Blog

Aug 25, 2023

Electric vehicles will not “end the weekend”. My 10,000 kilometre road trip shows why

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Former minister Sussan Ley told us electric utes don’t exist. Ousted prime minister Scott Morrison warned us electric vehicles would end

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

Former minister Sussan Ley told us electric utes don’t exist. Ousted prime minister Scott Morrison warned us electric vehicles would end the weekend. But they were oh so wrong.

I’ve just driven one of the first commercially available electric utes on a six-month trip through regional Australia. Driving more than 10,000 kilometres, visiting 25 communities and talking to hundreds of regional Aussies, here’s what I learnt about how ready regional Australia is for electric vehicles.

Ben Lever took this LDV eT60 electric ute on a 10,000 kilometre road trip through regional Australia.

When I climbed into the giant LDV eT60 electric ute in my home town of Ballarat, I discovered its power outpaced many petrol cars – the instant torque electric motor meant it was smoother and quicker off the line. As a former petrolhead, I loved the gurgle of a petrol exhaust, but the melodious note from the ute at low speeds turned many heads, especially in Tamworth where they’re no strangers to musical displays.

People might think EVs don’t have enough range to deal with regional Australian distances, but my electric ute road trip busted that myth. Planning my charging points was straightforward, even with this early model ute which had a shorter range than some electric cars.

That said, there are still areas needing government attention to get regional Australians better charging infrastructure. If one charging site is out of order, it’s important to have another one nearby – not 100 kilometres away. In my journey that was only an issue twice, when people left their cars in charging bays, blocking their use for others.

Throughout my summer-to-autumn trip, I dealt with plenty of rain and plenty of sunshine, but most places where I charged the ute had no weather protection. At truck stops, the petrol pumps would be undercover while the electric chargers were often at the edge of the car park. I found the solution – some chargers are shaded by solar panel canopies, providing weather protection while generating clean energy. An obvious win-win for governments would be to regulate that chargers and car parks have solar-shaded covers to generate more clean energy for electric vehicles.

One of the biggest upsides to an EV road trip was the savings. The whole trip cost barely a few hundred dollars for high-speed charging, compared with the $2700 it would have cost if you calculate fuel at roughly 27 cents per kilometre at $2 a litre. Not only are EVs great for the hip pockets, they’re also better for local economies. As you charge, instead of pouring money into your engine, you can pause to eat at a local cafe or restaurant – injecting money into the local economy. The more chargers we put in small towns like Wangaratta or Karuah, rather than just at highway petrol stations, the more benefits will flow into those country towns.

In Ballarat, Shepparton, Yackandandah and Taree, other EV owners kindly used their cars for electric-powered barbecues to provide a feed. Our ute didn’t have this vehicle-to-load feature, but it’s available in overseas models. And that’s the biggest problem – we’re at the back of the global queue for EVs. Australia is the only developed nation (apart from Russia) without a mandatory fuel efficiency standard. Fixing this would increase the variety and supply of vehicles and drive prices down through competition.

Another thing I discovered: EV batteries are huge – the ute could power your house for a week – but most can’t discharge that power to your home or the grid yet. We need the government to ensure we have Australian standards for two-way chargers so we can unlock our batteries on wheels to charge our homes. Several farmers told us they’d love an EV battery backup. During blackouts and climate disasters such as bushfires, it could save lives.

All these issues are fixable. More than anything, we need to get a strong fuel-efficiency standard to unlock the supply of electric vehicles and that will unlock the benefits of EVs for more Australians. Meanwhile, we need the government to build more chargers in regional towns, with multiple bays, regulate for solar-shaded chargers and solar-shaded car parks and sort out industry standards so we can use our EVs to power our homes and tools.

Regional Australians will benefit most from cheap-to-run EVs, but we need the right policies so we’re not left further behind.

Ben Lever is the clean transport campaigner for Solar Citizens, and co-pilot of the Electric Ute Roadshow and author of the report Five Recommendations for Accelerating Clean Transport in Regional Australia.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.