“Hold my beer:” Chris Bowen takes Tesla on electric road trip, but gets ribbed by EV owners

Labor shadow minister for climate change and energy Chris Bowen “ruined” his own weekend on Saturday, taking a Tesla for a 400km drive from Canberra to Yackandandah in Victoria.

“Whenever I talk about electric vehicles in Australia, ” he said, “A lot of people will say ‘Look in Australia the distances are too long for EVs’.”

Finishing a week of sitting in Parliament, Bowen said: “I’m going in the trusty Tesla and thought I’d give you an update as we go on charging, we’re staring with 370kms,” he said.

“We can travel long distances in Australia with electric vehicles. Let’s see how we go, ” he said. The car was a hired one, but Bowen says he is due to take delivery of his own Tesla, under MP entitlements, later this week!

Bowen’s tweets were clearly calling out Scott Morrison’s Coalition government, which in 2019 launched an extraordinary campaign against Labor’s target of 50% new EV sales by 2030, implying EVs would “ruin the weekend” because they aren’t powerful enough or don’t drive far enough – a catch cry that has since been taken up by EV owners far and wide proving that they in fact don’t.

Stopping in Jugiong to use the NRMA public DC fast charger along the way, he finished the 400km trip with ease.

The video, which was refreshing given attitudes to EVs from the federal government (see below), brought out some good-hearted one-upmanship from the EV community, who swiftly posted saying “Pfff! Hold my beer.”

One was Hunter, an Alice Springs local who goes by the Twitter handle of “OutbackEV-Hunter”. Taking to Twitter, he posted a photo of his Tesla Model S which he says he drives from Uluru to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory on a regular basis – a 900km drive both ways.

Another was Jules Boag, whose 20,000km trip around Australia in a Tesla Model S named “Jon Snow” The Driven reported on in 2021.

The Boags’ circumnavigation was only the 13th to do so, and though road trips like theirs will soon be able to be done with a little more easily thanks to innovations like the Biofil chip oil charger being installed at roadhouses in Western Australia, they are an illustration of how capable EVs really are.

Activist Daniel Bleakley, who kicked off a “Miners in Teslas” campaign to show outback workers just how fun driving an EV can be, also took the opportunity to congratulate Bowen on his pro-EV stance, and contrast it with that of the current minister for energy and emissions reduction, Angus Taylor.

Taylor is, in the EV world at least, perhaps best known for producing a transport strategy that goes out of its way to demerit electric vehicles, and scoffing the thought of driving an electric car because he “needs something that can handle the hard roads and the distances.”