“Unfit for purpose:” Broken EV chargers spoil the Electric Super Highway

The longest intrastate electric car charging network in Australia is no longer ‘fit for purpose’, according to the secretary of the  Tesla Owners Club WA, Harald Murphy.

Murphy is currently doing his third ‘big lap’, travelling around Australia in an electric vehicle, and has told TheDriven that the chargers on the Queensland Electric Super Highway (QESH) network are regularly unusable.

“On the Queensland Electric Super Highway, I’ve had eight fast DC chargers that were working, and six that were not,” he told TheDriven.

“Any government or organisation can’t just install fast DC chargers in the middle of nowhere, as if they were planting a flag then going on to declare victory and walking away.”

Murphy is currently travelling from Perth anti-clockwise around the eastern states before driving back through the north of the country. This is his third time doing this “big lap” in an EV.

According to Murphy, Queensland was the hardest part of the journey due to the number of DC fast chargers on the QESH out of order, and because the Chargefox app sometime indicated chargers were working, when in fact they were not. He says this gives electric vehicle drivers a false sense of security about where they can charge.

While driving up from Toowoomba this was seen in practice. Murphy wrote on X (formally Twitter) about a driver who he had met who had hired an EV and had come to charge on the DC fast charger, but couldn’t when it didn’t work.

She wasn’t aware she had a type 2 cable in the boot, and without it she would have been stuck.

“Had she not had that cable, she only had 95 kilometres range remaining, which was not enough to go forwards or backwards. Without the type two cable she would have been effectively stranded.”

The QESH first started operating in 2018 using Tritium RT 50KW chargers on the Chargefox network. Since the first 18 were announced, there’s been multiple expansions, and now with Phase 3, the Queensland government has planned 55 fast chargers, around 30 of which are currently in operation.

When Phase 3 is complete, this will make the Super Highway 5,386 km long.

However, these chargers are seemingly not getting regular servicing, and it makes road tripping through Queensland in an EV a less pleasant  experience.

“Installing fast DC chargers is the easy thing to do,” says Harald.

“Keeping them maintained and keeping them reliably available when needed is by far harder. And that is something that unfortunately, it seems the Queensland Government has singularly failed to do.”