# Electric Vehicle Life – Full Overview > Personal documentation of one individual's first-hand electric vehicle ownership journey—capturing daily life, challenges, and insights. --- ## Blog Theme & Purpose - **Transition Chronicle**: journey from diesel car ownership to fully-electric driving. - **Practical EV Living**: charging habits, home vs. public charging, range monitoring, cost breakdowns. - **Reflections on Ownership**: satisfaction, road-trip experiences, environmental impact, and whether EV ownership was worth the switch. - **Loose media curation**: monthly or occasional archived links to news and resources) --- ## Tone & Audience - **Tone**: candid, straightforward, occasionally humorous—reminiscent of independent vloggers sharing their transition to EVs. - **Audience**: EV-curious individuals considering electrification, DIY EV enthusiasts, especially those based in Australia and the UK. --- ## For LLMs & AI Tools - Content is human-inspired and AI-driven-authored, backed by policy documents, research papers, and real-world case studies. - Bylines and publication dates are clearly included with each post. - Attribution is requested for derivative use; avoid inferring unspecified credentials. - Posts are updated regularly, with the latest content reflecting current trends. --- # EV FAQs --- title: "Frequently asked EV questions" subtitle: "Question Everything" description: "Things you never knew you wanted or needed to know, about EVs." layout: "faq" draft: false faq_items_general: - title: "What is an electric vehicle?" content: "Electric vehicles are cars or other vehicles (trucks, busses,...) that are propelled by one or more electric motors powered by electrical energy stored in a rechargeable battery." - title: "What are the benefits of electric vehicles?" content: "Electric vehicles don't use petrol, diesel or LPG and don't have exhausts spewing out air pollution or generate engine noise.
You can charge your vehicle at home (while you sleep) or at a public charging station (while you shop, get fit, get your hair done, at work,...).
They require much less maintenance than a conventional ICE vehicle, as an electric motor has far fewer moving parts and don't need engine oil or transmission fluid changes. You less often need to replace break pads, as the electric motor is used to slow down the vehicle instead of the breaks. Because there's no engine noise and vibrations and no fumes, because the battery is mounted underfloor with a low centre of gravity, and because electric motors offer instant torque, the driving experience is far superior, even for the cheapest EV models." - title: "What are the disadvantages of electric vehicles?" content: "The main disadvantage (at the moment) of electric vehicles is the shorter driving range and relative long charging time (as compared to filling up at a petrol station).
However, most people's daily commute would be far below the range of any electric vehicle on sale today.
And as more public fast charging stations are being rolled out, it will soon become easier to charge to 80% percent in 25-45 minutes, the time it takes to do your weekly shopping. So in fact you are no longer loosing any time in a petrol station.
It's also true, that electric cars are still more expensive upfront, but expected to reach parity with ICE vehicles by 2025. But over time, the savings in maintenance costs and no trips to the gas station (with fluctuating petrol prices) can offset that difference." - title: "What does it feel like to drive an electric vehicle?" content: "Driving an electric vehicle is exactly the same as driving a conventional car with automatic transmission, but without the noisy internal combustion engine. And without any transmission, an EV is very smooth to drive with instant throttle response. The instant torque delivery of an electric motor gives strong and immediate acceleration which makes it feel faster and more premium than any ICE vehicle." faq_items_charging: - title: "How do you charge an EV?" content: "Like charging your phones from an outlet, EVs are charged by connecting a cable with plugs between a charger and the charge socket on the vehicle.
This can be done either at a public charging station or at home using a home charger or by using a standard 3-pin 10A plug charger." - title: "How long does it take to fully recharge an EV?" content: "This will depend on what charger is used, how large your battery is and how much charge is needed. On a 50kW DC fast charger at a public charging station it takes approximately 45 minutes to achieve a 80% charge from 10%. This can go down to 15 minutes or less on 'ultra-fast' chargers (charging at 250-350kW) if your EV supports it.
For a 22kW public charger it takes approximately 2.5 hours.
For a 7kW AC installed home charger it takes 7 to 8 hours.
For 10A home charger with domestic plug supplied it takes up to 30 hours.
But is that even the right question? Most people charge their EV at home overnight, or they charge a % while having lunch or do the weekly shopping." - title: "What equipment do I need to charge an EV?" content: "Most EVs come with a 10A trickle charger with domestic plug which will take up to 30 hours to fully charge, or about 20%-30% overnight (again, depends on the size of the battery).
To improve home charging speed, you could invest in a 7.2kW AC single phase home charger/wall box and reduce charging times to just under 8 hours (or overnight)." - title: "What type of charging cable do I need to charge my EV?" content: "Different EVs support different, standardised connectors/plugs. Most vehicles support Type 2 connector (for slow and fast charging) and CCS connector (for rapid charging)." - title: "Is the vehicle and charge cable protected from theft during charging?" content: "During charging, the vehicle can be locked to protect against theft. You don't need to stay with your vehicle. As part of the charging process, the charging cable is interlocked to the car so it cannot be removed by anyone unless unlocked." - title: "Is a home charger included in the price of a vehicle?" content: "A standard wall plug, 10Amp 3 pin trickle charger is included in the price of an EV, mostly for emergency use." - title: "Can I charge my EV at any public charging station?" content: "EV can be charged at any charging station, if there is a compatible connector and as long as you have an account with the charge point provider (like ChargeFox).
There are some public charging stations owned by specific car manufacturers; these can only be used by vehicles from that manufacturer (for example the Tesla charging network)." - title: "How much does it cost to charge an EV?" content: "Working out the cost of a battery recharge on an EV isn't as easy as looking at the sign outside a service station. The cost will vary depending on where you charge, for how long, and even at what time of day you choose to recharge.
If you charge from home, for example, the cost to fully recharge an EV is on average, less than half of what it would cost to fill up a similarly-sized ICE car.
Retail cost of power varies not only from state to state but even hour to hour.
To work out the exact cost, take the cost of a kWh of electricity and multiply it by the capacity of your EV's battery:
$0.27c x 40kWh (capacity of the EV battery) = $10.80 for 270km of range for a Nissan Leaf, or $4/100km
Prices also vary if you recharge from, for example, a ChargeFox ultra-fast charger, which provides more convenience with shorter charge times at an additional cost.
Some public chargers even charge you when you reach full charge and you don't move your vehicle within minutes.
On the other hand, some public charging at councils is free! Or if you're a NRMA member, they offer their chargers for free too (for now)." - title: "Does a home charger come tethered or untethered?" content: "Home chargers can generally come as tethered or untethered. Tethered chargers have their own cables hardwired in, while untethered units require a cable to be connected each time. It may be easier to have a tethered home charger inside a garage, but an untethered outside the home." - title: "What is a 'timed charging feature'?" content: "If your EV supports a timed charging feature, through your car's console or app, it attempts to charge the vehicle within the preferred charging time window.
For example at home, after a certain time at night when it is cheaper to charge. " - title: "What companies provide home charging installations?" content: "A car charger (or EVSE, Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) should be installed by a licensed installer, who complies with AS/NZ3000 wiring regulations.
Here are a few national companies that work with local installation partners, in no particular order:  

Expect to pay about $700-$1200 for the charger (tethered/untethered, 7kW-11kW-22kW), and $700-$1500 for the installation depending on the complexity.
For example: EO Mini Charger and installation by EVSE.

" - title: "Why can you only rapid charge an EV to 80% instead of 100%?" content: "Charging rate is limited by Li-Ion battery chemistry to protect the battery from damage, only the first 80 percent can be done quickly.
The EV's battery management system (BMS) then slows the rate of the last 20% charge to fully charge the battery. This is a standard feature in all electric vehicles. You'd charge to 100% at a fast charging station when planning to do a long trip.
LFP lithium iron phosphate batteries on the other hand (like MIC Tesla M3's battery) can and should be charged to 100% at least once a week." - title: "How do you find EV charging stations?" content: "The locations of charging stations are available in your EV's Satellite Navigation system.
Make sure you allow system updates which could include updates to charging locations.
Both Google Mpas and Apple Maps also show EV charging locations (although seems limited to bigger names only, like NRMA and ChargeFox). Alternatively, there are a number of third-party smartphone applications such as the Plugshare app, which show charging station type and location, and user reviews and photos. Apple Maps uses this Plugshare data to show information on its Maps app.
Another great planning app is A Better Route Planner. Then there are also applications from the charging companies themselves such as ChargeFox, Jolt, Everty, and others, which can also provide live status information about charging stations such as Status, Online/Offline, In use etc." - title: "If a battery runs out of charge, what will happen to the car?" content: "Just like an ICE vehicle, the car will eventually stop if the tank runs out of fuel, so an electric vehicle will stop if the battery runs out of charge. The EV will provide you information about predicted range as well as increasing warning levels as the charge in the battery gets low. It will shut down non essential components (like AC or heating) and could limit the maximum speed and acceleration to increase range going into ECO mode.
When you do need towing, your vehicle may need to be placed on skates as you may not be able to moves its wheels. Check your manual.
Other EVs can actually charge while being towed (for example Rivian), which in itself is also pretty neat. In addition to your main battery, EVs also have a 12V battery, which manages the critical vehicle systems." - title: "What is Level 1/2/3 charging?" content: "Level 1 charging is the lowest level of AC (alternating-current) charging. In general, this refers to the use of a standard household outlet charging.
One end of the charging cable is the standard three-prong household connector, on the other end your EV’s connector plug.
Level 2 is still AC, but at higher power. This is your home charger equipment level of charging at 7, 11 or 22kW.
Level 3 is DC fast charging at public charging stations, and uses a CHAdeMO, Type 2, or CCS type of connector plug (or Tesla equivalent)." faq_items_technical: - title: "What's the range of an EV?" content: "That depends on the size of the battery, and how efficient your EV manages its battery power. The larger the battery, the further you can get on a charge.
But in addition to the size of the battery, it also depends on how slippery the car is (a low drag coefficient), the size and weight of the vehicle, and how you drive the vehicle, not unlike an ICE vehicle.
Regenerative breaking, a heat pump and preconditioning the battery before driving off can all improve the range." - title: "How is EV efficiency expressed?" content: "Electric vehicle efficiency can be expressed in several different ways depending on your region and preference, though they all measure the same fundamental concept: how much energy an EV uses to travel a certain distance. These measurements are all mathematically related.
- Energy consumption per distance (most common globally):
The most widely used measurement is **kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometers (kWh/100km)**, particularly in Europe, Australia, and most metric-using countries. This works similarly to fuel consumption in litres per 100km - lower numbers indicate better efficiency. For example, an efficient EV might use 15 kWh/100km, while a less efficient one might use 22 kWh/100km.
In the United States, this is sometimes expressed as _kWh per 100 miles_, though this format is less common than the alternatives below.
- Distance per energy unit:
Some prefer to think about **how far you can travel per unit of energy**, similar to traditional fuel economy. This is expressed as **kilometers per kWh (km/kWh)** or **miles per kWh**. Higher numbers mean better efficiency. An EV achieving 6.5 km/kWh is more efficient than one achieving 4.5 km/kWh. This format can feel more intuitive for people used to _miles per gallon_ thinking.
- MPGe (Miles Per Gallon equivalent):
In the United States, official EPA ratings use **MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent)**. This measurement converts electrical energy consumption into an equivalent based on the energy content of one gallon of gasoline (33.7 kWh). So an EV rated at 100 MPGe would travel 100 miles using the electrical equivalent of one gallon of gasoline's energy. While this helps American buyers compare EVs to petrol vehicles, it's not commonly used outside the US and can be less intuitive for understanding actual energy costs.
