What it’s like to roadtrip in an EV in Australia: a beginner's experience

I have never owned an electric vehicle, but for 3 weeks in June I got a loan of a Polestar 2. I drove a couple of thousand km on Australia’s busiest highway. I charged in rural towns and I charged at public chargers in the city in Canberra and Melbourne and experienced the delights of all these types of public chargers. And now I want to share my experience with you.

First up, I have to say, I was hesitant to write this. I have seen the reaction that the EV community gives to pieces like this from EV newbies who write about their experiences. So let’s get the objections out of the way up front. Yes, I chose to do long road trips often in areas with sketchy charger availability! And I didn’t even do it in a Tesla! Yes, I am aware that all you smug long-time EV owners could have done it with much less trouble than I’ve had, but I’m going to tell you about my struggles anyway because I will only have the chance to see these issues with beginner eyes this one time. And a beginner’s experience is important information for those who are working to take EVs from early adopters only to mainstream.

In this article, I’m going to share my experiences during the 3000-odd km that I drove in this car. My itinerary was:

• Sydney to Canberra
• Canberra to Melbourne for a clean energy conference
• Melbourne to Canberra via Wagga Wagga, where I stopped to film a YouTube video
• Canberra to Sydney and back the next day, to see Nils Frahm at Sydney Opera House
• Canberra to Kosciusko National Park for a couple of days of XC skiing
• And the odd trip around town in Canberra to visit clients for work.

I’m going to talk about what worked well, what was a struggle and how long the mythical “range anxiety” lasted for me.

I have been keen on electric vehicles for ages and wanting to buy one for years but a few things have stopped me. First, the last time I bought a car was back in 2016 and it was a 2007 Fabia. It was surprisingly expensive, about the equivalent of $13,000 Australian. That's because I bought it in Denmark and they have very high taxes on cars there, but even so there were definitely no EVs remotely in that price range back then.

I’ve since moved back to Australia and I would reallllly like to get an EV now. In fact I have been delaying buying any kind of car since I moved home over a year ago as I have been suffering analysis paralysis, trying my hardest to make the case for an EV being our next car.

But it’s tricky, because I don’t think my partner and I are your typical car owners. We both ride our bikes to work. In fact I mostly work from home so I don’t commute anywhere most days. I would estimate at least 90% of our kilometres driven come from long trips. We drive to the coast to go surfing, to the mountains to go skiing or mountain biking.

So that’s why I have been stuck for the past 18 months, I am not sure what EV to get or even whether it suits our lifestyle at all. The main sticking point has been to try to figure out what range we need in a car. There is a huge difference in cost between a short range EV like a Mini Cooper with 233km range and a Tesla Model S with 652km range.

So I was absolutely thrilled when I asked Polestar if I could borrow one of their cars to do some work-related road trips, and they said yes! They loaned me a Polestar 2 in the long-range, dual motor option. It’s got a 78kW battery and stated 487km range.

It also has allllll the options that I wouldn’t have thought I needed in a car but now I find I do. Like assisted cruise control, heated steering wheel, and wing mirrors that tilt down when you reverse so that you can avoid gutter rash on the fancy wheels.

I’ll just give a quick rundown on the trips I did in the Polestar, and then talk through some of the more, ahem, "interesting" events.

I drove about 3,000km in total, I made 16 charging stops at public chargers to charge about 600 kWh which I paid $284 for.

Of those 15 charging stops, 6 went smoothly, and 9 had problems or hassles, 3 of those hassles being major.

I picked the car up in Sydney, put my destination in the computer and as the battery wasn’t full, found I didn’t have enough charge to get to Canberra. It suggested I stop at Mittagong, and bonus, that’s an NRMA 50kW charger and those are currently free to use.

When I got to the charger, I was third in line and waited about an hour before I could plug in. I had a great chat with the couple of other drivers there and got a cup of tea at the nearby club. Then my charge up to 80% took about an hour. I could have actually only charged to 60% and had more than enough range to get home, but at that stage I didn’t trust the computer’s estimate so I overdid it. By the time I was done the queue was up to 4 people and probably at least 2.5 hours wait to start charging. In hindsight this was pretty selfish and annoying behaviour on my part! And several others had come and seen the queue and decided to continue to the ultrarapid charger at Goulburn.

First lesson. Free chargers have big queues, and if you don’t want to wait you’d better come at a weird time, not midday on a Saturday.

My next big trip was Canberra to Melbourne. Now, I had naively assumed that on a 660km trip, in a car with 487km range I would need one charging stop. Wrong! For a few reasons. First, the 487km is based on WLTP (Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure) certified range, which “measures the range of a car travelling at an average speed of 30mph in summer temperatures”. On the highway, the car gets less, mostly due to aerodynamic drag being much larger at highway speeds.

