‘We can’t stop here, this is bat country!’
It was almost noon, it was our first road-trip in the EV, and I knew that very soon we’d need to charge the battery. Half an hour before, the Plugshare app had taken us to a shopping mall. One charger was occupied, one was out of order, and the other, a ‘compatible Type-2 charger’, turned out to be Tesla-only. There was no time to rest and I pointed us back to the highway.
Plan B was a BMW Dealer-ship near Gosford. They had a supercharger and it was available 24/7. When we got there, I hit the brakes and pulled over on the gravel verge. It was surrounded by a fence of black steel spikes and the gate was locked. It was a Sunday and the dealership was closed.
My partner looked at me through her Spanish wraparound sunglasses and asked, “What the hell are you yelling about?” “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” No point mentioning the deficiencies of Plugshare, I thought. The next closest was a private marina down a long dead-end. But we knew better than to risk going there.
The only other option was a shopping centre at Pennant Hills. But it would be tight. In the boot we had the home charging cable, a heavy-duty extension cord, a portable type-2 plug which the dealer had supplied for $300 – and half a packet of party balloons that we’d liberated from a kids’ party before they could wreak havoc upon the world.
With 30km to go, the monitor said we had 33km range and the low charge warning got to DEFCON 2. We’d long since switched to eco-mode and cut the aircon and now I leaned over to turn off the radio. “Man, this is no way to travel,” said my partner. She began swiping through contacts for anyone who might live nearby.
Around the 10km mark, the charge remaining turned into three blank hyphens. “Okay kids,” I said to the back seat, “it’s go time.” They were sweating like lizards in their woolly jumpers, but they had the balloons ready and began furiously rubbing them on their chests. It was enough, and we coasted into the charging station on our last two electrons.
Of course, I had to download yet another app (I now have five of them, not counting the one that never worked) and the charging station was in the basement carpark – with no mobile reception. So, I punched in bank details, and a ten-digit password including at least one hieroglyphic, while standing on the down-ramp, staring down oncoming traffic, “They’re not your friends,” said my partner. “We’re not like the others.”
I think back today on the three hours that followed, wandering the backstreets of Penno and wondering how things had gone so wrong. Private enterprise, left to its own devices, has failed to build a coherent charging eco-system, that’s how. Like the idiotic birth of Australia’s railroads, each state laying a different gauge track. Nevertheless, after two years in the EV, the idea of returning to an ICE vehicle reminds me of another great archaism: eighteenth century London at night, the streetlamps all burning the oil of butchered whales.