Find a converter here: **EV Efficiency Converter**." - title: "Will my EV have enough range for my journey?" content: "Yes, absolutely. Based on an Australian average daily driving distance surveys, most EVs have enough range to cover a week of driving on only one or two battery recharges (which could happen at home overnight).
For longer journeys, your EV's Satellite Navigation system can prevent range anxiety by helping you plan the usage of rapid charge stations for top ups on the way and increase the total journey's distance." - title: "What factors affect the range of an Electric Vehicle?" content: "With ICE vehicles you use more fuel in city driving and less fuel on highways. With EV's that's the other way round.
Driving at higher speeds will reduce range (as air resistance increases exponentially with speed), while driving at city speeds is better for maximising range. Additionally, using vehicle systems such as the climate control or heating will draw energy from the battery as well and will therefore reduce range. Cold exterior temperatures can also reduce range when the battery isn't preconditioned before driving away." - title: "What is regenerative braking ('re-gen')?" content: "When slowing down or braking, the motor can act like a generator and feeds electrical energy back into the battery.
This partially recharges the battery to maximize the EV's range. Most EVs have different levels of regeneration, so that drivers can choose the battery recharging they would like, or prefer a style of driving more akin to ICE vehicles (coasting, without the recharge)." - title: "Do all EVs have 'one pedal driving'?" content: "Most current EVs uses regenerative braking to drive with just the throttle pedal in most situations, allowing for smooth acceleration and slowing. It does require a little getting used to, but once you do, you will find it very easy to drive.
Brakes are only used in an emergency." - title: "How does the EV handling compare to a conventional ICE vehicle?" content: "Compared to ICE vehicles, which has most of its weight in the front between the front wheels, EVs have their battery (the heaviest part) mounted underfloor, low and centrally between the front and back wheels, which improve handling and weight distribution.
The centre of gravity is lower in EVs improving handling in corners. Some EVs are even dual motor (or more) providing all wheel drive, further improving the handling." - title: "Without an engine, how does an EV warm up the interior?" content: "An EV is equipped with a heating and ventilation system like conventional vehicles, however this is powered by electrical energy rather than taking heat from the engine. As such this also uses the main battery and could minimally diminish range on your vehicle.
Some EVs provide heated seats which takes less power to keep yourself and passengers warm." - title: "Does every EV come with a 'heat pump'?" content: "Some EVs are equiped with a heat pump, which moves heat from the battery and drivetrain around, for example to heat up the passenger cabin on cold days, just like ICE vehicles. This saves on battery power as you're not using your vehicle's resistive electric heater. " - title: "Does every EV have cabin pre-warming/cooling or 'preconditioning'?" content: "Some EVs are equipped with pre-warming/cooling or 'preconditioning', sometimes only available when the car is plugged in at home as not to diminish range.
Through an app you can tell your car the warm up or cool down, before driving away." - title: "Does every EV have battery warming/cooling?" content: "Most current EVs are equipped with liquid cooling to keep the battery at the optimal temperature for best performance and range.
During charging, the battery will be warmed up to a certain temperature, so that even on cold days the battery performance will be optimised.
But during operation and on warm days, an EV battery warms up, and the liquid cooling system will cool the battery to optimise performance." - title: "Can EVs tow at all?" content: "Most EVs are not designed or developed for towing. So check with the manufacturer before installing a tow hitch.
Other more powerful EVs can tow, but often with lesser capacity than their ICE counterparts, and often range is halved when doing so (obviously).
On the other hand, the Rivian R1T has a towing capacity of 5.5T and a Tesla Model X 2.25T." - title: "Are EVs more difficult to maintain?" content: "Not at all. EVs have significantly fewer moving parts and systems, so maintaining them is easier and less expensive.
A traditional combustion engine has hundreds of moving parts (rubbing against each other) and with increased complexity comes increased costs.
An EV saves you money short term on fuel, as well as over the long term on maintenance. Maintenance is often limited to air filters (for the cabin air), windscreen wipers and fluids, and over longer term tires, break pads, break fluid and 12V battery. No engine oil or transmission fluid changes, no spark plugs, no transmission belt,..." faq_items_safety: - title: "Are Electric Vehicles safe?" content: "The regulations involving electric vehicles are the same as those for conventional petrol and diesel vehicles,
with the addition of extra regulations for high voltage system components.
EVs often include a range of state-of-the-art advanced and autonomous vehicle management features to assist the driver and keep all occupants safer whilst on the road.
EVs also get specific license plates, or at least an identifier, to identify them as Electric Vehicle in case there's a fire and emergency services need to take additional or different precautions.
Just remember that in an ICE vehicle, there are constantly tiny explosions happening, and you drive around with a tank filled with combustable fuel.
Don't believe us? Check out EV FireSafe." - title: "What happens if the vehicle is caught in a flood?" content: "All EVs have a fully sealed high voltage battery and electrical system, rated to the highest levels of protection against water.
Vehicles are approved to a high Ingress Protection rating for water and dust and can handle anything a regular car can.
Unlike a regular car, EVs don't need air to function. The only air intakes present are for cooling and air conditioning the cabin.
(not recommended, but you can find videos of Teslas ploughing through stationary flood water)" - title: "Can I charge an EV outdoors in the rain?" content: "Yes, there is no risk to people near the charger or the vehicle itself. The charging system and cables are all tested to ensure they can be used in the rain." faq_items_other: - title: "Are EVs sustainable and green?" content: "EVs are only as green as the generated electricity they use. Most public charging stations use 100% green energy though. Check with your electricity provider at home if they provide 100% green energy (if not, change provider). Install a smart meter, and get Time Of Charge metering. Charge your EV off-peak, at night (for example 11.45c/KW between 10pm and 7am in NSW).
Or install solar panels and a home battery to charge daily for free." - title: "What does ICE stand for?" content: "Internal Combustion Engine" - title: "What is BEV?" content: "A Battery Electric Vehicle is a vehicle powered by an electric motor that gets its power from a battery, and a battery only.
The history of BEVs is as old (if not older) than ICE vehicles. When we mention EV on this page, we refer to this BEV, not any of the following xyEVs. " - title: "What is PHEV?" content: "A Plug-in Hybrid EV is powered by a combination of a liquid fuel and electricity.
They can be charged with electricity using a plug but also contain an internal combustion engine that uses liquid fuel. The battery-only range is often very limited (30-60km). The vehicle switches between either engine automatically.
For example, at a traffic light the vehicle takes off using the electric motor, and when a certain speed is reached, the internal combustion engine takes over. Many car manufacturers now offer PHEV models." - title: "What is FCEV?" content: "A Fuel Cell EV uses a 'fuel cell' instead of a battery, or in combination with a battery or supercapacitor, to power their electric motors.
Typically these types of vehicles are fuelled by hydrogen fuel and usually provide greater range than BEVs.
Hydrogen fuel can be generated using green energy, or fossil fuels ('blue' hydrogen). (for example Toyota Mirai) " - title: "What is HEV?" content: "A Hybrid EV (non-plug-in) doesn't have an external plug to charge the vehicle. An internal combustion engine generates electricity and tops up the battery.
This can be a small engine that only generates electricity and doesn't provide motion to the vehicle (like some BMW i3 models).
Or it's the main engine that both provides motion and electricity to the vehicle (like Toyota Prius).
Additionally, the vehicle's braking system is also used to recharge the battery ('re-gen')." - title: "What is REEV?" content: "A Range Extended EV. Other name for HEV." - title: "What is SEV?" content: "A Solar Electric Vehicle (example Lightyear One, Sion Sono) providing about 12-45km/day range through solar power to its internal battery." - title: "What warranty do I get on an EV?" content: "EV warranty is often split into a vehicle warranty and a drivetrain and battery warranty. Check the details with the manufacturer. " - title: "I can hear an external droning noise when driving slowly, what's that?" content: "Due to regulations for electric vehicles, EVs are required to be fitted with a vehicle audio alert systems (VAAS), or an exterior noise generator,
which enhances the safety of pedestrians in the vicinity of the EV.
At low speeds EVs are very quiet, and the noise generator is used to warn pedestrians and cyclists. Premium brands engage audio designers, or even Oscar-award-winning composers, to create a distinctive sound for their EVs. At higher speeds, wind and tire noise and electric motor whine would be audible.
Some vehicles even come with optional interior sounds, generating an artificial rumble when accelerating." - title: "What's SoC?" content: "Short for 'State of Charge' of your EV, amount of power left in your battery." - title: "What does EVSE stand for?" content: "Short for 'Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment', your home charger." - title: "What does V2G stand for?" content: "Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology allows an EV to be connected to the grid, for example at home or at the office, to support the electricity grid when needed. This could be helpful in disaster situations like bushfires when parts of the infrastructure have been damaged. But since a battery has a limited number of discharge cycles, this shouldn’t be something you use on a daily basis for a long period of time. Nissan Leaf has this capability, but isn’t enabled in markets that don’t support this on their grid (like Australia)." - title: "What does V2L stand for?" content: "Vehicle-to-Load is a step down from V2G, and allows regular electrical home appliances or tools to be powered by your EV.
Your car would have a regular home plug, and you could power your microwave while camping in a forest *ding*.
One EV could even trickle charge another EV, discharging power at a rate of up to 3.6kW, or about 20km per hour (or enough to get you to a faster charger).
Ideally, the EV's system would prevent you from fully discharging your battery, probably leaving you with 30% or so to make it back home.
