Evie Networks charging a Tesla Model Y. Source: Evie Networks
Access to public charging in Australia should not be a barrier for most Australians to choose to own and drive an EV. I’m sure many readers are already fuming at this statement and I am certainly not out to excuse the occasions when you pull up to a broken charger, have to queue or meet some other frustration.
However most of the time, for most people; the installed base of public charging available is sufficient to Australian drivers to meet demand.
I’m also not arguing to slow down the investment in charging infrastructure, far from it, if we want to decarbonise our transport system then equitable access to the critical infrastructure is essential and construction needs to stay ahead of growing demand.
Busting the myth that the lack public charging is an impediment to most people owning and driving an EV is an urgent priority for our industry. There are some key stats that make Australia uniquely well positioned for a rapid uptake of EVs.
Firstly, Australians don’t actually drive very much. Sure, we live in huge and sprawling cities and like to dream about the massive road trips we’d like to do, but the numbers don’t actually bear this out.
Australians drive on average 13,800km a year, compared to 18,000km a year in Western Europe and 20,200km a year in the United States. When we go long distances, we fly. In 2024 Melbourne to Sydney was the 5th busiest flight route in the world.
The other factor in our favour is how we live – 70% of Australians live in single family homes and another 13% in townhouses; and whilst not all of these dwellings will have garages and driveways the vast majority of them will.
So if the average Australian drives 38km a day and returns to a home with a driveway or a garage (and often has solar PV as well), why are EVs not selling? Edgecases and outliers dominate the narrative, no one likes to think of themselves or their needs as average and there is no denying that there are some things that are harder to do with an EV.
If you have an ICE vehicle in the driveway, you can pull out of the driveway, and without much of a thought get to almost anywhere in Australia the roads go. If you’ve driven an ICE car, have you ever asked it’s GPS to plot a route and had it lay out which petrol stations to stop at?
My own experience working for a CPO (charge point operator) and in conversations with other CPOs shows that public charging behaviour groups people into two broad categories; those that charge daily and weekly – people who drive for a living and apartment dwellers that have little alternative to a weekly public fast charge, and those that charge rarely, often around Summer or Easter, the big Australian driving holidays. There’s also a massive cohort of people you don’t see in the public charging records, who just don’t charge in public because they don’t need to.
People tend not to anchor to the mundane daily utility of their cars but the edge cases where a few times a year they take a trip. The curse of individual vehicle ownership, the reason why it is so difficult to get people to transition is that its pretty easy to meet 100% of you needs, relatively economically with one vehicle, even if it pretty unsuitable for urban driving.
Why else would my neighbour head out every day in a Landcruiser decked out with recovery boards and shovel? Melbourne potholes are bad, but not that bad.
It’s only reasonable that someone considering replacing their ICE vehicle, that can meet 100% of their needs, transition to a mobility solution that also meets 100% of their needs; but it doesn’t have to delivered in the same form. We can get creative with how we meet driver needs.
How about we underwrite people’s edge case trips by including a car rental or car share voucher for when they need to travel out of their comfort zone, need a different vehicle or just want to try something else? Perhaps people will use it, or perhaps they will learn they can make it to the beach and back with confidence in their EV.
We also need to solve for outliers – the growing minority who live in appartments and the inner cities without access to home charging and for the high km drivers for whom daily access to public charging is a priority need. For the inner city dweller, I would ask the question, ’How much does your mobility actually depend on a car’.
I was liberated from car ownership way back in 2007 and a combination of bikes, public transit, ride share, car share and car hire has met my needs ever since. Even as the other modes have electrified, It’s a frustration that those car share hires are rarely electric and there is definitely a problem to be solved there.
Of course that doesn’t work for everyone who lives in the inner city and relies on a car to meet their daily or weekly mobility needs; many inner-city and apartment dwellers do make EVs work, whilst provision in apartment buildings is still poor and retrofitting can be an expensive challenge, many drivers make it work by fitting a public charge into their weekly routine.
The problem here is one of equity, it’s a lot cheaper to charge at home, so apartment dwellers are penalised by their reliance on public charging.
Of course, none of this means investment in charging should stop but we need to make it more effective, more sustainable and deliver a return for investors whilst still delivering ubiquitous, accessible and equitable critical infrastructure. Many complaints centre around the paucity of the provision of chargers in regional centres, often a single 50kW charging head.
These are crucial to giving confidence to prospective EV drivers, often in an outsized way with some segments, but they are currently a terrible investment for those that are building them. For many of those regional sites, and even many suburban ones, revenue is not even close to covering operating costs.
At the other end of the spectrum, the best locations for charging the locations that will generate a return by serving the most drivers are also some of the hardest to build in. If there is a problem to be solved it is ensuring that CPOs can deliver the growth in charging capacity that we definitely will need by delivering the return on investment that makes it easy for them to raise money.
Getting people into EVs is about giving people confidence and engaging them in a conversation about the transition. The best thing about an EV is not having to think about fuelling beyond plugging in at home.
The worst thing about an EV is heading out into the unknown, unsure if you can make it back. Solving this is crucial to solving Australia’s EV uptake problem. It won’t be solved simply by building more charging but by changing how people think about how they access mobility.
