A trip round Australia in a Tesla

Source: The Guardian

For those of you who don't know, Oz is very big.  And 90% is very sparsely inhabited.  It's hard enough to find petrol stations in the outback, never mind EV charge stations.

Sylvia Wilson drove around Australia in an electric car. It cost her $150.90.

Wilson, 70, a retired farmer from near Biloela in central Queensland, had planned the trip of a lifetime with her husband, Rod. One impulsive evening in mid-2016 they went online and, sight-unseen, bought a Tesla S75 electric car for the journey.

A few months after Rod died last year, Sylvia announced to her family: “I think I’ll do that trip.

“Most of them were really keen. A couple of them said ‘you’re mad, you’ll never do it’,” Wilson told Guardian Australia.

It took Sylvia 110 days and 20,396km door to door to navigate the Round Australia Electric Vehicle Superhighway – a loop of charging stations. She is the first woman to drive the route and the second person to loop the country in a Tesla.

Her daughters, sisters, friends and a daughter-in law – in total seven different women – flew in and out from various points to keep her company along the way.

“I had to stick to a schedule because they had to book their flights, so there was no mucking around. I was flying blind to a certain extent. I booked all my accommodation, and that had to be tied in to what the car could do,” Wilson said.

Some of the more remote charging stations had never been used until Wilson rolled into town in Bluey, her affectionate name for the Tesla.

In the Kimberley, at Fitzroy Crossing, she arrived late on Friday afternoon and discovered the charging station not working.

“They found the only electrician in town and he came and did something and it worked,” she said.At the next town over, Halls Creek, the power socket was at a business that was shut. At the local motel she found a 15amp power supply and was able to plug in overnight.

“They call it range anxiety. That’s what everyone talks about. It’s totally valid to have that, to be thinking about the next charge, once you’ve got an [electric vehicle].

“But the reality is that if you can see the lights on, or that the kettle works, then you can charge. Even in the remotest places you can still charge the car. In a way there are more places to charge an EV [electric vehicle] than there are a fossil fuel car.”

[Read more here]

Note that Tesla superchargers only cover south-eastern Australia, where most Australians live, with a couple of outlier charge points outside that area.  However, there are far more Tesla "destination chargers" at hotels, motels and resorts which are fast enough to charge overnight though not as fast as the superchargers.  There are destination chargers across most of SE Australia, western Australia and all the way up the east coast, but not that many elsewhere.  Yet she made it all the way round the country.