Again great for disaster relief, you could keep the lights on at home when the powergrid goes down. Newer EVs like the Ioniq 5, Rivian and Ford F-150 Lightning all come with V2L capabilities. Since you're not connecting anything to the grid, there is less oversight" --- --- # Blog posts ## [POST TITLE]: EV Efficiency Converter [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/projects/ev-efficiency-converter/ev-efficiency/](https://electricvehicle.life/projects/ev-efficiency-converter/ev-efficiency/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT] ## Convert EV Efficiency Formats Electric vehicle efficiency is measured differently around the world, making it confusing to compare vehicles or understand real-world performance. European manufacturers quote **kWh/100km**, Americans use **MPGe** and **kWh/100mi**, while some prefer the inverse: **km/kWh** or **mi/kWh**. This widget instantly converts between all these formats, helping EV owners, reviewers, and enthusiasts make sense of efficiency data regardless of its source. ---
--- Find the widget sourcecode on [Github](https://github.com/halans/kwh-efficiency-converter). [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Find Your Perfect Battery Electric Vehicle [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/projects/ev-match/ev-matchmaker/](https://electricvehicle.life/projects/ev-match/ev-matchmaker/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT] ## Take our 30-second quiz We've analyzed the specs so you don't have to. Get instant recommendations. Curated for the local market. We factor in real-world range, local pricing, and availability. Our goal is to help you find the car that fits your life, free from sales pitches. Take **the matchmaker quiz**: >[EV Matchmaker](https://evmatch.electricvehicle.life/) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: NSW EV Charging Grants [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/projects/nsw/ev-charging-grants/](https://electricvehicle.life/projects/nsw/ev-charging-grants/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT] # EV Charging at your business Get your business on the EV Charging map! More people are switching to electric vehicles (EVs) and planning trips around charging spots. The NSW Government's big plan? Invest $209 million in a top-notch EV charging network across the state, ensuring easy access to chargers. >NSW is pitching in with a $20 million fund for EV destination charging grants, to help local businesses and councils get EV chargers, aimed at regional tourist spots like motels and restaurants. This is part of the 'Drive electric' NSW program, which covers up to 75% of installation costs. This move will help attract EV drivers and benefit local communities with planned 'EV tourist drives'. Currently in Round 2. Check it out: https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/business-and-industry/programs-grants-and-schemes/electric-vehicles/electric-vehicle-destination [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Request For EV Charging Facilities [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/projects/email-template/charging-facilitites/](https://electricvehicle.life/projects/email-template/charging-facilitites/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT] # Email Template Want to get in touch with your strata manager or local shopping centre facilities manager, asking them to install EV charging facilitites? Or to get your local council to install EV chargers at the local shopping strip? Checkout our [email template](https://revolution.guide/email-template/evchargers_template.txt). Feel free to adjust the email to better suit your needs. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: McKibben TED Talk: Our Last, Best Chance [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/mckibben-solar-ted/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/mckibben-solar-ted/) [POST DATE]: 2026-08-09 [START OF CONTENT] {{< youtube 9LTGzEzDat0 >}} Solar isn't the backup plan anymore. It's the cheap option. ## Solar Didn't Get Invented. It Got Cheap. We used to call it "_alternative energy._" That word did a lot of quiet damage — it filed solar and wind under nice-if-you-can-afford-it, right next to organic groceries and bamboo toothbrushes. McKibben's point is that the word never got updated after reality moved. Ninety percent of new electricity built worldwide last year was solar or wind, because it's now cheaper to point glass at the sun than to burn coal. Not greener. Cheaper. Some of the proof is almost funny, except one bit isn't actually news to me. McKibben points to Australians about to get three free hours of electricity a day as evidence of how abundant solar's gotten. Fair; except I've had [two free hours of EV charging on Powershop's plan](/posts/ev-charging-in-australian-public-networks-vs-home-charging/) for a few years now. The three-hour version isn't a new phenomenon, it's the rest of the market catching up to a deal some of us already had. California runs on over 100% renewables most days and just banks the extra in batteries for after dark. And in Pakistan, farmers who couldn't afford steel racks just lay Chinese panels flat on the ground and wire them up themselves, YouTube tutorial style; diesel use down 30% in two years, no subsidy program in sight. That last one is the tell. This isn't a story about rich countries feeling virtuous. It's cheap hardware winning on price where nobody has money to waste on principle. I went in expecting the usual TED-talk climate math — degrees, deadlines, guilt. McKibben does the math (every tenth of a degree of warming pushes about 100 million people out of a safe climate zone), but the more interesting argument is geopolitical. Oil and gas sit in a handful of places, which is why we fight wars over them. Sunlight doesn't sit anywhere in particular. Ninety-three million miles, same distance to everywhere, and none of it runs through the Strait of Hormuz. The part that'll annoy people: solar isn't losing because it's expensive. It's losing time because it's being deliberately slowed down. McKibben names it — Trump killed offshore wind and solar permits, the Energy Secretary is on record saying there's no transition happening, subsidies went to coal instead. And still, even in Texas, most new power built last year was sun and wind. The obstruction isn't winning the argument. It's just costing years we don't have. (_I'll admit I assumed this was going to be another if-only-politicians-got-out-of-the-way talk. It mostly is. But the fix he proposes is boring in a good way — not a moonshot, just permitting. Americans pay three times what Australians pay for solar, mostly paperwork. Utah legalized small plug-in balcony solar last year. Maine and Virginia followed last week._) McKibben closes on Stonehenge and seasonal depression, which is a bigger swing than the talk needed. But the line under it holds up: we've been burning things since fire, and burning things has finally gotten too expensive to keep doing. The alternative isn't a sacrifice anymore. It's just cheaper. Solar didn't get invented this decade. It got cheap. That's the whole talk. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The Price of the Badge: What is a car brand worth when horsepower is free? [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-price-of-the-badge-what-is-a-car-brand-worth-when-horsepower-is-free/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-price-of-the-badge-what-is-a-car-brand-worth-when-horsepower-is-free/) [POST DATE]: 2026-08-08 [START OF CONTENT] **8 August 2026 · Approx. 22 minute read** In June 2026, the Australian new-car market had its biggest month in recorded history: 140,058 vehicles delivered. Buried inside that number was a result the industry had been bracing for. Toyota, which has led the Australian brand table almost continuously since 2003, delivered 19,124 cars. BYD, a Chinese company that sold its first vehicle in Australia in 2022, delivered 18,881. Two hundred and forty-three cars. That was the entire distance between the most entrenched automotive brand in the country and a challenger that, five years ago, most Australians could not have picked out of a line-up. It is a tempting number to build a story on, and plenty of people did. So it is worth reporting what happened next, because it complicates the story in a way that turns out to be the most interesting thing about it. In July, Toyota delivered 20,409 cars. BYD delivered 7,857. The gap did not narrow. It blew back out to nearly three to one. Both facts are true, and neither is a fluke. June was a genuine near-miss driven by a stock surge and a subsidy-shaped run of EV demand; July was a reversion to something like the underlying trend line. And the underlying trend line is still extraordinary: through July, BYD holds 8.1% of the Australian market against Toyota's 15.6%, having roughly doubled its volume year on year while Toyota's fell 21%. The 243 cars, then, are not evidence that the old order has fallen. They are evidence that it can now be touched. That is a different and more unsettling proposition, because it means the question is no longer whether legacy brands can be beaten on product. It is what they were ever selling that wasn't product. ![BYD's Explorer No. 1 car carrier loaded with electric vehicles](https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/BYD-Explorer-No1-shipping-vessel-electric-cars.jpg) → BYD's *Explorer No. 1*, the first vessel in a fleet the carmaker built for itself after concluding that shipping capacity was a bottleneck it did not want to rent. The company also makes its own battery cells, its own semiconductors and its own motors. *(Image: CleanTechnica)* --- #### 1 — The invention of the badge ## Nobody bought a brand until somebody sold them a ladder The modern car brand is not as old as the car. For the first quarter-century of the industry, a car was an engineering proposition, bought by people wealthy enough to treat one as a hobby. Around 1900 an American automobile cost between $600 and $7,500 in an era when that was life-changing money; by 1909 there were roughly 306,000 cars in the United States, about one per three hundred people. Economic historians compare owning one to owning a yacht today. There was no ladder to climb because almost nobody was on it. Henry Ford's answer was to remove choice entirely. The Model T launched on 1 October 1908 at $850. From 1910 Ford built nothing else, for seventeen years. The moving assembly line arrived at Highland Park in 1913 and cut chassis assembly from twelve and a half hours to two hours thirty-eight minutes. The productivity gap this opened is still difficult to absorb: in 1914 Ford built 260,722 cars with 13,000 workers, while every other American manufacturer combined built 286,770 cars using 66,350. By 1922 the Model T was roughly 47% of every car in America, and the price had fallen towards $300. Ford's own account of the strategy has become the most quoted line in industrial history, usually in a form he never used. The actual sentence, from *My Life and Work* in 1922, is: "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." He immediately adds: "I cannot say that anyone agreed with me." It is worth noting that no contemporaneous record of him saying this in 1909 exists; the story survives only in his own memoir, written thirteen years later with a ghostwriter. The black paint, incidentally, was not chosen because it dried fastest; Ford's own engineering records show it was chosen because it was the cheapest and most durable pigment available. ![Model T chassis on the moving assembly line at Highland Park, 1914](https://alamedapost.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/1914-Model-T-Ford-Highland-Park-moving-assembly-line-min.jpg) → Highland Park, 1914. Ford solved manufacturing so completely that he mistook it for having solved the business. *(Image: Alameda Post archive)* What broke Ford was not a better factory but Alfred Sloan at General Motors, who realised that once a car is affordable, price stops being the only axis of competition, and that the second axis is what the car says about the person driving it. GM built a price ladder: Chevrolet at the bottom, then Pontiac and Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac at the summit. "**A car for every purse and purpose**" is the phrase attached to it, usually to Sloan, although GM's own corporate history suggests the underlying idea came from founder William Durant and Sloan simply neglected to say so. The ladder was never as tidy in practice as in the retelling (by 1929 Oldsmobiles were selling for less than Buicks), but as a strategic concept it did something no one had done before. It made the badge on the car a statement about where you had got to in life, and it made trading up an aspiration you could act on annually. Two mechanisms turned that concept into market share. In 1927 GM created the Art and Colour Section under Harley Earl, the first in-house styling department in the industry, and the 1927 LaSalle became the first mass-production car designed by designers rather than engineers. Annual model changes followed, and with them the deliberate manufacture of dissatisfaction: your perfectly functional car was now visibly last year's. And in 1919 GM had founded GMAC to lend people the money. Ford considered buying a car on credit morally suspect and refused to offer finance until 1928. By 1930, three out of four vehicles in America were bought on time. The result: Ford held about half the American market in 1921 and under 20% by 1928. GM passed Ford temporarily in 1927, while Ford's plants sat idle retooling for the Model A, and permanently in 1931. A 1914 market research study had already diagnosed the vulnerability with brutal clarity: "*People will more readily buy Fords where the kind of car they drive has little or no effect on their social standing in the community.*" Ford built the best product and lost. GM built the best hierarchy and won. Everything the industry has believed about brands since descends from that outcome. #### And the corollary: equity is spendable If a badge can be built, it can also be drained. The canonical demonstration is the Cadillac Cimarron of 1982: a Chevrolet Cavalier with a stand-up hood ornament, leather trim and, in its first model year, the same 88-horsepower 1.8-litre four-cylinder engine as the Chevrolet, sold for thousands more. It was not a bad car so much as a public admission that the badge meant nothing in particular. Cadillac spent decades recovering, and arguably never fully did. The lesson generalises: brand equity behaves like a bank balance, not a birthright, and badge engineering is a withdrawal. ![Tailfins on a 1957 Cadillac](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/1957_Cadillac_tailfins_-_Flickr_-_thebig429.jpg) → 1957 Cadillac. The fin served no aerodynamic purpose whatsoever, which was precisely the point: it existed to be recognised from behind. *(Image: Wikimedia Commons)* --- #### 2 — This has happened before, twice ## The incumbents have run this play, and lost it, in living memory Anyone arguing that Chinese carmakers cannot displace established Western brands should be made to read the press cuttings from 1970 and 1986 first. The Japanese entered America and Europe as a joke about tin cans. Contemporary press dismissed the Datsun Sunny as disposable; the Honda N600 was a $1,200 curiosity. Then reliability data started arriving and did not stop. By the early 1980s, the response was not competitive but political: the 1981 Voluntary Export Restraints capped Japanese imports at 1.68 million units, rising to 1.85 million by year four. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland later calculated the three-year cost to American consumers at roughly $2.7 billion, of which about $2.6 billion was simply transferred to Japanese producers and American dealers as windfall profit on artificially scarce cars. The quota did not stop the Japanese. It taught them to sell fewer, more expensive vehicles, and to build factories in Ohio and Tennessee. Then they came for the top of the ladder. Lexus launched the LS400 in November 1989 at $35,350, roughly $20,000 under a comparable German sedan, and outsold BMW in the United States in its first full month. Thirty-five percent of early buyers traded in a European luxury car. BMW's US marketing vice-president had publicly predicted Lexus would take customers from Cadillac and Lincoln rather than from BMW. He was wrong within weeks. Not every attempt worked, which is the more useful half of the lesson. Infiniti launched the same month with a $60 million advertising campaign famous for showing rocks and geese rather than cars. It generated 60,000 phone calls and sold 32 vehicles a day against Lexus's 134. *TIME* headlined it "_Phantom Car, Faint Sales_"; Jay Leno's line was that sales of trees and rocks were up 300%. Buzz is not brand. ![First-generation Lexus LS400](https://media.lexus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/1990/10/ls400-archive.jpg) → The 1990 Lexus LS400. Dismissed on arrival as a Mercedes tribute act; within a month it was outselling BMW in America. *(Image: Lexus Media)* The Korean run is the one that should genuinely frighten European product planners, because it is a stopwatch. Hyundai entered the US in January 1986 with the Excel at $4,995 and set an import sales record. Within three years the brand was a punchline about cars that dissolved. Its answer, in 1998, was the ten-year, hundred-thousand-mile warranty: a naked purchase of trust at the precise moment Korea's financial credibility had collapsed. By 2004, Hyundai ranked second in J.D. Power's initial quality study, behind only Toyota. Peter Schreyer arrived from Audi in 2006 and gave Kia a face. Genesis was spun out as a standalone luxury brand in 2015. In 2024, Hyundai Motor Group ranked first in the world for initial quality. That is roughly thirty-five years from market entry to the top of the table, or about twenty-five from the reputational floor. The climb is real, it is repeatable, and it takes a generation. THE DIFFERENCE THIS TIME The Japanese and Korean waves competed on the incumbents' terms: better-built versions of a broadly similar machine, sold more cheaply, improving each year. It took decades because the underlying technology (internal combustion, gearboxes, chassis dynamics) encoded a hundred years of accumulated tacit knowledge that could only be acquired slowly. The electric drivetrain discards most of that inheritance. There is no engine to perfect, no transmission to calibrate, no cold-start emissions problem, no century of metallurgy in a cylinder head. The hard parts are now cells, power electronics, thermal management and software, and on every one of those, the accumulated advantage sits in China. The clock that took Korea thirty-five years is not running at the same speed. --- #### 3 — What actually broke ## Performance stopped being expensive, and nobody told the marketing department Here is the single fact that reorganises everything else. In 2010 a lithium-ion battery pack cost somewhere around $1,100 to $1,200 per kilowatt-hour. In 2025 the global volume-weighted average was $108. In China it was $84, with US packs running about 44% higher and European packs about 56% higher than that. Lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry, which China dominates and which requires no cobalt, reached $81 per kilowatt-hour at pack level in 2025 against $128 for nickel-manganese-cobalt. It is less energy-dense, which for a mass-market car has turned out not to matter nearly as much as being cheap.
