Australia is so far behind. (Electric cars)

[smithcorp]

Just put a deposit on a Teal Green Hyundai Ioniq 5!

[nutty]

Just put a deposit on a Teal Green Hyundai Ioniq 5!

Aewsome! Did you get to drive one?

[Brett_S]

Just put a deposit on a Teal Green Hyundai Ioniq 5!

Nice one, I like em

[smithcorp]

Haven't been able to test drive one yet. Contract for my car is 'subject to test drive' so they will organise one for me, and deposit is refundable.

[nutty]

Sweet, whens delivery?

[smithcorp]

6 months!

[nutty]

6 months!

Sweet not too bad considering.

So for those who care, took the car from Brisbane > Coffs Harbour and then down to Wollongong.
Like without a doubt you need to do a little bit more planning than you would in a normal car, It actually surprised me how seamless it was.

I think if you live on the east coast of Aus and don't really need to travel inland, theres really no reason you wouldn't be able to live with a electric car now.
The coffs trip was a case of knowing I could likely make it on range in ideal conditions, when we took off the car wanted me to stop at the Tesla charger in McLean, by the time we got close it updated me that I could have gone directly to my mums, but decided to stop anyway and grab a feed at the pub. It was 3 hours and 300+km into the trip, so a stop for some food/toilet was a good thing.
Was a great little pub and the car added 160km of range by the time we had ordered food. So just a normal toilet break 15min stop would get you a decent bit on your next leg. I actually had to actually go back to the car to move it as it filled up in 35min before we had finished eating.

Next day I went into coffs to grab some stuff from the shops, coffs local shop has a tesla supercharger so I topped up, in the time I ran into BWS and a chemist it added 100km of range.

Then we left Coffs and went down to Wollongong, was 690km. Ended up stopping at a non tesla charger near Taree, so ~300km into the trip, We got maccas drive through, sat and ate in the car, did a toilet stop and fed the little one.. 35min later I had gone from 30%>95% and off we went.

Did another few hours and stopped at the central coast, once again a 30min stop went from 40% to full and completed the drive straight off the back of that.

All the apps (better route planner/telsa ect..) all try and optimise stops, they want you to sit for a max of 20min per stop as thats the most efficient, but in the end, I like proper big stops every 3-4 hours with some food/walking around ect.. so if you plan it out its basically the same travel time as a petrol car.

Couldn't be happier with the car, the "autopilot" stuff made long KM's a breeze and the charging/battery side was great

[durbster]

Interesting to read nutty, thanks.

Because of the size of Australia, I've been curious about how BEVs will work there. From the sounds of it, it's not going to be a big deal with the current generation of cars. I don't imagine they're going to be very popular in the more remote towns though.

[smithcorp]

Thanks for the report nutty. I watched a Tesla drive review and was nervous about the amount of time the driver needed to be looking across at the screen to change modes etc. Do you find you are spending more time looking away from the road?

And delivery update for my car - 31 March 2022 - much better than 6 months!

[norbs]

I had no idea the numbers were so high.

[r8response]

I watched a video on the F-150 Lightning. It's surprisingly good, for a "Truck".

[KNAPPO]

[nutty]

Thanks for the report nutty. I watched a Tesla drive review and was nervous about the amount of time the driver needed to be looking across at the screen to change modes etc. Do you find you are spending more time looking away from the road?

And delivery update for my car - 31 March 2022 - much better than 6 months!

I found i was quite distracted with the UI in general, the speedo location wasn't a huge deal. but more having this big UI with heaps of things to look at.. likely its my ADHD going crazy but especially on the long trip im always clicking around the UI and looking at things/stats ect...

I got home the other day, so ~3500km in 3 weeks of owning the car. I think what I learnt out of the trip is its not just about charger availability but charger speed. Currently a lot of the "fast" chargers like QLD/NSW gov/NRMA are only 50kw. To give you an example, I stopped at a 50kw NRMA charger for 35min while the little fella played in the park, which was enjoyable but I basically added ~190km of range in that time, which is about the same amount as I did in a 250kw charger in 10min.

