Kakadu Road-trip by EV: sensing grandeur, navigating limits

Kakadu National Park is vast – any way you think about it. Located at the Top End, it is Australia’s largest terrestrial national park and home to a whopping 30% of Australian bird life.

Something of the grandeur and gravitas of this place begins to make sense when James, a young Bininj man, budding lawyer and Park Ranger, guiding us around the rock art at Burrungkuy, relates a conversation with his uncle, who is one of the traditional owners of this part of Kakadu.

James to his uncle: ‘some people say there have been humans here 60,000 years. What do you think’. Uncle says: ‘Our ancestors have been here for ever!’ 60,000, infinity, what’s the difference, anyway? James concludes.

Iconic but not necessarily ancient, Anbangang rock art gallery, Burrungkuy

Kakadu is one of just four places in Australia (and just 38 in the world) that the United Nations lists as ‘world heritage site’ under both natural and cultural categories.

We are here in the last week of August, when Wurrkeng (the coolest season) is giving way to the start Kurrung – in mainstream ‘Aussie’, it’s almost spring. About 200,000 tourists visit Kakadu each year – not a great number considering the vastness of the park – nearly 20,000 sq kms. So, even in high tourist season, even on the main road that takes you into Jabiru township, from the gates of the park and back out to Highway 1 at Pine Creek – a total drive of 230 kms+ – you are likely to see more animals than cars, especially in the early morning, including some non-natives, like feral pigs, but plenty of natives too and birds who might just be passing through.

Birds at dawn, Mamaluka Wetlands

Getting to the sublime via the ridiculous

Kakadu might feel remote. But it is just 150 Kms from Darwin to the gates of the national park. And another 100 kms or so will bring you to the little settlement of Jabiru with various accommodation options, or Cooinda with slightly more expensive options.

Darwin has excellent fast chargers. Just south-east of Darwin, Palmerston is your last fast charger until you get back to Katherine. This means minimally 540 kms, plus the driving inside Kakadu park. All this calculation is bringing on an attack of range anxiety for Co-Pilot – so we stop to top up at Palmerston. Unnecessary.

And talking about the ridiculous, at Humpty Doo, you cannot miss the world’s only boxing crocodile.

Humpty Doo petrol station, just as useful to us as its boxing croc

There are AC chargers available both at Jabiru and Cooinda. So there is no real cause for range or charger anxiety. You can charge your car overnight if you are happy to pay for a powered caravan site or you can charge on a 3 phase plug at an hourly rate of $10 at Aurora Kakadu Lodge.

Where in Kakadu

Unless you spend your lifetime here, or fly over it for a bird’s eye view, you are never going to see most of Kakadu. Criss-crossed with rivers and marshes, much of the park is not passable by any terrestrial vehicle most of us would drive.

We decided, even before setting off from Perth, to put some limits on this road trip. We go only where the road can take us – and that too is limited by the capacities of a 2 wheel drive.

But our stars are in alignment in Kakadu. Just in the two-and-half days we have here, Co-Pilot finds three marvellous tours with indigenous guides, of rock art sites and a crocodile habitat.

Crocodiles at Cahill’s Crossing

But Jim Jim, the famously high plunge-waterfall is beyond our reach – 60 kms on gravel roads marked 4WD only. I feel like I am missing out on something really important, I say to our guide James, who is clearly wise beyond his years. He says: ‘Ah, you can miss out on Jim Jim for ever. It is just a trickle now – if you get there, it might disappoint. Come back in rainy season and it’s a 200 metre high wall of water. Blows your mind. Then again, the road there might be washed out! But you are enjoying now, yes?’

Let me see: breakfast with the birds at Mamaluka, fishing with crocodiles at high tide at Cahill’s Crossing, two open air galleries of rock art, old, new, undated, by artists named and unknown. And we finish up at Ubirr with sunset on the rocks. Yes, thanks. Enjoying – now!

Exmouth: Electripping the Northern Way to Ningaloo

Sunrise at Vlamingh Head Lighthouse, Exmouth

Many West Australian beaches are ‘world famous’ for their sunsets. But there can’t be too many places in this wide country (4000 kms east to west) where you can see the sun rise and set from exactly the same spot.

Exmouth is a tourist mecca for many reasons. Its population of 3,500 can soar to 20,000 in high season.