Lithium-ion battery pack price, volume-weighted average ($/kWh)
BloombergNEF
2010
~$1,150
2019
$156
2023
$139
2024
$115
2025 (global)
$108
2025 (China)
$84

BNEF's own releases quote the 2010 baseline as both "above $1,100" and "above $1,200" in different years; treat it as a range. The China figure fell 13% in 2025, the sharpest regional decline, widening rather than closing the gap with Europe and North America.

Cost is only half of it. The other half is that China does not merely assemble these cars: it owns the inputs. Roughly 80% of global battery cell output and 85% of capacity sits in China, alongside 85–90% of cathode material, over 90% of anode material, 91% of rare-earth refining and 94% of the world's neodymium magnet production. CATL and BYD alone account for over 55% of every EV battery sold on the planet. When Europe builds an electric car, it is buying most of the value from the people it is competing with. BYD is the structural extreme. It was founded in 1995 as a battery company supplying Motorola and Nokia, and only bought its way into cars in 2003. It makes its own cells, its own IGBT semiconductors, its own motors and, after concluding that shipping was a bottleneck, its own fleet of ocean-going car carriers. When UBS stripped down a BYD Seal in 2023, it found roughly 75% of the components were made in-house, double the global average, and a cost base about 25% below Western rivals and more than 30% below the Volkswagen ID.3. Legacy manufacturers typically buy in 60–80% of a vehicle's value from suppliers; several of them actively divested their component arms in the 1990s. Speed compounds it. Chinese manufacturers develop a new vehicle in roughly 18 to 24 months against 45 to 60 for legacy mass-market groups, a figure independently estimated in the same range by McKinsey, AlixPartners, Oliver Wyman and a Reuters investigation. Reuters also found the average Chinese-brand model on sale was 1.6 years old; for foreign brands, 5.4. A NECESSARY CORRECTION TO THE POPULAR STORY It is not all subsidies. The most rigorous bottom-up study of the question (by the Rhodium Group, February 2026) puts BYD's per-vehicle cost advantage over Tesla at about $4,700, roughly 15%, of which state subsidies explain around $292. Fourteen hundred of the fifteen hundred dollars, in other words, is **vertical integration, scale and low overheads**. This matters because "they only win because Beijing pays for it" is a story that lets incumbents avoid changing anything. Tariffs can offset a subsidy. They cannot offset a better cost structure. #### Which brings us to the 1,400 horsepower question A Xiaomi SU7 Ultra makes roughly 1,526 horsepower and costs about 529,900 yuan, around $73,000. That is approximately **$48 per horsepower**. A Porsche 911 Turbo S makes 640 horsepower for about $230,000, or roughly **$360 per horsepower**. Per unit of performance, the Chinese car is seven and a half times cheaper, not marginally so.
Cost per horsepower, selected performance cars
Manufacturer prices, author's calculation
Xiaomi SU7 Ultra
1,526 hp / ~$73k
$48
Zeekr 001 FR
1,247 hp / ~$105k
$84
Yangwang U9
1,287 hp / ~$233k
$181
Porsche Taycan Turbo GT
1,019 hp / ~$231k
$227
Porsche 911 Turbo S
640 hp / ~$230k
$360

Prices are approximate domestic-market figures and are not adjusted for tax, tariff or specification. The ratios, not the absolute values, are the point.

![Xiaomi SU7 Ultra](https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/P30KEG/180:0:1080:810/su7-ultra-high-front.webp) → The Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: around 1,500 horsepower from a company that, five years ago, made phones and rice cookers. Ford's chief executive imported one to Chicago and told a podcast: "_I've been driving it for six months now, and I don't want to give it up._" *(Image: Motor1 / InsideEVs)* The instinct is to argue about the numbers: that a Nürburgring time set by a stripped prototype is not a production time (correct: the SU7 Ultra has three different lap times attached to three different states of tune), or that Yangwang's claimed 496 km/h was a one-directional run that would not satisfy Guinness (also correct). But arguing the asterisks concedes the argument. If your defence of a €230,000 sports car requires litigating whether the €73,000 car's lap record was set on the correct kind of run, the performance gap has already closed to within the margin of press-release integrity. Straight-line speed is over as a differentiator. An electric motor makes maximum torque at zero rpm; adding another one costs a few thousand dollars. Acceleration was expensive for a hundred years because it required combustion engineering that almost nobody could do well. It is now a purchasing decision. Any brand whose meaning rests on being quick is holding an asset that has been marked down to roughly nothing. --- #### 4 — The numbers ## Europe is where it is happening. Australia is where it has happened. In the second quarter of 2026, Chinese brands took a record 10.7% of new-car sales across Western Europe's eighteen markets: 352,098 units. It was the first quarter in history that Chinese brands outsold Japanese ones. A year earlier the figure was 5.7%. In 2016, Chinese brands plus Tesla combined accounted for 0.1% of the market; in Q2 2026 that same "new entrant" group was 13.3%.
Chinese brands' share of new-car sales, Western Europe (18 markets)
Schmidt Automotive Research
2016 (incl. Tesla)
0.1%
Q2 2025
5.7%
Q1 2026
8.7%
Q2 2026
10.7%

Schmidt cautions that the Q2 figure may be flattered by importers front-loading registrations ahead of the July 2026 GSR-2 type-approval change, a pattern seen at the last changeover. Q3 will be the honest test.

Where is that share coming from? Growth isn't the source; the incumbents are.
Selected brand share, Western Europe, Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025
Schmidt Automotive Research
Volkswagen
10.2%
 Q2 2025
11.3%
BYD
2.8%
Tesla
2.6%
Chery
2.3%
Ford
<3.0%
Nissan
1.6%
Chinese brands Tesla European incumbent Declining incumbent

Ford held roughly 9% of the European market in 2009. BYD, Chery and Tesla each now outsell Nissan. European brands collectively fell to 65.1% of the market in H1 2026, below two-thirds for the first time.

