Why we hired a powered camp site for our Ioniq 5 while we rode off on our e-bikes

Recently my wife and I took a week off to ride two of the rail trails in Victoria. Naturally, I was determined to drive down to Beechworth, our starting point, in the newly acquired Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric SUV.

Since there is no roof-rack for the Hyundai and as we – in our late 60s – have moved to e-bikes, albeit it light ones, we needed to have the factory fitted Hyundai towbar and backed that up with a Thule bike rack. The tow bar and the bike rack can be fitted and unfitted quite quickly.

It’s about 620km down to Beechworth from our house and we ended up charging three times – at Goulburn, Gundagai and Barnawartha – arriving at Beechworth with 75% charge and having spent just 63 minutes charging.

The trip time was comparable to similar trips I have done before going electric. Despite the car and the chargers both in theory being capable of 350kW charging, at no point did any of the chargers get much above 200kW. It was the same on my prior long distance trip from Brisbane.

The Hyundai makes a fine touring car in terms of road-worthiness and comfort. Its handling is average, as is the suspension by the standards of some cars I have driven, but the electronics including adaptive cruise control and assisted steering work pretty well.

In my opinion the screens are the right size and fit into the car interior without dominating it. The one disadvantage of the electronics is that every time I put the car in reverse the bike carrier causes the “rear collision automatic brake” system to engage and this is fiddly to overcome.

It’s hard to judge what impact the bikes have on the car’s efficiency, but as typically happens as the battery gets warm from cruising down the express-way at 110km/h and then being recharged quickly by the end of the trip, I was seeing 25kWh/100km a lot of the time and of course the battery is never full.

From Bright, we drove down to Mansfield. There are no charging facilities in Mansfield and the nearest fast charger is at Euroa and it was broken – and in any event was well out of our way. So I was worried.

Fortunately our “Tour de Vineyard” host Bernard came up with the smart idea of renting a powered caravan/camping site for the three days while we cycled from Mansfield to Tallarook via Alexandra. We enjoyed this ride and, by coincidence, ate lunch at a cafe seated next to Sandy McKinnon, author of “The unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow.”

Returning to the car after three days we found it was lonely but fully charged and waiting for us at the very nice caravan park at Mansfield.

The trip back involved the same charging sequence in reverse except we stayed overnight at Yass where we took advantage of the 50kW free charger before heading off to the excellent portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

It’s worth noting that the charging infrastructure in Canberra, the Nation’s capital, is fairly average with one 50kW charger around the main tourist area and a few low power ones.

In general, after trips in the Hyundai from Brisbane to Sydney, Sydney to Victoria return and Sydney to the Hunter I can say that fast charging makes the trips almost as quick as in a petrol car, provided the chargers are working, and they often are not, and provided no-one else is using the charger, which they sometimes are.

The other disadvantage is that you basically end up eating where there is a car charger and the Chargefox network generally doesn’t have the quality of the food as a criterion in where to locate a charger.

For the industry I expect continued tension as both the number of EVs and the number of chargers grow. Reliable 350kW chargers with lots of outlets, hopefully with decent restaurants, are definitely the only way to keep drivers happy as the electric vehicle transition continues.

I have more long distance trips coming up and feel confident enough, but range anxiety is still a thing and there is also the question of the long-term impact on battery life of too much fast charging.

As a footnote, I can recommend cycling the victorian rail trails. I’ve done a lot of cycling but at my age I find the lightweight e-bike has put the joy back into it. E-bikes really are a great way to get around our beautiful countryside and rail trails really bring out the best of it. It was great to see some 5B solar panels used at the Barnawartha charging site.

David Leitch is principal of analyst firm ITK and co-host of RenewEconomy’s popular and weekly Energy Insiders podcast.