About 15 kilometres north of the town centre, the Vlamingh Head lighthouse sits on a tiny 74 metre-high hillock. At sunset, cars are cheek by jowl all the way up and down its curly driveway, jostling for a space to see the sun go down.

At dawn, as I silently slip EVie into place, there are just 3 cars, hoping for a cloudless horizon.

At 6:42, the sun peeps out of the strip of ocean, just visble beyond the east coast of the promontory. For a little time, it seems to glide up the horizon, coppery, like a harvest-moon. Then, in a flash, a glowing orb leaps out of the waters east of the pointy beachhead, floods the narrow wedge of land, sends a beam of light into the water across the headland, and dazzles everything in its wake. Sun rise at Ningaloo – priceless…

The drive from Karijini to Exmouth went precisely to plan, with three dependable chargers on the way: Tom Price (25 kw), Pardoo (50 kw) and Nanutarra (150 kw). There is a more direct route from Tom Price to Nanutarra, but with a long unsealed stretch, it is a lot slower.

The little town of Exmouth has everything you need to explore Cape Range National Park, including a bank of four fast chargers, convieniently located in the car park at the tourist information centre.

After sunrise, you can slide quietly back down from the lighthouse towards the beach and follow the turn of the only road, heading south, along the line of the Ningaloo reef, into the Cape Range National Park. This is the northernmost section of the Ningaloo World Heritage area.

First stop after day-break, the Observation Bird Hide in Mangrove Bay. To someone whose idea of mangroves are the fearsome Sunderbans in Eastern India, this one looks like a beautiful miniature – almost manicured with a clear lagoon in the middle surrounded by the distinctive mangrove root system. Bird calls fill the morning air. But mostly, the birds are hiding or darting past at the speed of light, and the jumping fish are just silver flashes in the pond.

There is so much to do along the 88 km stretch of road from the charging station in Exmouth to the Yardie Creek Camp site at the southern end of Cape Range Park. There seems to be a beach for every watery activity ever imagined. You don’t need to be brave enough to swim with the whale sharks (I wasn’t), or pay some exorbitant amount for an organised activity further out to sea (but plenty available if that is your pleasure).

You can spend the hours of high tide at Oyster Stacks, snorkling amongst the corals with hundreds of magnificently coloured fish; walk around the Mandu Mandu Gorge trail, then cool off riding the current at Turquoise Bay – and, don’t panic when a huge fish or sting ray floats in on the same current right underneath you! In season, you can see whales breaching from beaches on both sides of the promontory. At Mauritius Beach, at sunset, they might put on a mesmerising show with an ensemble of surfers as corps de ballet – it’s magic if you happen to be there!

When tired, just idle on any beach in the park and marvel at the massive waves crashing on the horizon – breaking against ‘Australia’s largest fringing coral reef’ and ‘the world’s only large reef located so close to a landmass.’

Yardie Creek Campsite is the furthest from Exmouth fast charger

Cape Range Park provides a perfect opportunity for camping with an EV as you are never further than 88 kms from the WA EV fast charging station in Exmouth. Every one of the 500 wilderness camping sites is booked out 6 months ahead, the day the bookings open! We missed out.

Yardie Creek Road is a smooth and scenic drive: with the ocean flashing in and out of view on one side, and on the other, the gentle rise of the Cape Range (just over 300 metres at its highest), closing in and sliding away. It all seems too accessible.

Yardie Creek Road beteween the ocean and the hills

And then suddenly it is not. The sealed road comes to an abrupt end at the Yardie Creek camp. To get further into the Ningaloo National Park you need wings or sails or at the very least, a 4WD.

A final walk takes you up the Yardie River, which like the road, comes to a stop suddenly, without quite reaching its natural destination, the ocean – it just pools there, its journey suspended…

Later, talking to some locals I learn that the river only reaches the ocean during rare major flood events. Perhap this is metaphor, a warning, about longings: the river’s for the ocean and mine for the way ahead, which leaves the sealed road, changes to gravel and a few metres ahead, into sand dunes.

But surely, we are not foolish enough to think we can go wherever we want, whenever we want? We know: every vehicle necessarily has its limits, every road some end.