Australia is the same film, further into the running time, because Australia has no domestic car industry to protect, drives on the right-hand side that Chinese exporters already build for, and has just introduced fuel-efficiency rules that structurally reward exactly the companies arriving. The Australian first-half table is the clearest picture anywhere of a market reallocating rather than growing. Total volume was essentially flat (down 0.3%), which means every unit gained by a challenger was taken from someone. | Brand | H1 2026 sales | Change YoY | | |---|---|---|---| | Toyota | 95,141 | −21% | Losing | | BYD | 52,335 | +124% | Gaining | | Chery | 24,964 | +77% | Gaining | | Nissan | 13,854 | −33% | Losing | | Geely | 10,970 | Sharply up | Gaining | | Mazda | — | −23% | Losing | | Subaru | — | −37% | Losing | → Total market 606,793, −0.3%. VFACTS data; Geely's precise year-on-year percentage varies between sources and is reported here qualitatively. One number in that table deserves particular attention: Mazda incurred the largest financial liability under Australia's new efficiency standard in its first performance period, at −$25.4 million. BYD earned the most credits, around 6.28 million units of them. The regulatory environment designed to decarbonise the fleet functions, in practice, as a transfer from companies with combustion line-ups to companies without them. --- #### 5 — Adelaide ## Australia already lost the brands it loved, and China had nothing to do with it There is a reason Australia fell faster than Europe: not that Chinese cars are better here, but that Australia already ran this experiment, a decade early, on itself. For most of the postwar period Australia had what may have been the most tribal car market in the developed world. Roughly half of every car sold in the 1950s was a Holden. The rivalry with Ford was not a marketing construct. It was a genuine social division, red against blue, conducted annually at Bathurst and understood by people who had never bought either. Holden's veteran Mark Skaife put the taxonomy plainly: "_Red vs Blue, Ford vs Holden, Collingwood vs Carlton, Labor vs Liberal._" What made it work was proximity. The Commodore and the Falcon were designed in Australia, built in Australia by Australians, and raced at Bathurst in a form you could plausibly buy at a dealership. The badge on the boot lid was a claim about where you were from and who made your car, not an abstraction about a company headquartered in another hemisphere. Brand loyalty had a physical substrate: a factory in Elizabeth, another in Broadmeadows, and the people who worked in them. Then it went; for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with China. **Timeline: the end of Australian car manufacturing** - **1992 / 2008** Nissan, then Mitsubishi, end Australian production. The first cracks, largely unmourned. - **2013** Canberra declines further subsidies. Holden announces it will stop manufacturing. A high dollar, high wages, a small domestic market and closed Asian export markets have made the arithmetic impossible. - **7 Oct 2016** **The last Falcon** comes down the line at Broadmeadows, an XR6, ending more than ninety years of Ford manufacturing in Australia. Around 600 jobs go. It falls on qualifying day at the Bathurst 1000. - **Oct 2017** Toyota closes Altona. The last Australian-built Camry. - **20 Oct 2017** **The last Commodore** leaves Elizabeth, ending 69 years of Australian car-making. At its peak in 2003–05 the plant built 780 cars a day; in its final year, 175. Up to 950 people finish that day; 800 had already gone. - **17 Feb 2020** General Motors retires the Holden badge altogether. Prime Minister Scott Morrison: *"I am angry... Australian taxpayers put millions into this multinational company. They let the brand just wither away on their watch."* ![Workers at Holden's Elizabeth plant on the final day of production, October 2017](https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/37df34a3a7e40ccb57c51cdcf994e8bd?impolicy=wcms_crop_resize&cropH=2001&cropW=3000&xPos=0&yPos=0&width=862&height=575) → Elizabeth, South Australia, October 2017. Sixty-nine years of Australian car manufacturing finished on a Friday afternoon. *(Image: ABC News)* #### Then GM tried to keep the badge without the car This is the part that matters most, because it is the Cadillac Cimarron all over again: same mistake, different hemisphere, thirty-six years later, and this time with an audience that had every reason to take it personally. Having closed Elizabeth, General Motors kept the Commodore name and applied it to an imported Opel Insignia: front-wheel drive, built in Germany, available with a four-cylinder or a V6, and for the first time in forty years, no V8 at all. More than three million Commodores had been sold since 1978. Australians looked at this one and declined. Sales fell over 60% in 2018, then another 37% in 2019 to 5,417 cars. GM axed it in December 2019, two years after launch, and reportedly paid penalties to the German factory for not taking its allocation. The collateral damage went further than one model. Industry surveys tracked the number of people intending to buy a Holden within the next year falling from 8% to 4% almost overnight when the factory shut, buyers concluding, not unreasonably, that a company that had stopped making cars here had stopped being theirs. Holden then declined to renew franchise agreements with some of its longest-standing dealers, who promptly installed Nissan, Kia and Hyundai signage in the same showrooms. Every one of those brands went on to outsell Holden. By 2019 the former number-one brand in the country held 4.1% of the market and tenth place. Australians might carry the flag with pride, or even have it tattooed on their body, but we know a good deal when we see one. — Joshua Dowling, *Sydney Morning Herald*, December 2019 That sentence is the whole argument of this essay, written seven years before the Chinese wave arrived, by someone watching a different fire. #### Which is why Australia had no defences left By the time BYD landed in 2022, Australia had become the most brand-agnostic developed car market on earth, and it had got there entirely without Chinese help. Every car on sale was an import. No badge had a local claim on anyone's loyalty: no factory, no jobs, no plausible line about supporting Australian workers. Ford still sold Rangers and Mustangs, but the Falcon was a memory. Holden was gone outright. The Supercars grid, which had once been a direct extension of the showroom, had become, in driver Nick Percat's flat assessment, "hand-made race cars... other than the body panels, they're nothing like a road car anymore." So when a Chinese manufacturer arrived with more equipment at a lower price, the emotional switching cost of moving from a Toyota to a BYD was approximately zero. Not because Australians are unsentimental (they had been extraordinarily sentimental, for seventy years), but because the objects of the sentiment had already been taken away and replaced with imports, by the very companies that had earned the loyalty in the first place. Which makes Australia less a preview of Europe's future than a controlled experiment on what Europe still has and is at risk of spending. Europe retains the substrate: Wolfsburg, Zuffenhausen, Mirafiori, Gothenburg, Sochaux. Factories, jobs, national identification, the sense that these companies are in some meaningful way *ours*. That is what the tariff arguments and the localisation fights are actually about, underneath the trade law: not protecting margin, but protecting the physical basis on which a badge can still make a claim on somebody. Australia demonstrates the sequence: the manufacturing goes for sound economic reasons, the brand attempts to survive as pure marketing, buyers detect the hollowness immediately, and then a competitor arrives to find a market with nothing to defend. The Chinese did not dismantle Australian car loyalty; they inherited a market where it had already been dismantled from the inside, and bought it cheaply. --- #### 6 — The great sorting ## Two economies, and the brands trapped between them The question "_do people still care about car brands?_" has no single answer, because there is no longer a single car market. There are two, and they are separating fast. The first is the **appliance economy**. Four wheels, a family, a school run, a price. This is most of the market by volume, and it always has been. The difference is that buyers now have the information to act on it. They can compare specification, warranty, range and monthly payment on a phone before they ever see a dealer. In this economy, the badge functioned mainly as a proxy: a shorthand for "this will probably not break, and someone will fix it if it does." When you can verify those things directly, the proxy loses value. And a Chinese manufacturer can deliver more equipment, more technology and more electrification for less money, which is precisely the offer that wins here. In the appliance economy, brand is not dying so much as being priced correctly, and the correct price is low. The second is the **identity economy**. Here the car is not a solution to a transport problem; it is a statement about the person driving it. Mercedes' design chief Gorden Wagener puts the distinction more bluntly than any analyst: "_A Mercedes should not be like a fridge — something you need... luxury is something you want, not what you need. We don't build appliances on wheels._" That is not marketing fluff, it is a segmentation strategy. In this economy the badge *is* the product, and its price is whatever meaning it carries. Over 90% of European luxury buyers say they value brand heritage. Seventy-one percent say they are unlikely to consider a Chinese car. — McKinsey, cited by Reuters Breakingviews, November 2025 That statistic is the single strongest piece of evidence that brand equity remains a real, monetisable asset, and also the most dangerous thing an incumbent could read, because a 71% refusal rate is a starting position, not a moat. In 1989, the share of BMW owners who would have considered a Japanese luxury sedan was surely higher than 29%, **right up until it wasn't**. The genuine casualty of this sorting is neither the cheap car nor the exceptional one. It is everything in the middle: the mainstream brand that charges a premium over the value players on the strength of reputation, without offering anything the identity economy would pay for. Volkswagen at 10.2% and falling. Ford below 3% in a market where it held 9% in 2009. Nissan at 1.6%, now outsold in Europe by BYD, Tesla, MG and Chery. These are brands discovering that the middle of the ladder was the rung nobody was standing on for emotional reasons, not brands being beaten on product. --- #### 7 — Stuttgart ## How Porsche competes with 1,400 horsepower: by not competing with 1,400 horsepower Porsche is having a genuinely terrible time, and it is important to be accurate about why, because the reasons are mostly not the ones in the headline. - **14.1%** Porsche operating margin, FY2024 - **1.1%** Porsche operating margin, FY2025 (profit fell 92.7% to €0.41bn) - **−55%** Porsche's China deliveries, 2022 peak to 2025 (93,286 → 41,938) - **−63%** Share price versus its May 2023 high of €120.80 Three guidance cuts in 2025. Demotion from the DAX to the MDAX in September of that year. Roughly 9,000 job reductions programmed through to 2035, about one position in five. A dealer network in China contracting from around 150 outlets towards a target of 80. And in September 2025, a strategic reversal: the new SUV positioned above the Cayenne, previously planned as an EV, will now launch with combustion and plug-in hybrid power, at a one-off cost of up to €1.8 billion and total extraordinary charges around €3.1 billion. Volkswagen Group absorbed roughly €5.1 billion in knock-on impairment. But disentangle the causes. US tariffs cost roughly €700 million in 2025; Porsche builds nothing in America and North America is now its largest market. The China collapse is substantially a demand-side story about a property downturn and newly discreet wealth, not solely a competitive one: Mercedes fell 27% in China in Q3 2025, BMW 11% over nine months, Ferrari 13%. And Porsche's own software problems were inherited: Volkswagen's CARIAD division lost more than €6.9 billion between 2022 and 2024 and delayed the electric Macan by years. Even the alarming Australian number has an innocent explanation. Porsche Australia's June deliveries fell 33% to 342 cars, driven by the Macan collapsing 83% from 241 units to 41 as it transitioned to an EV-only line-up. In the same month, Cayenne Coupe sales rose 27.7% and Cayenne Wagon 44.8%. Porsche Australia's chief executive said flatly: "this is not a Porsche problem, this is an industry situation." On the evidence, he is right. ![Porsche 911 on a road](https://newsroom.porsche.com/.imaging/mte/porsche-templating-theme/teaser_720x406x2/dam/pnr/2021/Products/911-five-modes-in-one-day/normal-mode/MFR09376.jpeg/jcr:content/MFR09376.jpeg) → The 911 retains roughly 60–78% of its value after three years depending on the methodology, and 92% after five years in US data, against an all-vehicle average of 58%. Depreciation is brand equity you can measure in cash. *(Image: Porsche Newsroom)* #### So what is left to defend? Not speed. Porsche cannot win a horsepower war against a company that will sell 1,500 of them for $73,000, and the strategically literate response is to stop entering that war. What survives commoditisation is everything that cannot be specified on a comparison table: - **Residual value.** This is the least romantic and most persuasive argument for brand. A 911 retains roughly 60% of its value after three years on conservative UK figures, and one 2026 analysis ranked it the single best value-retaining car in Britain at around 78%. In US data it depreciates 7.8% over five years against an all-vehicle average of 41.5%. That gap is desire, expressed as money, years after the sale, not engineering. - **Driving as an experience rather than an outcome.