Won’t most EV users be home charging anyway?
What percentage are really looking for distance road trips?
More dumb analysis, FFS wake up!
That’s the brilliance of it - electricity retailers are already offering really cheap overnight rates to take advantage of baseline power supplies.
At most, I can’t see us ever doing more than one massive road trip per month that would require public fast charging, and more realistically it would only be once a quarter.
So ~4-8 fast charges a year, and ~350+ days of home charging.
That math works out great, as long as everyone’s 4-8 fast charges a year are spread out so on average the demand is spread out evenly throughout the year. But if Australia is even a little like Europe, that won’t be the case, and most people will try to take those long distance trips during the summer holidays. Obviously during those peak demands charging rates will be restricted to avoid overloading, but rich consumers (who can buy electric cars) have become such babies that they can’t or won’t understand this technological reality.
It’s more about actually having enough chargers than having enough energy, at this point at least. The fast chargers along the east coast got hammered last Christmas/New Years and there will be more demand this year.
This claim was made in every country against EVs. Is there a single one where it held true? Sure, modernizing the net costs money but it seems that even the most buerocratic countries stayed in top of it.
And I promise you, capital has been mad about it ever since
Yeah, but no problems with datacenters somehow?
Rip apart the data centres infrastructure and turn them into massive-scale sodium battery storage systems and cover the facility in solar and wind turbines as a gen-bat system
It’s not about the energy, it’s about actually having the gear installed for people to plug into. DC fast chargers are something like $50k to $100k each, and they need big fat grid connections or buffer batteries. Especially if there’s a few of them next to each other.
Do that same with parliament house
Add Reggie’s to the list. That guy is a dick.
How many new datacentres are in Australia though? I didn’t think there were many new ones being built.
Well yea, 100GW to one building is way easier then pulling 200kW at 30 different Coles shops in Vic and qld.
/s
To be honest you’re right, and globally if the data centre is built they’re having delays with getting hooked up.
Which means they will be running diesel generators as a “backup”.
Tell that to your Dodge RAM driving mate who uses ChatGTP to make all His decisions for him every day. The reason diesel is so expensive is because of the Data Centres.
If we can completely transition away from ice it will be interesting to see the knock on effect of improvements to physical and mental health when we’re all not breathing in fumes all day long. I know it’s only one aspect of how unhealthy car culture is. Edit: spelling.
Unfortunately all the microplastics from tyres will only get worse due to vehicle mass increasing
Only if we continue to buy absurdly large vehicles. Electric hatchbacks and sedans are lighter even with battery weight included.
And if people won’t change on their own, then tax the vehicles based on weight.
My petrol hatchback car is 900kg
The closest electric replacement is 1500kg to 1600kg
…with more room inside.
The difference is not that big
2025 byd dolphin (big battery): 1658kg
2025 Corolla Ascent Sport Hev, 1.8l: 1430 kg
You’re still comparing a hybrid to an electric lmao
2025 corolla gts: 1510kg (ok, its awd)
I’m surprised EVs didn’t take off sooner in Australia, given the fact that 40% of Aussie homes have solar panels.
I’m Aussie but am living in the USA now. Last time I visited Australia, I leased an EV from Sixt and it was so much cheaper than an ICE car because they included free Chargefox and Tesla supercharging.
Range anxiety. Australia is full of wide open spaces. Camping is also a popular Australian activity.
Car purchases are based on the hope of being able to do The Loop, even though most trips are no more than 100kms.
Quite a few EVs are coming onto the market with ranges more than 1000km, but when you get to your destination you have to spend half a day in civilisation waiting for your car to charge back up.
Some EVs even have a “Camping” mode where they go into a low power mode overnight, but they still don’t have the same range the next morning.
When you do run out of electricity on the side of the road, you have to get towed by a diesel flatbed truck (or a diesel flatbed truck with a diesel generator on the back). (Just like all the plebeians with ICE vehicles and no spare tyre). You can’t walk to the nearest servo and get a 10l Jerry can.
EV camping is pretty awesome, though - you can get 240V AC from the car, so you can run proper lights, a fridge and an induction hotplate from the car for probably a few % of the battery per day.
Going more than few hundred km from the closest fast charger would make things uncomfortable, but that’s actually a lot harder than you’d think in most areas. Here’s NSW for example:
That’s only fast chargers, you can also plug in overnight anywhere with a wall outlet for an extra 140km or so. With a modern EV with 500km of range, you have to go a long way out west to find a place you can’t drive to and back again. You can almost drive around Australia just going from fast charger to fast charger, the stretch from northern WA across the NT to Queensland is pretty sparse. I looked it up at one point, there’s a few spots my short-ish range EV would have to stop and trickle charge overnight.
Quite a few EVs are coming onto the market with ranges more than 1000km, but when you get to your destination you have to spend half a day in civilisation waiting for your car to charge back up.
You aren’t waiting for it, though. You’ve arrived and you’re doing whatever you went there for while your car trickle charges. If you need to be fully charged right away, hit a 400kW fast charger, you’ll be done in half an hour.
