EV charging facts and myths: What 6 years of real data reveals

Myths regarding EVs in general and charging in particular are endemic in social media, some car sites, and certain sections of the mainstream media.

Claims like “You can’t drive long distances!”, “You’ll have to wait hours for a charger!”, “Road trips take twice as long to do!” or “They are city cars only, they won’t work in rural Australia!” are common.

Our household became EV-only in 2019 when we replaced our workhorse Toyota Camry with a Tesla Model 3. We have a garage and can charge at home.

Our driving habits seem fairly typical. On average, our Tesla has covers nearly 11,000 km per year, only a little less than the national average of 12,100 km per year as reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. We live in Sydney, but usually take at least 2 substantial (more than 1,000 km) road trips each year.

Being a data nerd, I mined and analysed our Tesla’s entire charging history – 6 years’ worth. And if something hasn’t happened in those 6 years (for example, we’ve never run out of charge) then the odds of it ever happening are probably pretty low. So what did this analysis reveal?

Fact #1 – People with off-street parking charge at home 80% of the time

It’s difficult to find the origin of this claim – it appears to mostly come from driver surveys rather than hard data. The figure quoted varies between 70% and 90%.

We’ve charged our Tesla 1034 times in 6 years. Of these, 783 were at home and 40 were at work. I combine work charging with home charging since if charging was not available at work, I would have replaced it with charging at home.

Therefore, 823 sessions, or 79.6%, were at home or work. Bullseye on the 80% stat! But the energy shares were vastly different. I have never seen this quantified before.

Even though 80% of charging sessions occurred at home/work, those sessions represented only 48.4% of all charging energy used. Public charging away from home (including both fast DC charging and slower public AC charging) represented the other 51.6% of charging energy. I think this is a more interesting result in the context of planning future public charging requirements.

People who commute daily to a workplace in their EV would have an energy mix more in line with the session mix. But for me, with only occasional commutes to a workplace and ‘normal’ driving around the city, longer trips away from home used about half of our travel energy.

Myth #1 – charging on the road takes hours

On road trips, we quickly became accustomed to charging our car whenever we stopped to do things we were going to do anyway, like have lunch or have a “Stop. Revive. Survive.” leg-stretch.

We have DC (fast charged) our car 128 times. 68 of those sessions were at Tesla Superchargers and the remainder were at Evie, NRMA, Chargefox and BP Pulse chargers.

The median duration of those charging sessions was 29 minutes (i.e. half of the sessions were shorter than this, and half were longer). The average session duration was 31 minutes and the average energy delivered was 31.4 kWh – neatly indicating an average charging rate of 60 kW.

That has been enough charging to comfortably get us to our next destination, and fits in with the natural length of breaks one should have on a long drive anyway.

End-to-end time penalty? Zero. We were stopping anyway, and in almost every case, the car was ready to go before we were.

Longer sessions (40-50 minutes) typically coincided with having lunch. Shorter sessions (15-20 minutes) coincided with morning or afternoon breaks. Only 13 sessions were longer than 50 minutes. Our longest and biggest single charge was 98 minutes (64.9 kWh) on a 50 kW NRMA charger while eating dinner in Cobar, NSW.

What about charging rate? Our Tesla can charge at up to 250 kW although it very rarely hits that speed at chargers capable of delivering it, and really high charge speeds don’t last very long. Cars with a lower maximum charge rate would find their average session duration to be a little longer than ours – but possibly not much longer.

Fact #2 – Destination charging makes a massive difference to road tripping

Cars spend a long time being parked somewhere. Especially overnight when you’re asleep at a hotel or motel. This is the perfect time to charge an EV, either on a dedicated AC destination charger, or using the mobile charger that comes with most EVs that plug into standard 10 or 15 amp power sockets.

On long road trips we always seek accommodation where we can plug in overnight. It makes a massive difference to the rhythm of a journey. In the morning, we can head off immediately without having to stop and plug in somewhere else. We use Plugshare to do this research.

60 of our charging sessions have been at overnight accommodation, and although we always offer to pay for the electricity, 57 of those sessions were free. The average amount of energy delivered per session has been 19 kWh.

In rural and remote areas we are big fans of caravan parks because they are already set up to charge EVs via their powered campsites. We always stay in a cabin, but we’ve never had a caravan park owner refuse us permission to plug in at a powered site. Few caravan parks advertise this or even list their sites in Plugshare, so it always pays to ask.