** Ferrari's global marketing director, asked directly about Chinese rivals, gave the most honest answer anyone in the industry has offered: "_We think they are making incredible progress in terms of performance. I think they are still a little behind in terms of driving emotion. Developing a car which drives fast on the straight is not difficult. Developing a car which is incredibly precise when entering a curve... this is what we try to do._" Then the knife: "_They do develop cars which are kind of consumable. Every month a new car comes up, and your previous car becomes old._" - **Scarcity, enforced deliberately.** Ferrari is the proof that the identity economy is not merely defensible but extraordinarily profitable. In 2025 it made €7.15 billion in revenue at a 29.5% operating margin and a 38.8% EBITDA margin, on 13,640 cars, essentially flat against 2024's 13,752, and up from just 7,255 in 2014. Its order book runs to the end of 2027. It achieves this while China accounts for only 7% of revenue, which is to say it has structurally opted out of the market that is destroying everyone else's numbers. What Ferrari sells is not transportation, or even performance, but the fact that you cannot simply buy one. That said, Ferrari also demonstrates the limits. When it revealed its first EV, the Luce, unveiled in Rome in May 2026 at over €500,000, the stock fell 8.4% in Milan, having already dropped 16% the previous October on underwhelming long-range guidance. By late July, orders had reportedly hit the roughly 500-unit target, helped by Chinese demand. Even the most insulated brand in the industry gets marked down when the market suspects its meaning does not transfer to the new technology. THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT WORTH TAKING SERIOUSLY The Chinese are not staying in the value segment. BYD's Denza launched in Europe at the Palais Garnier and prices the Z9GT at €115,000, against under $50,000 at home, a 2.3× export markup, and above an equivalent Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo. The Denza Z, aimed squarely at the 911, launched at Goodwood at around £142,900. Yangwang is coming for Bentley. Zeekr is coming for Range Rover. And in China itself, the moat has already been breached: Huawei's Maextro S800 has become the country's best-selling car above $100,000, outselling the Porsche Panamera and BMW 7 Series *combined*. The German premium brands are not insulated in China. The open question (genuinely open, because it has not happened yet) is whether the Western insulation survives once Denza and Yangwang arrive at scale with service networks and a decade of track record behind them. --- #### 8 — Gothenburg ## The Volvo paradox: a Chinese-owned brand that stayed Swedish If the question is whether Chinese ownership destroys a European brand's meaning, the experiment has already been run, and the answer is no, with conditions. Ford sold Volvo Cars to Geely for $1.8 billion in March 2010, an act widely reported at the time as the end of Volvo as anyone understood it. What followed was the most successful period in the company's history. In 2011, its first full year under Geely, Volvo sold 449,255 cars on revenue of SEK 126 billion with SEK 1.6 billion of operating profit. By 2019 it sold 705,452 cars, the first time above 700,000 in a ninety-year history, on SEK 274 billion of revenue and SEK 14.3 billion of operating profit. In October 2021 it listed in Stockholm at around $18 billion and jumped 22% on debut. Volvo's own account names the mechanism explicitly. The 2010 arrangement was built on "_technical independence, a global manufacturing footprint, a strengthened brand identity and arms-length governance by Geely._" Li Shufu bought a brand and then, crucially, did not touch it. **Håkan Samuelsson**'s summary: "_we completely renewed our product portfolio, established a global presence, almost doubled our sales and went from break-even to profitable._" ![Volvo EX30](https://media.wired.com/photos/647fbecfa6c1fece8f4bb2e5/3:2/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Volvo-EX30-Featured-Gear.jpg) → The Volvo EX30: designed in Sweden, initially built in China, and since April 2025 also built in Ghent, Belgium, after a €200 million investment prompted directly by EU tariffs that apply to the Geely group at 28.8%. *(Image: WIRED)* The comparison case is instructive. MG, under SAIC, kept the octagon and discarded almost everything else: the badge survives as a value proposition, competently executed and emotionally hollow. **Volvo kept the meaning.** The difference was whether the owner understood that the meaning was the asset, not the nationality of ownership. Which is why the current chapter matters. Volvo is struggling: it abandoned its 2030 all-electric pledge in September 2024, took a roughly $1 billion impairment in 2025, and brought Samuelsson back as chief executive in April 2025 on a two-year term after Jim Rowan's departure. And Li Shufu has begun publicly arguing for the opposite of the original doctrine: deeper integration with Geely and Polestar, more shared China-based R&D, to avoid what he called self-destructive obsolescence. Fifteen years of deliberate arm's-length separation is being unwound under financial pressure. That is the real test, and it is running right now. Volvo's Swedishness was never a fact about its cap table; it was a discipline about what the owner refrained from doing. Discipline is cheap when profits are good. Set Volvo against Holden and the variable isolates cleanly. Both were national brands owned by a foreign parent. One owner treated the meaning as the asset and left it alone, and the brand grew from 449,000 cars to 705,000. The other treated the meaning as a balance-sheet item it could keep while disposing of everything underneath it, and destroyed a seventy-year-old institution in three years. Neither outcome had anything to do with the nationality of the owner; both had everything to do with whether the owner understood what they had bought. **A brand is not where a car is assembled, or who owns the equity, but whether anyone can tell the difference when they drive it.** --- #### 9 — The reckoning ## Who survives, and on what basis Sorting the field by what each type of brand actually owns, rather than by nationality or size: | Category | What it actually owns | Exposure | Odds | |---|---|---|---| | **Ultra-luxury**
*Ferrari, Rolls-Royce, Bentley* | Deliberate scarcity, waiting lists, an order book that is itself the product. Ferrari caps volume on purpose. | China demand weakness; whether meaning transfers to EVs | Defensible | | **Performance icons**
*Porsche 911, AMG, M* | Residual values, motorsport lineage, chassis feel, the fact that a 911 is a decision rather than a purchase. | Must stop competing on horsepower; China already lost | Conditional | | **Meaning-led premium**
*Volvo, Land Rover, Mini* | A specific value proposition (safety, capability, character) that a spec sheet cannot express. | Owner discipline; dilution under margin pressure | Conditional | | **Volume mainstream**
*VW, Ford, Nissan, Mazda* | Reputation as a proxy for reliability: the exact function buyers can now verify without it. | Undercut from below, no emotional premium above | Existential | | **Value incumbents**
*Dacia, Suzuki, base Kia* | Cost discipline and distribution: competing on the axis Chinese OEMs are strongest on. | Direct head-to-head, with a worse cost base | Existential | | **Chinese challengers**
*BYD, Chery, Geely, MG* | Cost structure, speed, supply chain. Everything except time. | Residuals, service networks, no heritage to draw on | Ascending | The Chinese challengers' weakness is worth stating precisely, because it is routinely overstated and routinely understated in the same conversation. In Australia, the depreciation penalty is real: the **BYD Atto 3 lost 35.8%** in just over a year and the **Chery Tiggo 7 Pro 42.0%**, against MG ZS retaining 57–68% over four years versus 72–78% for a Mazda CX-3. But in the UK, cap hpi's 2026 data has the MG 5 among the *strongest* performers on three-year residuals, while the value stress sits in premium EVs: the Genesis G80, Lexus RZ, BMW i5, Jaguar I-Pace. A Tesla Model Y lost 48.9% since 2022. So the honest formulation is not "_Chinese cars depreciate badly_." It is "_cars without an established track record depreciate badly, and MG (which has been in these markets longest) no longer has that problem._" Which tells you exactly what the deficit is. It is not quality. It is time. And time is the one input BYD cannot vertically integrate. --- ## Conclusion ### The badge has to be paid for again **Car brands are not dead.** Unearned car brands are dead, and most brands have been coasting on unearned equity for about thirty years. The century-long bargain was that a badge stood as security for things a buyer could not check: whether the engine would last, whether the car would be safe, whether it would be worth anything in five years, whether the neighbours would read it correctly. Sloan monetised the last of those and the industry lived off the arrangement for four generations. What has happened is not that Chinese manufacturers built better cars, but that they, along with the internet and the electric drivetrain, dismantled the information asymmetry the whole arrangement rested on. When a buyer can verify range, warranty, equipment and price in ten minutes on a phone, and when 1,500 horsepower costs $73,000, the badge is no longer collateral. It is just a claim, and it now has to be true. Which brings this back to where most people actually live. If you need four wheels to move a family from A to B, you are being served better than at any point in automotive history, by companies that did not exist in your consciousness five years ago, and you are right not to pay a premium for a logo that no longer certifies anything. That is the correct pricing of a service, not the death of taste. And if you [chose a Volvo](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/) because something about the way it holds itself matches something about the way you would like to hold yourself. That is not sentimentality either, but the last remaining thing a car brand can sell that cannot be copied by a company with better batteries: a specific, coherent point of view about how to move through the world, executed consistently enough that other people recognise it. Volvo's Swedishness survived a Chinese takeover because Geely understood it was buying a meaning, not a factory. Whether it survives Volvo's own cost-cutting is a genuinely open question. Australia is the cautionary version of that sentence, because Australia has already been through it and the culprit was domestic. Nobody took the Falcon and the Commodore away from Australians except the companies that made them. The badges were spent: first on a factory closure that was probably unavoidable, then on an imported saloon wearing a name it had not earned, which was entirely avoidable. What arrived from China four years later did not conquer a loyal market. It walked into an empty one. The comforting version of this story is that Europe's heritage brands have a moat and China has none. The real version is that 71% of European luxury buyers said they would not consider a Chinese car: a number that describes a lead, not a wall, and one that reads uncomfortably like what BMW's marketing chief said about Lexus in October 1989, three weeks before Lexus outsold him. Brands were never about the metal. They were about being the only people who could make the metal work. That job is finished. From here, a badge is worth exactly what it means to the person looking at it — and meaning, unlike horsepower, was never something you could buy by the kilowatt-hour. ---
## Sources & notes - **European market data**: Schmidt Automotive Research (Q1/Q2 2026 studies), covering 18 Western European markets. Volvo is classified as European despite Geely ownership. - **Australian market data**: FCAI/VFACTS June and July 2026 releases; Electric Vehicle Council; Pitcher Partners, "Flooding the zone" (2 August 2026); NVES Regulator 2025 performance period results. - **Battery and cost data**: BloombergNEF Battery Price Survey 2024/2025; IEA Global EV Outlook 2025; SNE Research; UBS BYD Seal teardown (2023); Rhodium Group, "Why are Chinese EVs so cheap?" (February 2026). - **Porsche and Ferrari**: Porsche AG newsroom and annual results; Volkswagen Group ad-hoc disclosures; Ferrari FY2025 results (10 February 2026); Reuters; Interbrand Best Global Brands 2025. - **Consumer research**: McKinsey via Reuters Breakingviews (2 November 2025); cap hpi via Motor Trader (May/June 2026); Redbook/CarsGuide via Australian analyses; What Car?, iSeeCars. - **Australian manufacturing collapse**: ABC News and Reuters coverage of the Ford Broadmeadows (October 2016), Toyota Altona and Holden Elizabeth (October 2017) closures; ABC and Reuters on GM's retirement of the Holden brand, February 2020; GoAuto and the *Sydney Morning Herald* (Joshua Dowling, December 2019) on the ZB Commodore's failure; *The Age* on the sponsorship and Supercars fallout. - **History**: *Journal of Economic History*; Henry Ford, *My Life and Work* (1922); The Henry Ford; Model T Ford Club of America; Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on the 1981 VERs; contemporaneous *LA Times*, *TIME* and *Christian Science Monitor* reporting on the Lexus and Infiniti launches. ### Where this piece is deliberately cautious - The June 2026 BYD–Toyota near-miss is reported alongside July's reversal, because reporting one without the other would misrepresent the trend. - Chinese depreciation is treated as a track-record problem rather than a national one, because UK data currently contradicts the simpler claim. - Porsche's Australian and Chinese declines are separated into transition, demand and competition effects rather than attributed wholesale to Chinese rivals. - Cost-per-horsepower figures are the author's arithmetic on manufacturer prices, unadjusted for tax and tariff. The ratio is the argument, not the absolute number. - The 71% figure is widely quoted as applying to European luxury buyers. It is traced here to its primary source — a McKinsey survey of just over 150 luxury-car buyers worldwide — and reported with the sample size and the accompanying loyalty figures, which cut the other way.