Inside Karijini: a perfect drive through an ancient land

Joffre Gorge at sunset, from the Eco Retreat side

In 2015, a headline in Conde Nast, perhaps the trendiest of travel magazines, said ‘Electric Car Road Trips are the next big thing’. Ten years later, here in outback Western Australia, my fellow grey nomads still look quizical or dismissive, at best curious, when you join a conversation about cars, costs and distances – what else would you talk about on these open roads?

Watching your first sunset with a bunch of other tourists at Joffre Gorge, just 5 minutes walk from your glamping tent, you are just grateful to have this view.

All the way from Cheela Plains I have had a Bangla folk song buzzing in my head:

গ্রামছাড়া ওই রাঙা মাটির পথ আমার মন ভুলায় রে। That red earth path out of the village is making me forget myself, says the refrain.

A dingo welcomes us soon after we turn into Karijini Drive.

If you are driving an EV, you are most likely to enter Karijini from the western side having fully charged up at Tom Price. Your first look out, Mount Sheila, its table-flat top, surrounded by memorial stones, invites a contemplative silence. Makes you appreciate the silence of your car, without an engine that roars or heats up!

Mount Shiela Lookout, soon after you turn into Karijini Drive

If like us, you have booked at Karijini Eco Retreat, back your car into the driveway of your glamping tent and enjoy your expansive back-yard all the way to the horizon.

It is hard not to gush when you talk about Karijini. Even its name is sweet on your tongue, as if belonging to some fairy-tale princess in an exotic land. Use a little imagination (we grown-ups like to call it planning) and just like that fairy tale, Karijini will let you into her magic.

Fully charged up at Tom Price, incidentally at 747 metres elevation, the ‘top town’ in Western Australia, we rolled along 80 kms of beautifully sealed, mostly flat roads, into the National Park, with more than 300 kms still in the tank.

With one exception (Hamersley), the gorges and pools that draw visitors to Karijini are within 50 kilometres of our accommodation. So, there is plenty of range to take in all the main attractions.

You park on the top of the gorges, then walk to the look-out. Or if you are like me, you will want to walk down the marked and graded trails, into the waterways below. ‘Whatever else you do, do NOT miss the Fern Pool’ says a lovely attendant at the Karijini Visitor’s Centre.

Fern Pool, Karijini, not a Hollywood set!

The only problem is, every one of the gorges is mesmerising. Even the carparks provide photo opportunities, like anthills as large as our car and taller than basketball players, and tiny Spinifex Pigeons which won’t stay still for a photo!

Spinifex Pigeon male showing off at the top of Dales Gorge

And then there are the walks, the edgiest down into Weano, which goes from level 4 to level 5 as you scramble and wade and when necessary swim and eventually squeeze between rock walls to the red stone and grey-green waters at the bottom.

You’ve got to be there to know how good that feels!

Final entry to the pool, just wide enough to squeeze through

And before you know it, your three days are gone. And you realise that Hamersley Gorge will take more time and planning.

Having gone to most of the places that any car may go (and beyond where only feet will do) in Karijni National Park, we returned to Tom Price with more than 20 percent still in the battery. With better planning or less time spent taking photos, it might have been possble to get to Hamersley Gorge – the road is partly unsealed but accessible without 4WD in most seasons. But after two full days and three starry nights at Karijini, we are booked into Exmouth, the gateway to yet another famed West Australian National Park.

Sadly, an EV cannot help with time management🙄

Slow Road to Karijini

Karijini, Western Australia’s second largest National Park: the sun is a smudged vermilion marriage mark on the earth’s forehead – my Bengali iconography evokes a bride’s shyly sweet morning after the wedding night before. The sound track is the song of unknown birds. The fragrance on the cold morning breeze is an unfamiliar presence for this urban dweller from the Australian coastal south.

Years of hoping, months of planning, three days and 1600 kilometres of driving has brought us from Fremantle on the south-west coast of Western Australia to the ‘glamping’ spot in the Karijini Eco Retreat.

Read any travel magazine and you would think it is impossible to get here without one of those humungus 4WD diesel-fed vehicles. The travel editor of a WA-based newspaper dismissed my plan of driving to Karijini in at electric car, with his smirk barely hidden behind a curt email ‘Good luck with your EV in outback WA!’

