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EV owners in for a chaotic Christmas as auto expert warns drivers will have nowhere to charge their cars over the holiday season
- Veteran motoring journalist John Cadogan offers some warnings about electric vehicles
- He says Australia lacks the chargers to support any widespread EV adoption
- Peak charging times would also put a lot of pressure on Australia’s power grid.
- It also warns that laws must be implemented to recycle dangerous batteries.
Australia lacks the infrastructure for a major increase in the use of electric vehicles, a car expert has warned.
Experienced automotive journalist John Cadogan, who runs the AutoExpert website and YouTube channel, said the lack of chargers presents a huge barrier to electric vehicle (EV) use.
He asked where people would charge their vehicles when everyone was at a holiday destination during periods like Christmas.
Veteran motoring journalist John Cadogan has issued a series of warnings about the widespread adoption of electric vehicles in Australia.
“At the moment, the logistics of recharging when you travel through the Australian regional area is screwed,” he said.
“And not enough regulatory emphasis is placed on things of this nature…these are the failure modes of widespread adoption of electric vehicles in Australia.”
While Cadogan praised recent moves by the Anthony Albanese government to create tax incentives for buying electric vehicles, he cautioned that even in urban centers, charging anywhere outside of a home garage was difficult.
He noted that even in the prosperous area of Mosman on Sydney’s north shore, there are only three public chargers, which means you’d see an EV parked on the street connected to one via a series of extension cords that run over fences and paths. .
Cardogan says that charging stations in the Australian region, including popular holiday destinations, are few and far between.
Photographic proof of this was posted by Sydney radio host Ben Fordham in September when a listener snapped a picture of a Tesla being carried by a tangle of cables dangling from an overhead balcony in the north shore suburb of Millers Point. .
Fordham posted the image on his Facebook page, describing it as a “plate of spaghetti”, arguing that the makeshift setups were an “accident waiting to happen”.
He stated that the “bizarre” scene raises the question of whether the infrastructure exists for people who do not have garages or designated parking spots to have electric vehicles.
The man who took the photo told Fordham that it looked like a scene from a third world country.
As if the problem of insufficient chargers weren’t enough, Cadogan pointed to another reason for concern when reading an article about Switzerland seeking to restrict the use of electric vehicles so as not to overload its power supply.
A photo of a ‘tangled mess’ of extension cords dangling over a wet public sidewalk on a rainy day shows the distances electric car drivers have to travel to charge their Teslas, even in the wealthy coastal area north of Millers Point in Sydney.
Cadogan was concerned that Australia’s electricity grid infrastructure could struggle when most EV users go online to recharge overnight.
“The problem with this, obviously, is that the poles and the wires can’t keep up,” Cadogan said.
He was also concerned about where the increased power supply would come from and said Switzerland, which is likely to ban EV use except for “necessary trips,” provided good warning in that context.
“Frankly, this is what happens when countries rush into some new technology, for example electric vehicles, without getting the integration right,” he said.
‘It would be nice if we had a solid solution to where that electricity is coming from.
“We have endless coal, so hypothetically we could produce endless electricity for all the driving we need to do.”
Cadogan raised concerns about how Australia’s electricity grid infrastructure would be managed if there was widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
Cadogan also questioned what would happen if battery recycling became commercially unviable.
Batteries from most electric car brands have a 10-year warranty, but they pose a recycling problem because they contain toxic chemicals and materials, such as lithium compounds, nickel compounds, arsenic compounds, and dimethoxyethane.
Cadogan said laws needed to be put in place to ensure these were handled safely.
“We’re not doing anything on the legislative front to make sure someone carries the can to make sure batteries are removed from liability,” he said.
“We need to have toothy legislation on removing that.”
He thought a big part of the problem was that governments had fired all their technical experts and that politics was mostly run by ‘failed lawyers and salesmen’.