Aussie Enviro

Who is this idiot? Seems like he wanted to not like EVs from the start.

I entirely agree about public charging. It should be tap and just like gasoline. This bullshit with apps and registration needs to stop. We shouldn’t be defending it.

But most people most of the time charge at home; I’ve never actually needed to use a DCFC (because my second car is gas and the EV is kinda shit for long distances for other reasons). The article seems paid for by Oil.

I worked out I spend 3 1/2 minutes “fuelling” my car per week. It takes me an extra 15 seconds to plug in or unplug my EV each day and I have 200 miles of range every day. A “full tank” 80% costs about £5 (under $7)

If I really really need it, I can put a whole £6 worth in and get nearly 250 miles.

How long does it take to drive to a petrol station, fill up, go into the shop, queue, pay, and get back to your car? And how much does it cost?

Most people will probably charge at home, but if you live in an apartment or are going on a long road trip, you might struggle to find one that's available.

Ok, that's not a bad point. But he's glossed over it far too quickly. The fact that 99% of the charging should be done at home is not an insignificant fact. A paragraph about the need to encourage apartments to be fitted with EV slow charging options would not be amiss, after emphasising the initial fact that if you can do it, EVs actually require way less effort to charge than ICE cars do.

There’s no tap-and-go option

You mean this? https://evie.com.au/autocharge/

FWIW he's pretty clearly talking about that particular charging station at this part. Though once again, the lack of contextualising does the article an immense disservice. He should have explained that other providers are plug-and-pay, and perhaps advocated for more of them to be done that way (or, dare I say it, suggested the possibility of a legislative requirement of such?).

So what did he do? Like a typical petrol driver he:

But for this experiment, I charge from 46 to 100 per cent. It takes about an hour.

This is immensely frustrating. Once again, he explains it away in a way that seems reasonable on its face. "Oh yeah, I know you're not supposed to do that too much, but I wanted to see what would happen if you did. I told you that, so it's fine." But it fails to properly contextualise. Unless you're driving between two chargers far enough apart (with no other chargers between) that you need to go all the way to 100% to be able to make it, you should never, ever, ever charge to 100% at a public fast charger. Charge to 100% at home, maybe, before starting a road trip. But charging to 100% is bad for long-term battery health, in addition to taking an order of magnitude longer to do. It's literally slower to fast-charge to 100% than it would be to have two separate stops where you charge to 80%. And the two separate stops are better for your health and safety while driving long distance anyway! Why does the article not explain any of this‽

This is the thing, if I know he’s done a shit job on something I know about, how badly are they writing about topics I don’t know about?

Nah don't worry about it! I'm sure they're absolutely fine in every other subject.

The ABC is a master of right-wing propaganda. They're nowhere near as blatant about it as other media sources, such that they're able to retain their undeserved reputation for being leftist. They cleverly promote right-wing talking points through articles like this one that just conveniently leave out (or even more sneakily, touch upon just enough that an ABC editor can say "yup, we fulfilled our editorial policies 4.4 Do not misrepresent any perspective and 4.5 Do not unduly favour one perspective over another" by pointing to the technicalities that they did indeed add those one-sentence caveats while failing to properly provide the due weight of context.

It's the same, for example, with all their articles about anti-Israel protests. They'll throw around terms like "anti-semitic" and "hate speech", and hide behind claims that they're just quoting the Government or quoting some Israeli lobby organisation. But they won't properly contextualise the history and meaning behind phrases like "from the river to the sea", they just let the pro-Israel lobby's opinion stand unchallenged, or (when forced to correct themselves) barely challenged. I also vaguely recall having some criticism about their coverage of Queensland's ebike laws, though I can't remember anything too specific.

these stories are written on an agenda. If he just plugged in and charged in 20min., wouldn't get the clicks from the boomers.

This is the thing, if I know he’s done a shit job on something I know about, how badly are they writing about topics I don’t know about?

I feel that. There have been a couple of articles by science communicators or journalists I've respected, but tempered my awe after they say something negligent on a topic I'm more familiar with.

One trivial but illustrative example was a science communicator you'd all know informing the public about secure data wiping (great! don't sell unwiped devices online, some people do search for those) but recommending a 35-pass Gutmann wipe, which Gutmann dismisses in their own epilogue to their paper, "In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive [since it covers everything back to 1970s methods]". It will basically just put unnecessary wear on the disk and waste your time.

But even then, I haven't had examples like this, where you've been able to utterly demolish their opinion piece like that.