Over a pleasant dinner at the Cheela Plains Station, our last stop before Karijini, I pin down a friendly grey nomad, almost by definition driving a 4WD dragging a motor home. He pays over $250 for every 500 kilometres or so. And that is not including the environmental cost of fumes from thousands of ICE cars in and out of these ancient and fragile landscapes.

According to recent government figures 650,000 people visit Karijini each year. It takes a lot of cars to transport all those people!

EVs are not a final solution of course, but with no tailpipe emissions, they are a move in the right direction for pleasure travel.

‘How about it then – a trip around Oz, taking in the national parks?’ I had asked Co-Pilot. He had said ‘why not?’

I could think of many reasons. I wanted a pleasant trip to beautiful places, not some adventure story of breakdowns and heroic rescues. The Plugshare app showed fast chargers, thin on the ground once you headed north from Perth. The WA government’s planned WA EV network is getting built – but we are not quite there yet.

Also, I was a bit concerned that our two-year-old EVie (a Hyundai Kona Electric 2022, Extended Range) will develop an inferiority complex, sitting between the Big Cars in an over-crowded caravan park, struggling to suck enough electrons from a Caravan socket overnight.

On a good day, with a full tank, EVie has a projected range of 480 kms – but open roads, high speeds and bad weather can easily reduce that by 20%. Yes, Range Anxiety is rearing its ugly head again. What if some of those chargers are broken? ‘We’ll call a friend’, said Co-Pilot.

‘Friends’ refers to … ahem, shall we call them EV-angels? Some 30 or so EV drivers have completed the 13,000+ kilometre drive around Australia – some of them more than once. Several live in our neighbourhood in and around Perth and have been generous with their time, advice and encouragment. Our first leg is straightforward: a 450 km drive to Geraldton. And there is a fast charger about half-way at Jurien Bay.

But EVs cannot prevent human errors. 150 kms into the journey, a sinking realisation – my iPad is not with me! The thought of surviving 80 days without my digital companion is unthinkable. We turn back adding an extra 300 km to our day and an extra hour and a half of charging time. Not auspicious.

Definitely the best when you running late and need a charge!

We make Jurien Bay about dinner time: the fast charger is avalable and conveniently located across the carpark from a friendly fish and chip joint! There used to be an Ampol charger at the station across the street – but has been broken for 6 months (Non-functional chargers might turn out to be a bit of a theme – but let’s see.)

Day 2, Geraldton to Carnarvon is smooth. And Overlander Roadhouse, run by a Samoan woman and staffed by a group of awesome Vietnamese Australians, offers unexpectedly good food and a fast WA EV Network charger.

But somewhere along the way an 18-inch crack has appeared on the windscreen.

By the time we reach Carnarvon, the one windscreen repair place in town is closed and remain stubbornly shut the next morning. Though it is reassuring to learn that locals think ‘if you ain’t got a cracked windscreen you ain’t driven in the Pilbara.’

From Carnarvon it is 700 kms to Tom Price where we are booked for the night – it will be less than 2 hours drive into Karijini the follwing morning. We are almost there.

But not quite. The plan was to charge at the newly installed WA EV network charger at Minilya, 140 kms along the way. According to the Plugshare app, it has been working some of the time, even though there is red tape around it clearly asking people to keep out! For us it would not work🙄

Co-Pilot tried pleading. I tried abuse. C-P rang the operator. Man at the other end sounded unconvinced by our assertion that anyone had been able to use it. Officially, the charger is ‘not yet active’ – no amount of ‘but we are desperate’ would move him. Next charger: Nanutarra, where we arrived having driven 368 kms on a single charge with just 22 km in the tank and frayed nerves. Neither of us felt like driving another 300 kms to Tom Price.

We stopped for the night at Cheela Plains Station just in time for a magnificent sunset. We got the last room and, yes, they could add us in for dinner.

A perfect place to spend an evening on the way to Karijini, EV or ICE

We are almost there – one sleep, less than 200 kilometres and two perfectly dependable, free chargers provided by Rio Tinto – our next sunset will be at Karijini.

As they say (may be they don’t yet, but soon will): EVs are great for going places. But they won’t compensate for human follies.

