WA EV Network: Reliability, availability & 100 km intervals needed on all major routes

Further to the extensively researched ABC article by Bridget McArthur and to expand on where the Tesla Owners Club of Western Australia a.k.a TOCWA is coming from, we are past the point where EV’s are just a novel niche interest taken up by only a small minority of early adopters. EVs are now mainstream with people buying an EV, hoping in their new car, and, as has been encouraged by the state government, expecting to drive it anywhere across the state, the same way they use their internal combustion engine (ICE) car. While this may be perfectly fine in NSW or some other states, it is not the current reality in WA where this has resulted in people getting stuck, with TOCWA then trying to do whatever we can to help them, sometimes literally driving hundreds of kilometres in the middle of the night.

As the number of new EV owners continues to grow, these situations will only increase if the chargers aren’t reliable, available and situated in one hundred kilometre intervals across all main routes of the state (including the Great Northern Highway route from Perth to Port Hedland).

RELIABILITY AND AVAILABILITY IS CRITICAL AND 100 KM INTERVALS ACROSS THE ENTIRETY OF THE WA EV NETWORK ARE KEY, NOT ONLY FOR GEOGRAPHICAL REDUNDANCY, BUT ALSO TO ENABLE EV’S TOWING CARAVANS, TRAILERS, BOATS, HORSE FLOATS, AND SO ON, TO BE USED IN THE SAME OR IN A SIMILAR WAY TO AN ICE CAR.

THIS IS NOW THE EXPECTATION OF MAINSTREAM EV DRIVERS, AND IT IS WHAT NEEDS TO HAVE BEEN IN PLACE YESTERDAY.

The issue is that even experienced EV owners have run into problems. For instance, we have had a family who needed to stay overnight at Jurien Bay, a day before Christmas, when that charger was down for a week during the busiest period of the year. Halls Creek has been down and not repaired since July that’s over 6 months! Pardoo is also down as we speak, not to mention the issues with charges like Mundrabilla and other sites between Perth and the SA border.

All you need to do is follow TOCWA secretary @harald_murphy on X. He’s currently on his eight lap around Australia, documenting the state of chargers and collecting important data for the benefit of every EV driver. Only three days into the trip, he had already encountered eleven WA EV Network charges that are down with nine of the eleven being the AC backup chargers. See: https://x.com/Ahead_of_Curve/status/1880857756661600645 For an updating version of this table see: https://www.tocwa.org.au/2025/01/19/waev-charging-network-status/

The whole point of these AC chargers is to serve as a safety net for when the DC chargers are occupied or when they are are down. In other words, the AC chargers are the 'lifeboat' backups relied upon when needed most, therefore, if they aren’t functioning, it defeats the purpose of their existence.

What the club is afraid of is a situation where someone has relied on a charger and got stuck and we weren’t able to help. If that person then gets on the airwaves and says they are going to sell their EV and go back to an ICE car, it could set EVs back and undo years of great work, education, campaigning and advocacy by the club and the wider EV community.

The news article and the radio interview has been a last resort. The club has met with countless politicians, bureaucrats, advisors, but people with passion for the project or a will and commitment to get things done have been few and far between. The head of Horizon Power was asked about having electricians trained and on-call to service EV chargers in the major towns on the network back in late 2023 and said they were looking into it. It is January 2025 now, and we have politicians announcing the WA EV Network as a great success and enthusiastically declaring it open and available for anyone to use and described as “all go and recognised by Time Magazine as one of the World’s Greatest Places”. For anyone who doesn’t know better, it implies one can hop into an EV and go exploring the WA outback without a backup charging plan, cables and so on. If the WA EV Network was reliable, we would be more than happy to enthusiastically echo the politicians’ message, congratulate them and sing their praises but doing so with an unreliable network is irresponsible and counterproductive.

The state government has spent over $20 million on the network, (which is back of the couch pocket change for the state government when a single freeway on-ramp costs that much and when just one of the almost 200 WA councils spend that much just on landscaping every single year), but the question is;

How much has been allocated to maintenance and ensuring reliability and availability?

How much has been allocated to expanding the network?

As far as we know, the answer to at least the second question is a big fat zero so far. With an election only weeks ahead, we need to see firm, actionable and funded commitments in this regard.

Politicians often talk about listening to the people, it would be great to get a response from Reece Whitby Roger Cook Rita Saffioti MLA