You're thinking about electric cars wrong! | Opinion

In my role putting together CarsGuide’s EV Guide site section, I’ve ended up talking to a lot of people about electric cars.

I hear a lot of the common complaints. They don’t have enough range - this one might be fair, although I think people overestimate how far they need to drive. They are too expensive - this one is also very fair, although it seems like BYD and MG are on the warpath to bring this summit down in the years to come.

The final frequent complaint I hear is that they ‘take too long to charge’.

This is a bit of a misconception about EVs that I want to take on. Yes, they can take a while to charge, I’m not going to dispute that, but the misconception here is that you’re always charging an EV from 10 - 80 or 100 per cent in the same way that you fill up a combustion car. That’s simply not how an electric car gets used in the normal day-to-day commuting life.

Having run many EVs with different battery sizes, ranges, and charging times as long-term test vehicles, over the last year and a half, and I can perhaps count on one hand the occasions where the time it took to charge up caused a genuine issue.

 

I think a lot of people attach to the one-to-two hour charging time mindset because this is how combustion vehicles are used. You drive them for a set amount of time - a week or two - then you fill them up in one big hit. This is simply not the case for EVs. Even if you can’t charge up at home, you’ll find ways to constantly pick up charge here and there.

Maybe your local shopping precinct has an AC charging unit. You might do a grocery shop and pick up 50 - 100km of range in that time. Perhaps your work has a socket and you plug in on the days you drive in, potentially picking up a few hundred kilometres at a time.

Maybe, if you’re particularly low on charge, you might choose to commute to a place where there is a DC fast charger for your next shopping trip, filling the entire car as you go.

It’s not as though those one hour long DC charging sessions are the only way an electric car is filled, and more often than not in the course of daily commuting, you’re never letting the battery drop particularly low anyway.

This will of course depend on where you live. This constant charging ethos might be more difficult if you were to own an electric car on NSW’s Central Coast, for example, which presently has very few charging stations, and that’s not to mention truly rural areas, where presently your only option will be charging up at home.

Aside from regional buyers, the other exception to this constant charging attitude is longer trips. You will need to plan. Charge the car up the day before to maximise your range. There are apps to plan your journey, and it’s likely that you will need to wait roughly an hour at a time to get enough charge to get to the next destination.

If this sounds a little inconvenient, it can be compared to a combustion vehicle, given the long distances between Australia’s capitals, but one healthy habit it enforces is the need to stop every two or so hours. Get a coffee, some rest, literally stop, revive, survive. It might slow you down a little, but I don’t see this as a bad thing for the majority of drivers - it makes the road a safer place if everyone is well rested.

For the majority of city-based EV owners though, you’ll need to embrace this mindset change which comes with constant charging. For many of you who will charge off a wall socket in your garage, you won’t even notice it. If anything, charging an EV will remove the need to stop at a bowser at all. Charge overnight and off you go. 

It takes hours on end to do it that way, but can you honestly tell me how long it takes your phone to charge overnight when you go to bed? It’s the same concept, and likely why, according to the electric vehicle council, 80 per cent of current EV owners it surveyed in 2022 reported they predominantly charge up at home, and 90 per cent said they used a high-speed DC charger one time or less a week.

For those of you still on the fence, the respondents to the EV Council’s survey also said they were, on average, saving more than $2000 a year on fuel, so as long as you’re ready to embrace the change in mindset which comes with owning an electric car, there are certainly benefits to be had in the longer term.