Eat, Preach, Drive

EV drivers get spoilt on the Nullarbor. Pretty much every roadhouse owner (not that there are many) with a plug point will let you charge overnight. Grey nomads (not that many of them here either) tumbling out of their enormous 4WDs will be solicitous ‘are you crazy or are you writing a book? (No!) Where do you charge (‘pretty much the same places as you – only slower…’)

The attention goes to your head: your ‘virtue signalling’ is rampant, opportunities for proselytising irresistible. ‘Price? this car? About half-way between a petrol SUV and your 4WD…and we are charging for free or next to nothing’ you say, knowing that they have just parted with about $200 to fill their car.

There are opportunities too, to promote the value of installing EV chargers to the receptive business owners, while sampling Buffalo salami and Camel milk ice-cream at Harry’s Home Made Fine Foods in Baroota, S.A.

In Port Augusta, we came across our first competing EV. The charger is booked for us only until 7 pm, we are told at the motel. Fine, we said, but can we please book it again for 7 a.m for a final top-up before we leave?

7 p.m change-over works fine. Not so much the early morning swap. The Tesla has completed charging but is still plugged in and, understandably, the reception staff are not willing to call a customer at the crack of dawn. Unhappy, we adjust our route a little to drive via Tanuda, Barossa Valley, which looks perfect for a lunch and a fast-charge.

Tanuda is, indeed, quite lovely, but its one charger is serving another client, a beautiful electric Volvo. Soon another Tesla is lining up beside us. Thankfully, the Volvo owner turns up in half hour or so. He has the patience of a saint, I realise after I have read him my ‘Complete Discourse on the Necessary Etiquette of EV Charging.’

On the main arteries between Adelaide and Sydney, fast charging stations are plentiful. More are coming on line every month, many are conveniently located in petrol stations and shopping centres. But given the variable charging times of EVs even on the ultra-fast chargers, there are bound to be instances where demand exceeds supply.

Conventions for sharing assets take time to develop. In the meanwhile it might make sense to work out some good practice, for example

Limit charging periods, especially when there are others in the queue.
Register on Plug Share if you are charging or waiting.
Set up your car so it can be disconnected when it’s finished charging by waiting drivers (so you won’t have to rush your drink at the pub).

Just commonsense, the sort of stuff we mostly do but can easily forget in a rush.

We skirted north of Adelaide, and 2 days after leaving Port Augusta crawled into Melbourne in bumper to bumper traffic. Our first big city in 10 days dazzled us with the best chai and dosa since my teenage years in Kolkata. Then a couple of days meandering in the narrow hilly lanes of the Yarra Valley, slow enough to notice mystifying unmarked sculptures and not run-over a wombat in the dark.

On our first day out of Melbourne on the M31 towards Sydney, I finally came to grips with the question of speed:range ratio of an EV. Where charging stations abound, and provide insurance against range anxiety, why not join the average Motorway user at 110 kmph?

The only problem is that everyone else is driving just a little faster, overtaking and slowing you down just that little bit.

When the 13th car overtakes you – incidentally it’s a ute – you give into a less virtuous self who sits just beneath your environmentally-friendly-echo-plus type driving persona. Johnny in the ute sees just a silver flash, then 12 other small and large vehicles vanish into a blur in your rear vision mirror. By the time you notice you have been, ahem, going a little over the speed limit, the car range has dropped dramatically and you are not going to make Gundagai without another charge!

We have to stop for a charge at Tarcutta. Co-pilot sets the car to charge up to 85%. It will take nearly 2 hours. By the time we make Gundagai, the sun will have set and I won’t be able to take a photo of the great Aussie icon, the ‘dog on the tucker box’. But co-pilot and I are no longer on speaking terms, so negotiation is impossible. Never mind. Missing a photo op is a small price to pay for guilty pleasures. And there’s just enough light to catch the Giant Koala.

For the record: 4700 kms Fremantle to Sydney in Kona EV 2022 – done. Easy, safe, with just a light sprinkle of excitement.

Range Anxiety

Range Anxiety is the EV’s contribution to the English language. The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013: ‘worry on the part of a person driving an electric car that the battery will run out of power before the destination or a suitable charging point is reached.’

