 90% on the road thus avoiding that agonising wait for the last 10%. Of course, there were plenty of charge points on that route so there were no real issues but it might be a different story in more remote locations.

The biggest lesson learned was that charging stations are not yet totally reliable in Australia and the charge providers have not got their acts together. One broken Evie station had a message to say that they were aware of the outage and a repair has been booked for the 6th of June!!!!

The car performed very well.

Cheers.

 

[Extee]

Geoff, that's great.

So what were some of the biggest issues with public charging stations you encountered during your journey? Are you concerned that the issue with unreliable EV chargers will be exacerbated by the rise in the numbers of EVs on the roads?

 

[Darren]

Definitely some improvements required in terms of infrastructure, been lucky just around town public chargers are easily accessible out of town different story or at least some different options in the case they aren't available for whatever reason.

Found personally I'm northern suburbs of Adelaide and really lack public chargers out my way, typically jump in the car of an early weekend morning when the little one doesn't want to sleep but means I need to drive 15 minutes, others are available but @ 60c per kWh I'd rather just charge the car at home.

 

[Geoff (Gold Coast)]

Good morning. Well a few issues that I discovered will only become of concern to me when away from home again on another road trip.

First, the providers have built most of their stations with a CCS 2 type plug on one side and a ChaDeMo plug on the other side. Currently, the only cars that use the latter are the Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi Outlander, and they are few and far between on the roads here. The net result is that almost 100% of EVs rock up to stations wanting to use 50% of the available facilities while the other half sits idle. This is an issue for the manufactures and charge providers to solve.

Second, we were all used to planning our ICE drives knowing that we could fill up just about anywhere. Now, we have to look at where the charging stations are before leaving and also have a back-up plan. For me this is not a problem, but with mum and dad in the front and kids and a dog in the back it could be an issue.