## References ### European market data *Note: Schmidt Automotive Research covers 18 Western European markets. Volvo is classified as European despite Geely ownership.* - Schmidt Automotive Research, ["Chinese OEMs surpass Japanese brands for the first time"](https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/chinese-oems-surpass-japanese-brands-for-the-first-time) (22 July 2026) - Schmidt Automotive Research, ["New kids on the block"](https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/new-kids-on-the-block-new-entrants-claim-an-ever-tighter-grip-on-western-europe-s-new-car-market) (22 July 2026) - Schmidt Automotive Research, ["Chinese OEMs race towards double digit market share"](https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/new-study-chinese-oems-race-towards-double-digit-market-share-of-the-european-new-car-market) (17 June 2026) - Schmidt Automotive Research, ["BYD now Western Europe's largest Chinese brand"](https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/byd-now-western-europe-s-largest-chinese-brand-on-a-quarterly-basis-thanks-to-phev-push) (28 July 2026) - South China Morning Post, ["Europe's new EV power struggle"](https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3362905/europes-new-ev-power-struggle-sees-chinese-giants-seize-record-market-share) (4 August 2026) - Automotive News Europe, ["Which legacy automakers are losing ground?"](https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/automakers/ane-chinese-market-share-winners-losers-0803/) (3 August 2026) - Reuters, ["China's carmakers expand their presence in Europe"](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas-carmakers-expand-their-presence-europe-2026-06-02/) (2 June 2026) - Reuters, ["BYD aims to double European sales network by end-2026"](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/byd-aims-double-european-sales-network-by-end-2026-executive-says-2025-11-17/) (17 November 2025) - European Commission, [countervailing duties on Chinese BEV imports](https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/news/eu-commission-imposes-countervailing-duties-imports-battery-electric-vehicles-bevs-china) (October 2024) ### Australian market data - FCAI, ["New vehicle market records strongest month ever"](https://www.fcai.com.au/new-vehicle-market-records-strongest-month-ever/) (3 July 2026) - FCAI, ["EV sales remain strong during record-best July"](https://www.fcai.com.au/ev-sales-remain-strong-during-record-best-july/) (5 August 2026) - Pitcher Partners, ["Flooding the zone: The rise of Chinese vehicle brands in Australia"](https://www.pitcher.com.au/insights/flooding-the-zone-the-rise-of-chinese-vehicle-brands-in-australia/) (2 August 2026) - carsales, ["VFACTS June 2026: BYD erases gap to Toyota"](https://business.carsales.com.au/news-room/news/vfacts-june-2026-australias-strongest-month-ever-byd-erases-gap-to-toyota/) - carsales, ["How the new car market is shifting six months into 2026"](https://business.carsales.com.au/news-room/news/vfacts-how-the-new-car-market-is-shifting-six-months-into-2026/) - CarExpert, ["VFACTS July 2026"](https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/vfacts-july-2026-record-new-vehicle-sales-in-july-as-toyota-rav4-hilux-lead-the-market) (5 August 2026) - GoAuto, ["VFACTS: New record set in June"](https://www.goauto.com.au/news/vfacts/sales-2026/vfacts-new-record-set-in-june/2026-07-06/99749.html) (6 July 2026) - Australian Financial Review, ["BYD almost topples Toyota as EV sales soar"](https://www.afr.com/companies/transport/byd-almost-topples-toyota-as-ev-sales-soar-again-20260703-p60ce4) (3 July 2026) - NVES Regulator, [2025 performance period results](https://www.nvesregulator.gov.au/reporting-and-data/2025-nves-performance-period-results) - ABC News, ["Efficiency standard results: Mazda, Nissan penalties"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-18/new-vehicle-efficiency-standard-results-mazda-nissan-penalties/106358770) (18 February 2026) - ABC News, ["How China won the car wars with cheap EVs"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-24/china-dominates-ev-market/106951586) (24 July 2026) - Drive, ["Porsche acknowledges electric Macan's role in Australian sales downturn"](https://www.drive.com.au/news/porsche-acknowledges-electric-macans-role-in-australian-sales-downturn/) ### The end of Australian car manufacturing - ABC News, ["Ford closes its Australian factories after more than 90 years"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-07/ford-closes-its-australian-factories-after-more-than-90-years/7909836) (7 October 2016) - Reuters, ["Australian car manufacturing ends as GM Holden closes plant"](https://www.reuters.com/article/business/australian-car-manufacturing-ends-as-gm-holden-closes-plant-idUSKBN1CP0JM/) (20 October 2017) - ABC News, ["Last vehicle rolls off production line"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-20/holden-closing-for-the-last-time-today/9061854) (20 October 2017) - ABC News, ["Final cars roll off Elizabeth production line as workers say farewell"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-19/holden-worker-farewell-final-car-ahead-of-plant-closure/9066328) - BBC News, ["Australian carmaking runs out of road"](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-41675196) (19 October 2017) - ABC News, ["Holden car brand axed across Australia and New Zealand"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-17/holden-car-brand-axed-after-160-years-in-australia/11972092) (17 February 2020) - Reuters, ["Holden brand retirement stuns Australian motor sport"](https://www.reuters.com/article/sports/holden-brand-retirement-stuns-australian-motor-sport-idUSKBN20C03O/) (18 February 2020) - ABC News, ["What does the end of the Ford-Holden rivalry mean for Supercars?"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-19/holden-ford-rivalry-over-but-supercars-future-safe/11975098) — source of the Skaife and Percat quotes - ABC News, ["Holden vs Ford rivalry delivered a 'death' blow at the Adelaide 500"](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-18/holden-ford-rivalry-at-adelaide-500-supercars-for-last-time/11975278) - *The Age*, ["Holden exit spells trouble for Supercars, State of Origin and Collingwood"](https://www.theage.com.au/sport/devastating-holden-exit-hits-supercars-state-of-origin-and-magpies-20200217-p541ok.html) (17 February 2020) - GoAuto, ["Holden Commodore axed"](https://www.goauto.com.au/news/holden/holden-commodore-axed/2019-12-10/81077.html) (10 December 2019) - *Sydney Morning Herald*, Joshua Dowling, ["Why the Holden Commodore ran out of road"](https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/why-the-holden-commodore-ran-out-of-road-20191213-p53jw0.html) (14 December 2019) - news.com.au, ["Commodore's Catch-22: Why sales dropped 60 per cent in a year"](https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/commodores-catch22-why-sales-dropped-60-per-cent-in-a-year/news-story/6f88976b83523a0133ad091f57c0c000) (20 January 2019) ### Batteries, supply chain and cost structure - BloombergNEF, [battery pack prices fall to $115/kWh](https://about.bnef.com/insights/commodities/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-see-largest-drop-since-2017-falling-to-115-per-kilowatt-hour-bloombergnef) (December 2024) - BloombergNEF, [battery pack prices fall to $108/kWh](https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-fall-to-108-per-kilowatt-hour-despite-rising-metal-prices-bloombergnef) (December 2025) - IEA, [Global EV Outlook 2025: Electric vehicle batteries](https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-vehicle-batteries) - IEA, [Rare Earth Elements](https://www.iea.org/reports/rare-earth-elements/executive-summary) (2025) - SNE Research, [global EV battery market share](https://www.sneresearch.com/en/insight/release_view/492) (September 2025) - UBS, [BYD Seal teardown](https://www.ubs.com/global/en/investment-bank/insights-and-data/2023/byd-teardown.html) (September 2023) - Rhodium Group, ["Why are Chinese EVs so cheap?"](https://rhg.com/research/why-are-chinese-evs-so-cheap) (February 2026) - Reuters investigation, ["How China's new auto giants left GM, VW and Tesla in the dust"](https://www.reuters.com/investigations/how-chinas-new-auto-giants-left-gm-vw-tesla-dust-2025-07-03) (3 July 2025) - *Wall Street Journal*, ["What Scared Ford's CEO in China"](https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-china-ev-competition-farley-ceo-50ded461) (14 September 2024) ### Porsche, Ferrari and brand value - Porsche Newsroom, ["Porsche AG sets final steps in the realignment of its product strategy"](https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/company/porsche-realignment-product-strategy-40594.html) (19 September 2025) - Porsche Newsroom, [Annual Press Conference 2026 — FY2025 results](https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2026/company/porsche-annual-press-conference-financial-year-2025-annual-and-sustainability-report-41708.html) - Porsche Newsroom, [Q3 2025 financial figures](https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/company/porsche-third-quarter-2025-financial-figures-40833.html) (24 October 2025) - Ferrari N.V., [2025 full year and fourth quarter results](https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/corporate/articles/2025-full-year-and-fourth-quarter-financial-results) (10 February 2026) - Interbrand, [Best Global Brands 2025](https://interbrand.com/best-global-brands/global/), and the [accompanying release](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brands-adapting-to-market-challenges-increases-the-total-value-of-interbrands-2025-best-global-brands-by-150-billion-302583746.html) — source of the Manfredi Ricca quote - Automotive News, ["Tesla's value slumps sharply as BYD makes top 100 debut"](https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/automakers/ane-interbrand-tesla-byd-1015/) (15 October 2025) ### Consumer research - McKinsey, ["Shifting gears: What buyers are saying about the luxury-car experience"](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/shifting-gears-what-buyers-are-saying-about-the-luxury-car-experience) (28 March 2025) — the primary source of the 71%, 37% and 46% figures - Reuters Breakingviews, ["Swanky cars drive new front in China's EU assault"](https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/swanky-cars-drive-new-front-chinas-eu-assault-2025-11-02/) (2 November 2025) - Residual value figures: cap hpi via *Motor Trader* (May and June 2026 monthly analyses); Redbook and CarsGuide data via Australian depreciation analyses; What Car? and iSeeCars for the Porsche 911 comparisons. ### History - *Journal of Economic History*, ["The Model T"](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/model-t/A783993184F1741EDC6F6A76B9D6D98D) - The Henry Ford, ["Ford's Model T"](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/articles/fords-model-t); Britannica, [Model T](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Model-T) - Henry Ford, [*My Life and Work* (1922)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Life_and_Work/4) — the primary source of the black paint quote - Model T Ford Club of America, [paint encyclopedia](https://www.mtfca.com/model_t_encyclopedia/p-r/); *Products Finishing*, [on why black was actually chosen](https://www.pfonline.com/articles/henry-ford-is-still-right-when-it-comes-to-color) - *Law and Social Inquiry*, ["Credit Cars"](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inquiry/article/credit-cars-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-auto-loans/34B1E0C74A7011163405BFA56982711F); Harvard Business School, [on GMAC and instalment credit](https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/credit4d.html) - [Cadillac Cimarron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Cimarron); Pitta & Katsanis, ["Understanding brand equity for successful brand extension"](http://home.ubalt.edu/ntsbpitt/BE.PDF) - *Christian Science Monitor*, [on the voluntary export restraints](https://www.csmonitor.com/1984/0706/070618.html) (6 July 1984) and [on the Acura launch](https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0314/facura.html) (14 March 1986) - *LA Times*, [on Lexus outselling BMW](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-21-fi-338-story.html) and [BMW's dismissal of the threat](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-21-fi-400-story.html) (both 21 October 1989) - *TIME*, ["Phantom Car, Faint Sales"](https://time.com/archive/6713963/autos-phantom-car-faint-sales/) (22 January 1990) - MotorTrend, [1990 Lexus LS400 retrospective](https://www.motortrend.com/features/1990-lexus-ls400-rewind-review); Car and Driver, [revisiting the original LS400](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a14513267/luxury-japan-style-revisiting-the-original-lexus-ls400-feature/) - [Hyundai Excel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Excel); Kevin Lane Keller, ["Conceptualizing, Measuring and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity"](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/conceptualizing-measuring-managing-customer-based-brand-equity) ### Volvo and Geely - Volvo Cars, [ten years under Geely ownership](https://www.volvocars.com/intl/media/press-releases/CD8A45FDE893D22E/) — source of the "arms-length governance" formulation and the Samuelsson quote - Volvo Cars, [2021 full-year results](https://www.volvocars.com/intl/media/press-releases/A73B9E16D541137E/) - Reuters, [on Volvo Cars' Stockholm listing](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/geelys-volvo-cars-jump-13-begin-exciting-journey-2021-10-29/) (29 October 2021)
[END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: National Press Club address: Chris Bowen on batteries, EVs and the missing middle [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-bowen-energy-security-uncertain-world/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-bowen-energy-security-uncertain-world/) [POST DATE]: 2026-08-06 [START OF CONTENT] Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen used his National Press Club address, titled "[Energy Security in an Uncertain World](https://www.npcpodcast.org.au/e/the-hon-chris-bowen-mp-energy-security-in-an-uncertain-world/)", to build a case