In some parts of the world, such anxiety is, arguably, a matter of the individual psyche (https://www.pitchcare.com/news-media/range-anxiety-fact-or-fiction.html). But in much of this vast land, basic infrastructure for these cars (ie. charging stations) is in its infancy, so unregulated that you need a half a dozen different apps and attachments to be able to access a sufficient number of chargers on any long trip. Add to that the sparseness of most things in outback WA, and you have a perfect habitat for the dreaded Range Anxiety in the novice EV driver’s head!

Just 45 minutes and 50 km out of Fremantle, the speedometer indicates we have used 11% battery and one of my apps is showing ‘McDonalds, Mundaring’ charger nearby – motor car owners staggering under petrol price rises, please take note: it is free. But it will take an hour and 45 minutes to fill up the car!!! So begins a long debate between me and my Range Anxiety (henceforth RA).

Me: we don’t need to top up the battery

RA: more experienced drivers say you should top up when you can when you are on unfamiliar roads.

Me: Not unfamiliar!! We drove to Adelaide in a clapped out Honda Civic…

RA: Yes, in 1988…

I take the point but persist, pointing at a popular app: look, we get to the next charger at Merredin in 250 kms – we have plenty of battery to do that.

RA: but what if the Merredin one is not working? Or if your car will not charge as fast as the app says?

‘What if’ is always Anxiety’s killer punch! New car, we don’t know its quirks. And we know the uncertainties around charging points. They can work differently for different cars. For instance, our Hyundai Kona Extended Range goes a longer distance per charge, but depending on the charging technology, it can be much slower to charge up than its cousin, the Hyundai Ionic 5. And some chargers indeed are damaged, vandalised or simply may not charge at the anticipated rate. And everything from temperature to rain to road surface can affect the range of an electric car. Anxiety wins. We stop for nearly 2 hours to add just 50 kms of additional range.

It would be 2 days before we worked out that the last 10% of battery is always the slowest to charge up – not worth the time unless you really need the full range. On Day 1, we are at the bottom of a steep learning curve.

At the Merredin Community and Leisure Centre charging is happily, yet again, free and the rate of charging substantially faster than at Mundaring. Even so, it will be 6 hours before the car is fully charged. This time we bargain Anxiety down – 80% charge will get us comfortably to our destination for the night. And that will be done by about 4 in the afternoon. We tether the car to the charger and walk to Merredin’s only eatery operating this Sunday afternoon!

And this is when the real problems start. My co-pilot finds a Tesla charger which promises a faster charge. So we run back and carefully follow the instructions to un-tether our car from the charger: but the plug won’t release! First gentle persuasion, then increasingly forceful coaxing – the thing won’t budge! We try randomly turning things off and on several times – same result each time – the car remains fixed to the charger. Co-pilot searches the web – but this is not a common problem and consequently the web offers no solution!!

Following my damsel-in-distress instinct, I hail a group of men playing bowls. The lovely gentlemen, between them, have a thousand years of driving experience but are seriously befuddled by a car without a motor!

Meanwhile co-pilot has EV expert, J, on the phone and he too has never encountered a clingy charger until now. Yet, somehow, J talks co-pilot through the options and (phew!) at some point, after repeatedly hitting an ‘unlock everything’ button on the driver’s door (which we did not know existed until this point), the charger releases it’s grip on the car!! This process has taken an hour and we still have quite some charging to do before we can be confident about reaching our accommodation for the night.

So, to the TESLA charger we go and it works and the car screen shows that we will get the charge we need (without too much concession to Range Anxiety) by about 5 pm. And this charger too, is free!!

Meanwhile, our accommodation arrangements have gone awry, for reasons too tedious to explain. Eventually, we drive 3 hours in the dark and rain, the ‘range’ gauge dropping rapidly as headlights, wipers, de-misters, all draw on battery power. For our first night, we have no options but the caravanpark at Coolgardie, where you would not want to stay except in an emergency! But on the positive side, there is a caravan park plug point at which the car charges very slowly for the next 12 hours – and that is just enough to get us to the next charger in the morning.

Best thing ever: total ‘fuel’ cost for 600 km of driving? $0

First test for the long-distance EV driver: meet and beat Range Anxiety.

That done, with a little planning and some intriguing chargers (wait for the next post), the trip is turning out to be both entertaining and educational!

Crossing the Nullarbor! Or not?

You to the Universe, aka, Face Book: ’We are planning to drive Perth to Sydney, and hopefully back again, in our new Electric Vehicle (henceforth, Evie). Any advice?’

