Tesla has dominated the EV landscape in Australia over the past few years. This has not only included selling tens of thousands of electric cars but also delivering reliable best-in-class charging infrastructure in the form of it’s supercharger network.
In recent months, questions have been raised about the future growth of the supercharger network after Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, let go of the entire supercharger team globally which consisted of over 500 people.
Here in Australia, that hasn’t stopped the network from growing. Over the last couple of days, multiple new supercharging locations have been spotted across the country.
The first sighting was in the suburb of Chatswood in New South Wales. Here, 9 new V4 superchargers had been spotted inside a shopping centre.
This site appears to be not far from completion, providing a new charging location for hundreds of local Tesla and potentially non-Tesla owners.
Another new charging location was spotted in the town of Hay. It’s just over 700 km west of Sydney and 400 km north of Melbourne.
This site has 6 V4 superchargers in an open car park with 5 of the 6 bays being a standard perpendicular to the charger. The last bay has a drive-thru charging setup, making it easier for EVs towing a trailer to charge.
The third charging site is in Campbellfield, Victoria, located 16 km north of Melbourne. This location has 6 V3 superchargers and is found just off the main Western Ring road and close to the Hume Highway.
In recent weeks, another supercharger site under construction was also spotted on the outskirts of Brisbane in the suburb of Springwood. That site has 6 V3 supercharger stalls and is in a shopping centre car park south of Brisbane.
These four sites combined add another 27 high-powered chargers to the network with each charger being capable of delivering up to 250 kW.
On top of that, last week Tesla announced that it will be upgrading several of its NSW locations to have V4 supercharger stalls. These would help accommodate for non-Tesla EVs since the V4 chargers have a longer cable, making it easier to reach charge ports of some non-Tesla EVs.
It’s unclear if all the upgrades being spotted are part of the current charging station contracts or if these are part of Musk’s plans to invest over $US500 million into the supercharger network this year alone.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.