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Australia’s EV sales are skyrocketing. Our charging infrastructure may soon struggle to keep up
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Range anxiety. Australia is full of wide open spaces. Camping is also a popular Australian activity.
Car purchases are based on the hope of being able to do The Loop, even though most trips are no more than 100kms.
Quite a few EVs are coming onto the market with ranges more than 1000km, but when you get to your destination you have to spend half a day in civilisation waiting for your car to charge back up.
Some EVs even have a “Camping” mode where they go into a low power mode overnight, but they still don’t have the same range the next morning.
When you do run out of electricity on the side of the road, you have to get towed by a diesel flatbed truck (or a diesel flatbed truck with a diesel generator on the back). (Just like all the plebeians with ICE vehicles and no spare tyre). You can’t walk to the nearest servo and get a 10l Jerry can.
EV camping is pretty awesome, though - you can get 240V AC from the car, so you can run proper lights, a fridge and an induction hotplate from the car for probably a few % of the battery per day.
Going more than few hundred km from the closest fast charger would make things uncomfortable, but that's actually a lot harder than you'd think in most areas. Here's NSW for example:
That's only fast chargers, you can also plug in overnight anywhere with a wall outlet for an extra 140km or so. With a modern EV with 500km of range, you have to go a long way out west to find a place you can't drive to and back again. You can almost drive around Australia just going from fast charger to fast charger, the stretch from northern WA across the NT to Queensland is pretty sparse. I looked it up at one point, there's a few spots my short-ish range EV would have to stop and trickle charge overnight.
You aren't waiting for it, though. You've arrived and you're doing whatever you went there for while your car trickle charges. If you need to be fully charged right away, hit a 400kW fast charger, you'll be done in half an hour.
True, but because the range is accurately measured at the bottom and the car gets more and more sluggish as it gets below about 7% instead of just suddenly coughing and dying, you don't tend to play chicken with the fuel gauge the same way. If you're in walking distance of a servo, you can crawl into someone's driveway and beg them to let you trickle charge for an hour or two while you sit there and think about the decisions you made that got you there.
Reflections on crossing the Nullarbor in an EV (Feb 2026)
Our lap around Australia with a family of four in a small electric Dolphin (Nov 2025)
Eh? I can leave my EV parked unplugged for a week and it still has exactly the same main battery charge as before.
Well, at least to the nearest percent anyway.
'Camping mode' is about keeping the car on and running the A/C but with the headlights and DRLs off, so you can sleep in the car. It uses power because the car is running, just not moving. You can run the A/C for days from an EV drive battery but it does take power so you do run out eventually.
If you turn the car off, you lose something like 1 km of range per day on my car because it stays connected to the mobile network so you can control it from the app.
Mine has been sat unplugged in my garage for the last 2 months while I've been overseas and the state of charge has dropped a whole 1% in that time (and I suspect that the actual difference is less than 1% due to rounding).
Yeah, I was wondering. What Camping mode was, but that’s what the owners manual said in my nieces new EV…
I reckon it probably disables telemetrics and trying to spy on the owner.
That's a good point. I didn't experience anything like that while growing up - my dad had a car but we never went on road trips, and my mum never learnt to drive. We lived in the inner suburbs in Melbourne so I didn't really have a reason to drive anywhere in day-to-day life when I could just take a train, tram, or bus. I didn't even learn to drive until I was 26, after moving to the USA.