An Australian has exposed a major problem as she traveled across the country in an electric car after taking a short road trip for a wedding.
Kristie Hannah, a property and equity investor, drove her Tesla Model Y from Perth to Dunsborough, Western Australia, this weekend.
Ms Hannah rated the overall ride highly, but revealed one issue that kept the three-hour tour from being a perfect experience.
The car enthusiast got into trouble when she tried to charge her car during the return journey home.
Ms Hannah said she struggled to find available chargers, and when she finally did, they weren’t working or had already been taken by other drivers.
Her lack of options forced her to charge her car at Tesla charging stations – which ultimately cost her more than the other generic charging stations.
Kristie Hannah (pictured), a Perth-based property and equity investor and proud EV owner, has revealed a glaring problem with public chargers
Ms Hannah told Ny Breaking Australia that while she ‘loved her EV’, the lack of quality chargers prevented them from being reliable in rural areas.
“I think what’s missing at the moment is the lack of charging points… But the other thing is the maintenance,” Ms Hannah said.
‘It’s really annoying if you don’t plan, for example if you walk to a charging point and it’s out of order and you don’t have much charge, then you’re in trouble.’
After finding Dunsborough’s only used EV charger, Ms Hannah was forced to drive to the nearby Tesla Supercharger in Margaret River.
A video posted to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, shows her driving by as a man stands confused in front of the charger.
When she returned to the Dunsborough Charger the next day to charge her batteries for the drive home, she was greeted with a faulty charger instead.
In another video, Ms Hannah showed the charger screen with instructions to unplug the car as it was already charged.
However, the Tesla only had 11 percent battery left.
The low levels caused Ms Hannah to suffer from ‘EV range anxiety’.
She said this was the lowest charge her car had ever had, and she was lucky to have reached a functioning charger.
“I’m lucky because I live in Perth, near the CBD, so I’m close to chargers or at my house where I have a socket to charge it,” she said.
On a previous trip to the area a few weeks earlier, she relied on the Tesla supercharger in Margaret River rather than the chargers on the RAC network.
Ms Hannah said chargers outside of Tesla’s Supercharged network are often faulty and don’t have the maintenance or infrastructure to be reliable
She said she was at 11 per cent after relying on a non-Tesla charger in Dunsborough, near Margaret River, and was only just able to get to a functioning charger to travel home
“It appears there is a lack of maintenance on the chargers, the facilities are there but they are out of order unless you are using a Tesla charger,” she said.
‘People don’t necessarily want to go to the Tesla chargers because they are faster, but a lot more expensive than the RAC chargers.’
Despite the difficulty in finding a reliable charger, Ms Hannah said the future of electric vehicles will still be bright if the right infrastructure is introduced.
“I think once people buy an electric car or test drive one, their view of it will change,” she said.
After posting videos of the experience To her
‘If a system is complex and people have difficulty using it, the people are not a problem. This looks like horrible infrastructure,” one user said.
Another EV user said he wouldn’t even consider using anything other than the [Tesla] Supercharger at Eaton when I go to Dunsborough and back’.
Others said the car chargers in the southwestern part of the state had done more harm than good, noting they were more likely to not work.
Despite the challenges with charging outside major cities, Ms Hannah said the future of electric vehicles still looked bright if the right charging infrastructure was introduced.
The stretch of 16 fast DC charging locations forms the Royal Automotive Club’s (RAC) Electric Highway, built to connect Perth EV drivers with rural coastal towns.
The RAC chargers are produced by Brisbane-based company Tritium, which has been criticized for being unreliable at charging stations across the country.
Company CEO Jane Hunter responded to the criticism in January.
Ms Hunter said the company had been hit hard by disrupted supply lines during Covid, meaning they were looking for key components such as semiconductors.
‘There is no doubt that we would have had shortages of semiconductors during the corona crisis. I would say they are getting better now,” she told The Daily Telegraph
“We’re more desperate than anyone for it to be a phenomenal user experience because it’s our hardware that carries a negative connotation and we want it to be super successful.”
Ny Breaking Australia contacted RAC for comment.