First responder : No! Mate!! Seriously, Don’t do it.

Like Donald Trump we ignore reasonable counsel against self-destructive stupidity. Eventually more supportive advice flows in and we find at least three real people who have really done the distance.

So begins the planning for the 5000 km drive across the flattest, longest, straightest road in the world with less trees, people and EV charging stations per thousand kilometres than most places you care to name. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullarbor_Plain)

Unlike this blogger’s usual sojourns on foot, this trip is not going to be 100% guilt-free as many of the charging stations, where we will figuratively ’fill up’ the car, have fossil fuel generated electricity. (See https://www.mynrma.com.au/cars-and-driving/electric-vehicles/our-mission/are-evs-better-for-the-environment). Still, by most calculations, our environmental impact for this trip will be less than half of a petrol-guzzling, ozone ripping, air-polluting jalopy (I learnt that word from doing the Guardian crosswords and just had to use it).

Some say a previous Hyundai electric car was known to burst into flames for no apparent reason – but that was several generations (of cars) ago and we are assured by the dealer that that model is in no way related to our own Evie, who is a slick, white, 2022 Kona, with an enviable reputation for doing 480k on a full tank (i.e. 100% charge), on a good day. The equivalent more posh brand car costs 25% more.

She is cheap to fill up. For our test run, about 650 km Fremantle to Augusta round trip, we spent less than $15 on charging.

But there is a whole other language to EV ’filling up’ that ICE owners know nothing about. (If you don’t know what ICE is, I’m pretty sure you drive one! ICE = Internal Combustion Engine, in other words, most of the cars on the road.)

The most important question for an EV owner is ‘how long does it take to fill my car?’ The answer: how long is a piece of string? You will get a different answer depending on the type/model/year of car owed by the inquirer + the type/model/year of car owned by the responder + the charging station where this conversation takes place + the various cables that you should have bought but did not, plus 21 other variables I cannot remember.

Walking Buddy, WB, now re-classified as FM (Fast Mover) has read thousands of documents and composed a 400 page manuscript titled ‘Number, Length, Strength, Shape and other Variables of EV Charging Plugs and Cables: Essential Considerations Prior to your Long-Distance Motoring Adventures.’ As this is an open-ended discursive thesis, the work ends with no recommendations on what one can actually do to ensure availability of power to your car on the Nullarbor!

In any case, I really wanted the plug called Pig-tail because it has a cute name, but FM insists that name nothing to do with efficacy. In the end, the nice people from Hyundai HQ in Sydney stepped in to save the day (and a beautiful friendship) by offering us a full set of charging cables. HOWEVER, there’s a catch. These will be available at Port Augusta, which is after we have crossed the most remote stretch of the road.

Meanwhile we are setting off with a ’granny charger’ (which sounds slightly obscene and takes more than 30 hours to charge the car from 0-100), a type 2 (not to be confused with diabetes) and something called ’3-phase-5-pin’ (I-give-up) that FM has borrowed from more knowledgeable EV owners, which, used wisely, hold the promise of charging for just four or five hours most days. But hey, it’s not a race (as our coal-fired ex-PM once said).

Still, I wonder what will happen if Evie runs out of puff in the middle of nowhere (which is what the 2000 km between Perth and Port Augusta is)? FM has armed himself with an extra-long cable, which weights so much, I think it could be 100 kilometres long. But even so, the prospect of walking into a town with one end of an extension cable in your hand is hardly appealing!

Experienced EV drivers say, if running low on battery you should drop the speed to 40 kmh. That will extend the distance you can go before your next charge. At that speed, we should be in Sydney in 3 or 4 months.

Bryce Gaton, a respected expert on all things EV and Kona-owner, is crossing the Nullarbor east to west. He recommends patience!

https://thedriven.io/2022/06/16/are-we-there-yet-electric-road-trip-to-perth-reveals-state-of-ev-charging-in-australia/

So, we’ll go Leonard Cohen slow:

I’m lacing up my shoes
But I don’t want to run
I’ll get there when I do
Don’t need no starting gun

Please stay tuned for more slow-mo blogs, so you’ll be the first to know when we are stuck somewhere without a plug point within a 100 km radius!!!

#electriccar, #hyundai,