Record broken as EV enthusiast charges around Australia in just 10 days

Secretary of the Tesla Owners Club WA and frequent road tripper Harald Murphy has broken the record for the fastest ‘Big Lap’ around the country in an electric vehicle.

The whole trip, which covered 13,554 km in his Tesla Model Y took just 10 days.

“I had a plausible pathway to doing the entire lap in 12 days,” Murphy told The Driven.

“But as I was undertaking the lap, things got better and better. There are a few extra chargers that were available in Queensland, which was awesome, and in the end, I managed to do the entire lap in 10 days.”

To him, this shows there’s no reason that EVs can’t be used for long or remote road trips.

But it is important to know that this isn’t Murphy’s first electric big lap. His first trip in the EV was in the Tesla Model X back in 2018, where he took 19 days to do almost the exact same route. Last year in the Tesla Model Y it took 14 days.

He also took a slow ‘Big Lap’ with his wife earlier this year which took 31 days. However, this was marred by Queensland chargers that he said at the time didn’t work and were ‘unfit for purpose’.

This forth trip there were significantly less issues – mostly due to a new instillation of Tesla Superchargers, and the greater availability of other fast chargers.

This trip was by far the fastest, starting in Perth on November 17, going North towards Broome, Darwin, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and then along the Nullabour back to Perth on the 26^th.

“I’m really happy with it. I don’t think there’s any need for anyone to push for shorter than that. It just gets exponentially more difficult – you’ll need two drivers and you almost have to drive 24/7 and that’s not really the point of these,” Murphy told The Driven.

“Virtually everyone I spoke to said that their next car they wanted it to be an EV.  It was well away from back in 2018 where people thought it was some weird curiosity and something they would never ever contemplate.”

“It’s a paradigm shift in people’s attitudes to EVs.”

He’s now pushing for fast chargers at 12 regional locations to fill in the ‘black holes’, to better cover the whole of Australia. These including Barkley Homestead, Elliott, Katherine, Adelaide River and Camooweal.

While some people might stay home for a bit of rest and relaxation, Murphy, who told us he’s a “glutton for punishment”,  thinks he’ll undertake a few more laps before those fast chargers are added.

When The Driven spoke to him for this story, he was driving an electric truck, preparing to help another EV enthusiast Jon Edwards drive that EV around the country next year.

And, for those who want to know, some of the fine details of his trip:

Total distance 13,554km

Average efficiency 182Wh/km.

60 charging stops including a final home charge.

21 AC charging events

24 DC charging events

15 Supercharger supercharging events.

Murphy says all his overnight charges were intentionally AC even if DC was available, so that the didn’t have to waste time sitting in my car when he could use it more effectively sleeping while the car was being charged on AC!