When you do run out of electricity on the side of the road, you have to get towed by a diesel flatbed truck (or a diesel flatbed truck with a diesel generator on the back). (Just like all the plebeians with ICE vehicles and no spare tyre). You can’t walk to the nearest servo and get a 10l Jerry can.
True, but because the range is accurately measured at the bottom and the car gets more and more sluggish as it gets below about 7% instead of just suddenly coughing and dying, you don’t tend to play chicken with the fuel gauge the same way. If you’re in walking distance of a servo, you can crawl into someone’s driveway and beg them to let you trickle charge for an hour or two while you sit there and think about the decisions you made that got you there.
Some EVs even have a “Camping” mode where they go into a low power mode overnight, but they still don’t have the same range the next morning.
Eh? I can leave my EV parked unplugged for a week and it still has exactly the same main battery charge as before.
Well, at least to the nearest percent anyway.
‘Camping mode’ is about keeping the car on and running the A/C but with the headlights and DRLs off, so you can sleep in the car. It uses power because the car is running, just not moving. You can run the A/C for days from an EV drive battery but it does take power so you do run out eventually.
If you turn the car off, you lose something like 1 km of range per day on my car because it stays connected to the mobile network so you can control it from the app.
Mine has been sat unplugged in my garage for the last 2 months while I’ve been overseas and the state of charge has dropped a whole 1% in that time (and I suspect that the actual difference is less than 1% due to rounding).
Yeah, I was wondering. What Camping mode was, but that’s what the owners manual said in my nieces new EV…
I reckon it probably disables telemetrics and trying to spy on the owner.
That’s a good point. I didn’t experience anything like that while growing up - my dad had a car but we never went on road trips, and my mum never learnt to drive. We lived in the inner suburbs in Melbourne so I didn’t really have a reason to drive anywhere in day-to-day life when I could just take a train, tram, or bus. I didn’t even learn to drive until I was 26, after moving to the USA.
But how often are you doing it? If only there’s a way for people that wants to use those ICE cars for long distance to have access to them only during the period of time when they need to, and then for the rest of the year when they don’t need it it can be used by someone else who need it instead.
I know a lot of people with two car households; one 4WD Ute for camping and towing and one EV for more mundane local tasks.
I am single and don’t have the luxury of a second car. If I want to go bike touring, mountain biking or just hiking, I need an ICE vehicle to get me to the beginning of my adventure.
I also like 4WDing and borrowing a 4WD that may get damaged on the trail is not a great idea.
tesla needs to disappear off of that list
Combustion engines charge their own batteries, while they run, why don’t evs run on a dual battery system, if that’s not possible during operation, and be charging one, while the other is in use. Probably space and efficiency of the battery, I’m guessing? Can they just use a separate kinetic energy system recharge in motion? I genuinely wonder if this wasn’t done to prop up the fossil fuel / power industry in the first place, because how many electric cars did they buy just to bury.
Combustion engines burn more fuel to charge the 12V battery, they don’t just make free energy.
You can have two batteries and use one while charging the other, but you’ll use up the first battery much faster. You can’t get more energy by transferring energy back and forth between two batteries just like you can’t get more water by pouring it back and forth between two buckets. Using an electric motor to drive a generator to make more power also doesn’t work. Neither does pointing a flashlight at a solar panel.
The first two laws of thermodynamics are, more or less:
- You can’t win.
- You can’t break even.
See also: Perpetual motion machines
Absolutely, but also electrical byproduct or waste can be utilised. Old incandescest light bulbs has heat as wastage. The car is in motion, that motion could be utilised for energy creation. Literally hydro electric energy is utilising the kinetic energy of the water moving to move the rotor over the stator. I don’t see why the wheels can’t be a rotor, the axle a stator. I assume space issue.
The motion of the car isn’t a byproduct, it’s the main thing you’re using energy to produce, and harvesting that same energy means you need to spend more energy than you’re getting back otherwise the car stops. That’s how regenerative braking works.
You could harvest waste heat for energy generation, but it’s hard and there isn’t really enough of it to bother with in an EV. They do dump heat gathered from the drive unit into the A/C system to save energy on heating the cabin though.
These are called “range extenders”, and I’ve had some limited experience with them using a loaner BMW i3 a decade ago.
The issue is, that it’s a bit of a “worst of both worlds” scenario: you’re always lugging around d the weight of two propulsion systems, impacting electric range. You also lose a tonne of storage space as a result, and there can be reliability concerns with stale fuel etc. if you don’t use the extender often enough.
Toyota’s hybrids have been around for ages, and are a more “practical” implementation of this principle - but ultimately it’s all a bit of a fool’s errand in trying to rationally account for irrational range anxiety.
We’re expecting delivery of our first EV a little later this year, but just knowing that all we need to do is plug the car in when we get home and wake up to a “full tank” the next day saves us so much time and hassle having to go to a servo every week.
Ultimately as battery technology is rapidly improving, and will continue to do so as global demand skyrockets. The resulting density improvements, mean that EV range will surpass regular ICE vehicles in the next decade or so.