this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Australia’s EV sales are skyrocketing. Our charging infrastructure may soon struggle to keep up (theconversation.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Fuswoo@lemmy.world to c/australia@aussie.zone
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[–] zurohki@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.