Driving electric between Sydney and Melbourne is 37 pct cheaper than petrol, data shows

Australian charging network Evie has released data showing that the average cost for electric vehicles driving between Sydney and Melbourne on their network is 37% less than the average cost driving a petrol vehicle.

Evie says depending on vehicle and charging station, the EV drive between Sydney and Melbourne averaged $87, compared to an average petrol price of $140 for the same distance.

The company has announced its 111th national charging location on Docker Street in Wangaratta, Victoria, about 70km south of Albury.

Head of charging at Evie Networks, Bernhard Conoplia, says the company’s customers clocked up nearly 5 million kilometres over the December-January holiday period.

We know range anxiety over long distance travel is a prominent concern for road trip drivers, but it’s great to see that more EV drivers are on the road and benefiting from reliable, infrastructure, which is only continuing to grow,” Conoplia said.

While petrol stations often put prices up around public holidays to exploit the additional traffic, electric vehicle charging costs remain consistent.

“We know we are about to see petrol prices increase this week and what’s exciting is that Australia is finally in a position that means electric vehicle drivers are benefiting from the consistency of charging costs over long weekends and popular travel periods,” Conoplia said.

Evie says its busiest charging stations during the December holiday period in NSW were Seven Hills, Sutton Forest and Tarcutta. In Victoria, Collingwood, Dandenong, Vermont and Avenel were the busiest while in Queensland, Brisbane airport, Gasworks Plaza, Coochin Creek and Coomera were the most popular.

“Unsurprisingly, what we found over the Christmas period is our most popular sites were along major corridors and between major cities, with traffic distributed evenly over Friday, Saturday and Sunday as annual leave and public holidays meant more cars were on the road,” Conoplia said.

“We predict similar trends this Easter break and encourage drivers to carefully plan their stops, both in preparation for travel and along their journey.”

New network data welcome but still no “uptime” figure

At The Driven we’ve received a lot of reports from EV drivers who are frustrated with the reliability of the broader Australian EV charging network with many reports of charging stations being out-of-order for long periods of time.

“Evie Networks has really focused on network reliability since the Christmas holidays and can proudly share that 97% of our chargers are online, going into this upcoming Easter and school holiday travel period,” said Conoplia.

Although this figure is welcome, it’s important to point out that the “online” figure is different from “uptime” which is the percentage of time the network is operational.

In Australia, uptime rates aren’t made public, but anecdotal reports suggest that they are well below 97% across a number of networks. Network uptime figures will be key selling points for charging station operators as the electric vehicle charging market develops.

Prompted by a survey of EV users who reported frustrations with charging stations being too slow, too crowded or not working at all, the US government recently introduced vehicle charging standards for companies that receive federal funding.

The Biden Administration announced the new standards in February which included a 97 per cent uptime reliability requirement.

Evie says at this stage it has no plans to release its network uptime data.