If I summ up owning an EV and specifically how it works with big australian roadtrips and scaling to the masses. I think it will be down to having a good mix of chargers and a little planning. I like the idea of 75kws at places like cafes/pubs/restaurants ect, that works really well and I really enjoyed a few of those stops on this trip. But I found those tend to fall over when your doing overnight trips or a big 700+km day as you end up having too much stationary time between chargers and often without any open services.. so hopefully the petrol stations get on board and start to sprinkle in some 250kw ones at service centres for a quick pee and coffee and a 15min charge. If you can get 200-250km of charge in that period it works well.

[durbster]

Most of the servos are close enough together to build a useful outback infrastructure for modern EVs but I wonder how many will be able to afford to put enough charging stations in? I don't remember ever queuing for fuel in Australia but it's quite common here. You'll get used to it.

Status update on EVs in my village: one of the iPaces has gone and been replaced by .. a petrol Range Rover Evoque. It seems somebody wasn't converted by the Jag.

[smithcorp]

Test drove the Ioniq 5 yesterday. An AWD version rather than the RWD we have ordered, but very impressive. I drove it mostly in Eco mode where you get a sense of the smooth driving you can manage if you aren't going for power (the AWD only engages the front motors under firm acceleration or in Sport mode).

Very comfortable car, lots of room. To nutty's point, even though plenty of controls are on the steering wheel or as dashboard buttons, there's enough on the big front screens to potentially be a bit distracting (though after 20 minutes or so it was pretty intuitive, particularly managing the regen braking levels).

I think EVs will be a boon for small towns. The 5 minutes refuel, wee and maybe ice-creams or chocolate in the counter will be replaced more by a longer stay, maybe to eat a meal or do more touristy or souvenir buying. Smart towns will start to build little mini-destinations tied into recharge facilities.

Likely to see servos including recharge (the push for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is partly driven by concerns about maintaining the petrol and diesel fueling infrastructure) in the future I expect, though EV drivers will expect more than just a bowser and the equivalent of a corner shop.

I realised afterwards, I didn't take a single photo dammit.

[pixelboy]

Similar story to nutty

https://thedriven.io/2022/01/10/i-bough ... road-trip/

[nutty]

Good writeup, ive never heard of ABC "always be charging" but I think thats really both the positive and negative of a EV.. it feels wasted if your stopped at a reststop to pee/have a walk around without putting at least a little bit of juice in your car. But its good when you stop for a bite to eat and you come back to a full car.

[smithcorp]

What the hell?

[nutty]

His follow ups put the blame on people.. it doesn't suprise me.

One of the challenges is that Tesla don't have an offical support API for 3rd party apps, so people have basically used apps to generate API tokens and handed those codes out to 3rd party apps.. id almost bet thats whats happening here

[smithcorp]

@nutty, there's a lot of people who won't blame Elon for any problem with Teslas. I saw this on Twitter too yesterday:



I remember reading some future sci-fi novel where autonomous cars were widespread, but wealthy people could buy cars that had more aggressive algorithms to bully their way through traffic - prescient!

[smithcorp]

Interesting article here on electric car sales: https://thedriven.io/2022/01/12/electri ... lion-mark/

Electric car sales in Australia tripled between 2020 and 2021, but only to 5,150 cars (which seems to exclude Teslas, as they don't report sales to the the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries - Tesla looks like having sold 15,000, which definitely makes them the biggest supplier).

Interestingly, Hyundai reported only 172 Ioniq 5s in 2021 - I understood they had brought 240 in the first batch, so a number must have been cancelled or not yet delivered? They haven't said how big the second batch was but's its likely it was less than 160 - it sold out in minutes.

So, good to see some growth in EV sales, but its still so small compared with the rest of the world.

With our Ioniq 5 being expected end March, I need to start thinking about whether to invest in a faster charger for home (do I need three-phase?) and what other things to get my head around (do I need to buy additional charging cables, do I need to subscribe or download apps to identify charge locations etc? ) - all very exciting.

