Anxiety sets in
I live on the east coast of Australia in our biggest city, Sydney. I have rooftop solar, a home charger and PLENTY of local chargers I can use whenever I need to. This is my first EV Road Trip. My first time venturing outside of that comfort zone. Although I’m not venturing into the vast Australian Outback, like Crocodile Dundee or anything like that, the chargers suddenly seem a lot further apart as soon as we get out of the big cities.
You can see on the map that there are plenty of chargers in the city, many of them have the two lightning bols showing they are fast, but as we move out of the city and up the highway, those chargers suddenly start to thin right out. Most of those single lightning bolt icons can be discounted, as they’re too slow for most road trips, unless you’re staying overnight, or settling in for a decently long meal. There’s even a little orange spanner icon showing one of the chargers is undergoing maintenance.
Everyone who buys an EV has this moment. It’s time for the first road trip and range anxiety kicks in. It wasn’t a big trip, but we were out of our comfort zone. We didn’t have the home charger and the solar to back us up. What if something went wrong? It was only a few hundred kilometers and the car should be able to make a return trip in one charge. Planning? Yes, I did some planning. I planned and replanned several times in fact. To say range anxiety was a concern was a major understatement.
What if we got there and the local chargers didn’t work. What if we got delayed or detoured? Then what? To alleviate the concerns I made sure we had plenty of charge to start with. I would normally charge to 80% maximum to preserve the battery (there will be another blog post about battery preservation later), but on this occasion, we made sure we had 100% before we left for our very first EV road trip.
The EV Road Trip
The plan was myself, my wife and youngest daughter would leave our home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, pick up our eldest daughter on the other side of Sydney and attend the Pink concert at Sydney’s Olympic Park. This was the easy bit. Pink was great and we left the concert in high spirits around 11:30pm. We then spent over an hour getting out of the carpark.
Sitting there in an electric car, knowing we weren’t burning fuel was actually quite relaxing. We left Olympic Park around 12;45am with 82% battery and got on the highway to Newcastle, arriving at our accomodation a bit after 2:30am. At this time of night, there was no charging to be had at our accomodation, but with 45% left in the battery, we weren’t too concerned. The next day my youngest was competing in a dance competition, and we didn’t really need to go far. During one of the breaks, we ducked up the road to a local fast charger. The wife and kids went off to Officeworks, while I engaged in conversation with other EV drivers at the charger.
Charging
There were 4 charge bays, 3 x CCS and 1 x Chademo, with 2 cars occupying 2 of the CCS charge bays, so we pulled in to the spare CCS bay. Another driver quickly alerted us that this charger wasn’t working for them. We tried anyway and sure enough, it failed. So we waited about 10 minutes for one of the bays to become available. Soon enough we got on the charger and were able to get ourselves back up to 80% battery in about 12 minutes at a rate of 75kW.
A couple more cars came in, and there was a short wait for them, but everyone was happy to stand in the sunshine and wait their turn, chatting about our various vehicles and experiences. Nobody used the Chademo bay, very few cars still use this technology in Australia. Maybe it’s time to upgrade this bay to have 2 cables, so CCS users can utilise the 4th bay as well as Chademo users.
Thankfully we were in no hurry when we needed to charge and the short wait wasn’t a big deal. About 25 minutes all up, and we were able to get back to the dance competition for our youngest’s next dance. We got some school supplies and slushies at the nearby seven-eleven and eveyone was happy. Two first places in the dance competition made the trip really worthwhile and the trip home was pretty uneventful. We got home about 9pm on Sunday evening with 45% battery and plugged in to the home charger so I could get to work on Monday morning.
The result
Did I need to have range anxiety? Probably not! We could have theoretically made it home without charging in Newcastle, but I’m not keen on getting down below 10%, and I think others in the car might start to freak out. Will I have range anxiety on my next EV road trip? Quite probably yes, but will it be OK? Almost certainly yes.
Overall, this was a confidence booster, and we’re now planning a much longer trip. We’ll be away for over a week, with ferry trips and exploring the island state of Tasmania. Stay tuned, there will be plenty of updates on that one.