Second, you generally don’t drive from 100% battery charge all the way down to 0%. I only left with enough to get me to the first 350kW charger at Gundagai, because I couldn’t be bothered to wait for a full charge at the 50kW charger I used in Canberra the night before I left. I didn’t charge at home because our single garage is full of sports gear and I am too lazy to move it all out of the way.

And there are only a few ultrarapid chargers on my route, a hundred or more km apart. So you don’t get a choice to drive down to say 5% before stopping. You’ll probably stop at the first charger after you reach about 25% charge. And then there are some charging characteristics that mean that charging slows way down from about 80% on, so it would take ages if you wanted to fully charge each time. And in this way, I found instead of one charging stop like I naively expected, it would be three. In this trip, it was Gundagai, Barnawartha and Euroa.

Enroute to Gundagai, I was stressed. I had planned to get there with 20% battery left, but was the car computer's battery estimate telling me lies? I was anxious. But as I went along and the Polestar computer’s range prediction didn’t move that much, I relaxed and I realised that the range anxiety had already left me after maybe 500km total driving. But it was replaced by something that hasn’t left me yet after 3000km: charger anxiety. What happens if the Gundagai chargers were all broken? Or the app didn’t work? 20% charge was not going to get me as far as the next ultrarapid, so if that charger didn’t work out, all plans for my day were off.

It turned out fine, I was the only one at the charger at Gundagai and it worked great. Same at Barnawartha. And at Euroa there were some annoying things happening with the app, but it didn’t add much extra time. The trip to Melbourne took about 8.5 hours which is 1-2 hours more than in a petrol car, depending on whether I would have stopped for lunch and coffees anyway.

I made it to my conference at about the time I planned to, and felt the satisfaction that only an EV owner knows coursing through my veins. Another word for that feeling is “smug”, and it felt great. I had just done an EV roadtrip, and even on my *first try* it was a great, smooth, experience. Twitter was right, all those journalists who wrote about EV roadtrips in the Wall Street Journal and the like were clearly morons. And I’m not. I’m one of you now, smug Twitter EV community!

Yeah, you can probably tell that didn’t last.

A couple of days later I returned to the public carpark to get the Polestar. I hadn’t charged it since I arrived in Melbourne. I chose the carpark based on proximity to my accommodation, not based on whether it had charging. And now I had to find a charger before I could even get out of Melbourne to start my trip back to Canberra via Wagga Wagga.

This was the worst leg of my EV roadtripping. I won’t go through all the details, but it involved 5 charges, 3 of them were problematic and 2 of them very problematic.

At the first stop in Melbourne I had an issue with the charging app not talking to the chargers that took about half an hour to eventually sort out with ChargeFox’s customer service.

At other stops, there were broken chargers, and places where all chargers were in use so I had to wait.

And then was the issue of charging speed. Although I was at a 350kW charger, I was only getting about 60-100kW.

Second big newbie lesson: an ultra-rapid charger doesn’t mean you’ll get ultra-rapid charging.

The first constraint is the car itself. The Polestar can use 150kW maximum, which is a big difference from the 350kW written on the charger. Other EVs can go as high as 350kW, but only at certain levels of charge. Every EV has its own unique charge curve, and the charge rate depends on where you are between 0% to 100% state of charge.

I only got *close* to the Polestart max of 150kW a couple of times. Usually I was getting around 80kW, and it ranged between 50kW to 110kW most of the time. And this is in the middle of my battery’s charge, I was already aware before getting the car that charging slows a lot as you get close to full.

But the biggest problem I had on this leg of my road trip was primarily a problem of user error, I will admit. My last charge stop before Wagga, I charged to a little over 80% because I needed to get to Wagga and then to Gundagai before I would see another 350kW charger, and 83% should have gotten me there with 10% remaining. I should probably have given myself a bit more of a buffer, but I was now running late for my appointment due to the delays from the first couple of chargers. So I didn’t.

On the way to Wagga, I missed the suggested turnoff because it came earlier than I was expecting. According to the Polestar trip computer, I should have turned off to do the last hundred-ish kilometres on b-roads, but I stayed longer on the highway. There was no difference in the ETA between the original route compared to the highway route, but as soon as the computer rerouted I lost 5% expected destination charge due to more distance at a higher speed than the route I should have taken. If I wasn’t running late, I might have slowed down at this point to save battery but by now I was running quite late and at risk of missing out on my YouTube filming appointment altogether. I did make it to Wagga in business hours and had a very short tour of Greatcell’s research and pilot Perovskite solar cell manufacturing facility before they closed up for the day.