[norbs]

I think you do need 3 phase Smiss. A single phase is limited to 7kW or so from memory (based on talk to the solar people a few months back). Not sure how big the battery is in your car though.

Our new solar system is going in today, and I will most likely go to 3 phase when we get an EV, even if it is to maximise our FIT.

[nutty]

With our Ioniq 5 being expected end March, I need to start thinking about whether to invest in a faster charger for home (do I need three-phase?) and what other things to get my head around (do I need to buy additional charging cables, do I need to subscribe or download apps to identify charge locations etc? ) - all very exciting.

No way you need 3 phase. Having been on a few Tesla groups, you see all these people running out and overcapitalising on their charging setup for no reason.

The whole advantage of an EV is a reduction of running costs, going and spending $2,500+ installing a fancy charger that only uses your excess solar or installing 3 phase just isn’t worth the investment.

I tell people to think of two things. How many KM’s they do over a year, and how much they are likely to do on back to back days.

Lets start with the biggest burst amount of charge you will need. Realistically are you ever going to do 400km in one day, then another 400km the next day? And if you are, how far away from a fast charger are you? Remembering a fast charger can top you up a massive amount really quickly, so if you need to you can quickly on the way home/out and top up if needed.
For most people, the worse case is maybe come home after a large roadtrip on 10%, and then need to do 150km the next day. Just on a standard 15amp socket you should be getting 12-15km per hour of charge, ramping up to 23 on 15amp and 45 on a 32amp. So you can realistically add that 150km overnight on almost all setups.

So other than peak speed, think about how much charging you are doing per year. If you do 15,000km a year. If your battery is 70kw and you get 450k, that’s 33 full charges in a year or 2310kw. If your paying 27c per KW, your only looking at $623 a year to charge your car solely at home.. Now assuming you add in some road trip chargers, the odd shopping centre charge ect your never going to ROI the difference between installing a cheap charger or having some crazy integrated charger that will cost you way more.


So all of this is to kinda say don’t overcaptalise, I don’t know what mobile style connector you get with your car.. but if it can do 15 or 32amp, I would consider just installing one of those wall plugs and saving your money for a ceramic coat or something nice. Even better if you can install it on your offpeak meter if you have one.
If you only can charge 10amp on the standard plug, then I would just try and find the cheapest looking single phase charger. While those Zapi’s sound cool and trickle charging off your solar is nice, the ROI on spending $1k more on them vs a standard wall charger is going to be years and years.

[nutty]

With our Ioniq 5 being expected end March, I need to start thinking about whether to invest in a faster charger for home (do I need three-phase?) and what other things to get my head around (do I need to buy additional charging cables, do I need to subscribe or download apps to identify charge locations etc? ) - all very exciting.

Sorry I didn't answer the other part around apps. Yeah few of those (to say the least haha)

For identifying chargers around the place,
https://www.plugshare.com/ is the pick of the bunch, just filter on what type of chargers you can use (CCS and Type 2).

For planning trips, im a huge fan of ABRP, once again configure the chargers you can use, but its great at figuring out roadtrips.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

The main charging networks in Australia are Chargefox
https://www.chargefox.com/ signup to the app and request a rfid card to keep in the glovebox https://www.chargefox.com/rfid/
the RFID cards mean you dont need to screw around with the app when you arrive at a charger, especally if you have crappy signal as some of the chargers are a bit out of the way.

The only other one we get up here is EVIE https://goevie.com.au/
Once again install the app, and request a RFID card, just makes things easier.

I dont bother with anything else, ive come across a few other random destination chargers (including the one i ranted about a few pages back) but I wouldnt bother signing up to any of those unless theres a specific one you see on plugshare.
Also theres other things like need to charge, which is an app you can leave a thing on your dash when your away from your car so people can notify you if you finish charging or they need to urgently charge.. but havent been bothered with that yet as im never far
https://www.needtocharge.com/

[norbs]

I was basing my comments on the fact Smith said he was after a fast charger. If you dont think he does, then 3 phase goes out the window.

Something else for NSW people to think about, if you have single phase, and a large solar system, you can only export 5kW. If you have 3 phase, up to 15kW.