Our record is charging for 15 hours straight on a 15 amp caravan socket, from 6pm to 9am. We added 331 km of range for $0. Even if a hotel or motel does not advertise EV charging, we politely ask if they have an outdoor power point that we could safely plug into if needed as a back-up or “Plan B” option. A small number have refused, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Myth #2 – You’ll have to wait hours for a charger

In 6 years we’ve had to wait for a charger only twice. Ironically, both instances occurred at the same location, and somewhat more ironically, that location was Wilcannia in outback western NSW.

The NRMA site there has two stalls, but one is a hardware backup only, should the other unit fail. We actually found the situation amusing – what are the odds? – as well as an opportunity to chat to another EV driver covering the roads less travelled.

On both occasions we had lunch at a nearby cafe while we waited – and not for hours, but for about 30 minutes. It wasn’t a big deal.

If there’s any lesson here, it’s that there should never be any more 1-stall EV charging sites built. Even if power has to be shared between two stalls, it’s a better solution and makes a big difference to the likelihood of waiting and the length of any wait time.

This is not to say that EV drivers never wait for chargers. It does happen at peak holiday times on the busiest routes – but long queues for petrol and diesel is common at those times too (we’ve all seen it!). People seem to just accept it as an unavoidable part of travel at peak holiday times.

Fact #3 – EVs can go on long road tips, and to remote areas too

We’ve done three road trips over 3,000 km in length, and our longest to date is 3,800 km. Not a lap of Australia (which plenty of people have done) but we’ve gone to every state and territory except WA and NT, and to some fairly remote places particularly in far western NSW.

Outback travel is definitely possible in an EV. It takes a little more planning, but that should happen anyway even when driving an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle. In smaller towns, petrol station hours are often limited and might not even be open certain days. In contrast, EV chargers are almost always available 24/7.

In rural and remote areas it’s a good idea to have a “Plan B” in case you encounter any fast charging issues. Use Plugshare to research alternative options (like AC chargers) on your route or at your destination just in case the worst happens.

AC options en-route are going to be slower and would add 1-2 hours to a trip, but it’s better than being stranded. So far we’ve never needed to use a “Plan B”.

We’ve also never suffered “range anxiety” although good trip planning goes a long way to preventing that.

Myth #3 – EV charging is expensive

I’ve seen it claimed that EVs offer no cost advantage for people who cannot charge at home – or that they even cost more to run. Analysing our away-from-home charging suggests this is not the case.

First, most of our AC charging away from home has been free, lowering the average cost. We also had a small number of free sessions on NRMA DC fast chargers which did not require payment until September 2023 (although curiously the NRMA charger at Broken Hill, NSW, remained free until June 2025).

Overall, including free sessions, our away-from-home charging has averaged just under $400 per year, or 43.2 cents per kWh.

Excluding all free charging sessions, the average price paid for public/destination AC charging has been 48.6 c/kWh, and the average price paid for DC fast charging has been 58.4 c/kWh.

Figure 1 shows how DC fast charging costs have changed over time based on our paid charging sessions. Prices declined from a high of 65.4c/kWh in 2024 to 60.1c/kWh in 2025.

 

This represents a cost of around 9 cents per kilometre travelled – about 50% less than what a comparable diesel or petrol vehicle would cost, and about 20% less than what an efficient hybrid would cost.

So even if an EV driver had to rely entirely on paid public charging at all times, they should still be paying less than what it would cost to drive a comparable fossil-fuelled vehicle.  Toss in some free destination charging, and the costs drop even more.

Some final tips

Take advantage of opportunistic charging.  We don’t drive our EV until nearly empty and then “fill up” in one big go.  Not only is that the ICE mindset, that approach would actually increase your total trip time.  Nor do we charge to a target percentage, but instead enough to comfortably reach the next destination.  In most cases, the car is ready before we are.

If going to more remote locations, use Plugshare and the charging network operators’ Apps to check a given charger is working and has had recent successful check-ins before setting off to drive to that charger.  We’ve not yet had a situation where a charger was showing as working before we set off, but was not working once we arrived.

If possible, plan your trip to avoid driving at the worst of peak holiday times.  We did this anyway when we had an ICE vehicle.  Depending on the range of your EV, you might be able to get to your destination without stopping to charge at all, and instead charge at your accommodation or at a public charger at your destination.

Make use of your EV’s inbuilt trip planning functions, or use external tools like A Better Route Planner.  Trip planning is getting easier as more public charging networks share their real-time availability in Google Maps and in Plugshare, and more EVs build this capability into their navigation system.