So that was a bit disappointing to not get more time there, but not as disappointing as when I realised that I was now estimated to get to the Gundagai charger with 4% battery remaining. And as the temperature was dropping below zero I worried it would actually be less than that. I didn’t want to get stuck at night in the middle of absolutely nowhere between Wagga Wagga and Gundagai. Instead, I detoured to the only non-Tesla charger in Wagga, another one of those free NRMA 50kW chargers. By now we know that free chargers mean queues… when I got there I found a Tesla charging over 80% with no driver in sight. I debated the ethics of disconnecting it since I think normal etiquette dictates that charging above 80% on a public charger is poor form.?After 30 minutes, it was at about 92% and I was close to attempting to disconnect, though I later learned that’s not even possible with a Tesla. But then the owner came back. A lovely Finnish guy who was horrified he’d kept me waiting and informed me that the Plugshare app has a messaging feature and that he had checked in and noted that he was nearby and would come back to disconnect if anyone needed the charger. Lesson learned, and Tesla-driver stereotype smashed.

Third lesson: the Plugshare app is a must have

I stayed at that charger just long enough to get enough juice to get me to Gundagai because a full charge at 50kW is pretty painful to endure. The charge at Gundagai was fine and I eventually got home quite late. All up that day the trip took at least 4 hours longer than it would have in a petrol car. This trip nearly had me swearing off EVs for future road trips.

Other trips I did in the Polestar were recreational ones with my partner. ?We went to the mountains to go xc skiing for a couple of days. We didn’t have any problems with massively reduced range in the sub-zero temperatures, and just a small amount of stress waiting for the free NRMA charger in Jindabyne. During dinner I had to keep running out of the restaurant to check if a spot was free yet and hope that when it did come up that I hadn’t missed the spot to someone who happened to show up at the right time to snaffle it.

We also did a trip to Sydney to see Nils Frahm play at the Opera House. I’d learned a few things about EV roadtrips by then, so to minimise the pain, my partner cleared space in the garage so we could fully charge at home before we left. And then I spent a while researching to find a hotel in Sydney we could charge at. But the hotel turned out to only have Tesla chargers. And they were in a nearby public carpark and had been “ICEd” with petrol cars parked in those spots anyway. Later in the evening we went back and found a normal wall outlet we could plug into, but it didn’t give us enough charge to get home, and we had to stop at a shopping mall charger the next morning before we went home.

All up, in the roughly 3,000km I drove, timewise I spent a little over 10 hours at public chargers and dollars-wise I spent $284.33. Let’s compare that to an internal combustion car, and the Polestar 2 is based on the same platform as the Volvo XC40 so we can use that as a comparison.

I spent $284 and in the XC40 at June Petrol prices I would have spent about $493, so that’s a 40% saving in the Polestar.

Timewise though - that is a lot more time charging than I would have spent at petrol stations. However, in the vast majority of cases I was doing something I would have been doing anyway while it charged. Whether that’s a food or toilet break on the roadtrips, or leaving the car charging while I went shopping with my Mum, or recording this article as a YouTube video (coming soon!). It ranged from no big deal at all, like on the first leg of my trip, through to an absolute nightmare that added more than 50% to the total trip duration.

So anyway, that’s my newbie EV roadtrip story. Before I spent these 3 weeks driving an EV, I had a really different idea about what needs to be done to accelerate the transition from internal combustion cars to EVs. I thought that battery technology still has a way to go, that we need more range at a lower cost to address range anxiety. And, I mean that would be nice. But that’s far from the main challenge. In Australia at least, it’s the charger network that makes EV roadtrips painful. My range anxiety dissipated very early on as I learned that the Polestar computer could be trusted. But the charger anxiety never went away.

This is probably a good time to point out again that the things that EVs do well they do *amazingly* well. Do you drive mostly locally and have somewhere to charge at night? Then there is nothing but EV-upside for you, you’ll never go to a petrol station again. Likewise if you do a lot of trips where you can get there and back on a single charge.

But for people like me, who do mostly long trips - and also to a lesser extent those who can’t charge at home - what we need is better charging infrastructure. It needs to be reliable and that means there need to be enough chargers at each location that you won’t get stuck waiting for hours. It means that the chargers that do exist need to be reliably working, including the apps.

If EVs are to go mainstream, we need to get all this sorted as a priority. Government support to help more people buy EVs is only going to exacerbate these issues if we don’t tackle charging at the same time. If we get the order wrong and support a lot more people to buy EVs without simultaneously taking care of all the charger issues, we’re going to end up with big queues and very frustrated drivers.

Oh and that brings me to my final complaint. While we wait for all that stuff to be sorted out, could someone please come up with some sort of queueing system?? It is tolerable to wait 30 minutes or longer for your spot in a queue to start charging if you can go do something in that time. But if you have to wait at your car, watching the person charging and make sure you let anyone else who comes along know that you’re next in the queue… I’m sorry I just feel like it is a matter of time before we start seeing fisticuffs at public EV chargers.