Ed Lynch-Bell is Principal at Second Mouse, dedicated to building more sustainable energy tech and mobility products, services and businesses. Ed is also a co-host of the Melbourne and Sydney EV Meet-ups, bringing the e-mobility industry together.
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I think EV owners would be happier if repairs were a bit speedier. The Evie charger in Mansfield was reported to be out of order over a week ago and I see on their app it is still showing as unavailable. The nearest fast charger is about 50km away!
We are now the proud owners of a Fiat 500e. The review sites all describe this as only suitable as a second car because of its small battery (37.5 kWh usable). But, like a lot of people, we only plan the occasional long trip while the vast majority of our driving is around town.
So, we might need the occasional extra 15 min stop when we do travel. Who cares? It’s such a small issue in the overall scheme of things. Balanced against home charging from our solar panels and $250 annual costs for services, we feel we are a long way ahead.
Seeing that gorgeous little Fiat parked in our driveway still brings a smile to my face. Who cares if the back seat is a little cramped for adults? It fits our grandkids and dogs so we are happy.
I drive around 35,000km a year.
That is WHY I got an EV.
A standard range one even.
We’re much the same, over 70,000km in two years, much of that Melbourne to Coffs and return, but also Flinders Ranges and beyond. Off to Adelaide next week, and up to Port Douglas later in the year. Hate to be paying for petrol or the servicing for these trips.
High fixed costs of ownership (insurance, registration etc) mean that people are incentivised to have one car only. Although that is good in a sense, it means that the one car has to be capable of doing everything. That's why someone might buy a Landcruiser. It will tow the boat or horse float the couple of times a year it needs to while managing everything else too - like transporting one person to work.
But for most people a small EV will be a far better option nearly all of the time.
Accommodating heavy traffic at EV charging stations on public holidays, if the fleet is largely EV is something I have difficulty imagining.
It isn't the day to day that is the problem, not at all. It is the one day of the year that exceeds all the others.
Many people will keep driving the same vehicle until something will replace exactly what the icev does or they can't afford petrol and feel charging is too inconvenient. Many people are worried that batteries might catch on fire or degrade too quickly. Until these concerns are fixed, we won't get the majority into evs. Evs that can battery swap will get a lot of the majority into evs, 2.5 minutes to swap, quick highway stop, no need to charge at the apartment and convenient at night or when raining. Batteries are checked with every swap. Cheaper than petrol. No need to worry about battery degradation, also easier to sell. Less fast charging which means less battery degradation. Also swapping can be automated, you could be doing something else while the swap is happening. Hopefully coming to more countries soon.
EV range has been growing 10% per year and the new high voltage architectures allow lightning fast charging. It'll be plug and play all the way, charge in a few minutes, no need for national networks of expensive swapping stations.
I have to agree for the most part. Having home charging & solar definitely makes EV ownership a no brainer. I cover 50,000 km each year in a BEV & actually enjoy heading out into the country. Having not experienced a cross country drive in a non-Tesla EV, charging with other brands would perhaps concern me more than it should as that remains an experience unknown to me.
This view makes sense to urban early adopters with home charging like me, but unfortunately is unlikely to hold much sway with mass market buyers who need to be assured they can charge anywhere they could fill up, and to the 30% of Australians who can't access charging at home.
A good first step would be to model the distribution of fast chargers on the distribution of petrol stations in Australia. There are only 6,500 petrol stations in the whole country and many are near each other so if you were to build one charging site for every square km in Australia that has one or more petrol stations you'd get the same geographical reach for EVs from around a couple of thousand installations. At this point govt subsidies could be directed towards sites that fill out such a network.
I reckon the best boost to everyday community charging would be to allow the electricity distributors who own poles and wires to install pole chargers all over the place. It's under trial but I believe it needs a change to the regulations so they can act as retailers. Distributing chargers widely would minimise need for new lines and if they had cheaper charging rates in the daytime it would also help firm the grid through load shifting.
The market will take care of supplying chargers where there is high demand and where destination charging attracts customers to businesses. I noticed Chargefox chargers getting installed at lots of Woolies locations, and it seems really smart move for them to move towards guaranteed charging wherever there's a Woolies.
In the meantime it's down to government to sort out the geographical reach issue for both long distance travel and local AC charging. It will cost a drop in the ocean compared to the benefits of saving households a few thousand dollar a year each and keeping the $35 billion we spend on petrol each year inside the Australian economy.
People are emotional, not rational, so buy vehicles based on their 1% edge case or hypothetical usage rather than the 99% day to day reality. Massive SUVs are sold as family vehicles, while hatchbacks are sold as city runabouts. It doesn't matter that my hatchback has taken my family to Tasmania and back.
"Australians drive on average 13,800km a year, compared to 18,000km a year in Western Europe and 20,200km a year in the United States. When we go long distances, we fly. In 2024 Melbourne to Sydney was the 5th busiest flight route in the world."
Western Europe is probably skewed by the fact more people use PT, walking and cycling as a primary mode of transport and 1 car per household is the norm. Many households in major cities would be car free. So the people have have one, really need one to get in from their satellite towns to the city, or to do significant commutes that cannot be achieved by PT.
Australians will have 2 or 3 cars per household, so the cumulative km across a household is more like 28,000 km a year.
Add to this - cars per capita in Europe 0.52 cars, Australia is up around 0.9 cars.