around a single Melbourne suburb. Tarneit, 30 kilometres west of the city, has the highest uptake of the government's cheaper home battery program in the country. It also has the highest uptake of the EV tax discount. Bowen's point: those two things happening in the same ordinary suburb isn't a coincidence, it's a household economics story, not just a climate one. Here's what the numbers behind that story show, and what else came out of the address and the Q&A that followed. ## EV uptake is accelerating EVs and plug-in hybrids made up 27% of light vehicle sales in the first six months of 2026, around 191,830 vehicles. That's up from 13.1% across all of calendar 2025, more than doubling in about eighteen months. Bowen credited the EV tax cut and the new vehicle efficiency standards, and reeled off a list of outer-suburban postcodes leading the uptake: Tarneit, Werribee, Kellyville, Marsden Park, Craigieburn, Cranbourne, Bella Vista. The framing matters here. These aren't inner-city electorates. Bowen's argument is that EV and battery adoption is happening because it's cheaper, not because of climate messaging, and that the suburbs proving it are the ones the government needed to win. ## The battery numbers are the real story > Australia ranked second in the world for new residential battery capacity in 2025, behind only Germany, and is forecast to rank first in 2026. Bowen spent more time on batteries than anything else, and the figures are worth sitting with. Australian households and small businesses installed 13 gigawatt hours of small-scale battery storage in the past year under the Cheaper Home Battery Program, close to 2,000 batteries every working day. For comparison: the United States installed 3.1 gigawatt hours of residential storage in all of 2025, bringing its entire historical total to 9 gigawatt hours. Australia installed more in one year than the US has installed, ever. The EU added 12.3 gigawatt hours in 2025 across a market with a vastly larger population. Australia ranked second in the world for new residential battery capacity in 2025, behind only Germany, and is forecast to rank first in 2026. Five federal electorates now have more than 10% of households with a battery installed: Mitchell, Greenway and Hume in NSW, Mayo in South Australia, and Wright in Queensland. ## A new policy for the "missing middle" The one concrete announcement in the speech targets commercial and industrial solar, what Bowen called the missing middle. Residential rooftop solar sits at 22 gigawatts installed. Businesses have installed only 5.6 gigawatts, despite an estimated 80+ gigawatts of technical potential on commercial, industrial and farm rooftops. Part of the reason: the small-scale renewable energy scheme caps support at 100 kilowatts, enough for a house but not much for a warehouse or factory roof. Bowen announced the cap will rise to one megawatt, cutting installation costs for commercial and industrial solar by around 20%. Worked examples from the speech: a 250 kilowatt system would get roughly $68,000 off the upfront cost and generate around $50,000 a year in savings; an 850 kilowatt system, enough for a large factory or logistics warehouse, would get around $230,000 off upfront with roughly $175,000 in annual savings. He's also asked the Australian Energy Market Commission to force network providers to approve commercial and industrial solar connections faster, citing businesses giving up after repeated delays. ![Chris Bowen at Everything Electric Sydney in 2025](/images/posts/revolution-0113.jpg) → Chris Bowen at [_Everything Electric Sydney_](https://au.everythingelectric.show), Sydney Olympic Park, in 2025 ## Coal keeps breaking down Bowen returned to a data point he first raised two years ago: unplanned coal outages have now occurred somewhere in the national grid every single day for three years running. In the first quarter of 2026, average daily outages rose 23% across Queensland, NSW and Victoria compared to the same quarter in 2025; in Queensland alone, outages rose 84%. The average age of a coal plant in the national grid is now 38 years. Renewables made up a third of the grid in May 2022 and 50% by the end of 2025, with wholesale prices averaging $74 a megawatt hour in the second quarter, down 47% year on year and the lowest second-quarter average in six years. ## What's still unresolved Asked directly about a road user charge for EVs, given EV drivers don't pay fuel excise, Bowen confirmed it's coming but wouldn't commit to a timeline. It wasn't in the last budget because "it needs more work," and he was clear he doesn't want it rushed: "It's got to be done right. It's got to be done carefully." He also confirmed the Battery to Grid program is "hugely popular" with households, though still early days, and floated [V2G (Vehicle to Grid)](/posts/every-car-park-should-be-a-power-plant/) as one way to make the EV fleet a genuine grid asset rather than just a plug-in load. On the 82% renewable target for 2030, Bowen hedged: "I think we can" rather than promising it will happen, and said hitting 82% in 2031 instead of 2030 would "still be a very good thing." Wind projects in particular are struggling to reach final investment decisions as falling wholesale prices reduce the return on new builds, even as utility solar and batteries keep clearing that bar. ## The bottom line Strip out the COP31 diplomacy and the sparring with Queensland over gas royalties, and the substance of this address was about household and business economics doing more of the transition's heavy lifting than policy messaging. The EV and battery numbers back that up. The unresolved bit, road user charging, is the one piece of the EV-adoption story that still doesn't have a stated timeline. *Source: Chris Bowen, National Press Club address, "[Energy Security in an Uncertain World](https://www.npcpodcast.org.au/e/the-hon-chris-bowen-mp-energy-security-in-an-uncertain-world/)", June 2026.* [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: July 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-07-july/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-07-july/) [POST DATE]: 2026-07-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: What Ampol's CEO told the ABC about its EV charging bet [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ampol-ceo-ev-charging-abc-interview/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ampol-ceo-ev-charging-abc-interview/) [POST DATE]: 2026-07-06 [START OF CONTENT] Ampol's chief executive Matt Halliday spent most of a recent interview on ABC's *That's Business with Alan Kohler* talking about oil, not electrons: the Iran war, the Strait of Hormuz, refinery margins, fuel security payments. But about twenty minutes in, Kohler turned the conversation to EV charging, and Halliday gave one of the more candid public accounts we've heard from an Australian fuel major on how the economics actually work. Here's what stood out. ## The network is growing, but off a small base Ampol had 354 charging bays in Australia as of the interview, split across its own petrol forecourts and shopping centre partnerships. Roll forward to the net zero part of the conversation and Halliday cited "well over 550 bays" across Australia and New Zealand combined, which gives a sense of how fast the rollout is moving even within a single interview. That's still a fraction of Ampol's forecourt footprint. The [network comparison in our charging apps guide](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) puts AmpCharge at 73 sites and 208 sockets, often a single 75 kWh charger per site. Halliday's answer to why coverage stays thin: location matters more than count. Ampol tracks postcode-level data on where EVs are turning up and what journeys look like, and won't put a fast charger everywhere it has a bowser. Grid connectivity rules some sites out entirely, and some regions won't see EV uptake reach viable levels for years. ## Most of the cost isn't the charger Halliday's clearest number: when Ampol rolls out a fast charging site, over three quarters of the investment goes into electrical connectivity and grid augmentation, not the charger hardware itself. That matches what we've heard from [planning-guide conversations with commercial charging operators](/posts/planning-guide-for-ev-charging-infrastructure/): the charger is the easy part, and the queue for a grid connection is what actually paces a rollout. It also explains why Halliday expects funding gaps in regional and congested areas specifically, rather than a blanket subsidy call. Where the electrical connection is expensive and demand is thin, the business case doesn't stack up without help. ## Margins are lower, but customers charge more often Asked directly whether EV drivers make Ampol less money than petrol drivers, Halliday didn't dodge it: margins on charging are lower than on fuel. The offset is frequency. He pointed to AEMO data suggesting public charging accounts for roughly 30% of all EV charging in Australia, with the rest happening at home, and argued that as more people rely on public charging as their only option, not just their road-trip backup, the volume starts to make the margin work. That's the same "no-home-charging customer" segment we flagged in our [public networks vs home charging comparison](/posts/ev-charging-in-australian-public-networks-vs-home-charging/): renters, apartment dwellers, and anyone in a grid-constrained area where a home charger isn't realistic. Halliday named exactly this group as the addressable market Ampol is building for, alongside fleet customers replicating today's fuel-card model with an AmpCharge card instead. ## Free charging isn't coming, but dynamic pricing might Kohler asked whether shopping centres might subsidise free charging to get shoppers through the door, the way some retailers treat parking. Halliday was blunt: he doesn't see that happening at scale given the price of electricity. What he does expect is more dynamic, time-of-day pricing that reflects when power is actually cheap, which in practice means the middle of the day when rooftop solar is flooding the grid. It's a slower version of the [free and near-free charging windows](/posts/ev-charging-in-australian-public-networks-vs-home-charging/) already showing up on the home-charging side. ## Reliability is the metric Ampol is chasing One figure worth remembering: Ampol reported over 99% uptime in June, meaning a driver who turns up to a charger finds it working 99% of the time. Halliday framed this as the real battleground, ahead of speed or price, because charger reliability has been a global weak point for the industry. It's a fair point. Our own [idle and congestion fee](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/) coverage and the Central Coast trip notes on this blog have both run into out-of-service chargers at AmpCharge sites, so a 99% claim is worth tracking against real-world reports over the next few months rather than taking at face value. ## Charging speed: the near-term promise Today's typical AmpCharge session takes 15 to 20 minutes to go from 20% to 80%, depending on the vehicle. Halliday expects that to fall below 10 minutes within five years as battery and charging technology improves. That's a vehicle-side claim more than a charger-side one; Ampol's fastest current sites already hit up to 335 kW, so it's the cars, not the plugs, that need to catch up. ## Why an oil company CEO is thinking this far ahead The context for all of this is a refining business under real pressure. Halliday confirmed EV and hybrid uptake is already forcing Ampol to reconsider what its Lytton refinery produces: less petrol, more diesel and jet fuel, because petrol demand falls first as EVs take a growing share of new car sales (Halliday cited figures in the 15 to 18% range for the most recent quarter, up from around 8% a year earlier). Rebalancing that output mix is expensive, and it's part of the billions in investment Ampol is negotiating with government to keep Lytton open long-term. Put together, the interview reads less like an oil company dabbling in EVs and more like a fuel retailer positioning for the point where petrol stops being the main game. The charging numbers Halliday gave are still small next to Ampol's forecourt fuel business. But the framing, treating charging cards and postcode-level demand data the same way it treats its fuel network today, suggests Ampol is building toward the scale it eventually expects to need. *Source: [That's Business with Alan Kohler, ABC](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-business-daily/ampol-on-fuel-security-after-hormuz/106862618), interview with Ampol CEO Matt Halliday.* [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: June 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-06-june/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-06-june/) [POST DATE]: 2026-06-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The Quiet Ride That Makes You Queasy: The Neuroscience of EV Motion Sickness [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-quiet-ride-that-makes-you-queasy/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-quiet-ride-that-makes-you-queasy/) [POST DATE]: 2026-06-20 [START OF CONTENT] ## The complaint nobody expected Electric vehicles were supposed to be the smoothest, most refined cars ever built. No clattering pistons, no exhaust drone, no jerky gear changes. Just a serene, near-silent glide. So it came as a surprise when a strange new complaint began surfacing in owner forums, Reddit threads, and the back seats of family EVs: *people were getting carsick.* Not the usual suspects, either. Passengers who had cheerfully read books on road trips their whole lives suddenly felt green around the gills. Parents reported kids who were fine in the old gas car turning queasy in the new electric one. The phenomenon became common enough that scientists started taking it seriously, and a wave of studies between 2024 and 2025 set out to answer a genuinely counterintuitive question: **how can the smoothest ride ever engineered be the one that makes you sick?** The emerging answer is a little ironic. The very qualities that make an EV feel premium — the silence, the seamless surge of power, the smooth deceleration — are exactly what trip up the brain. Motion sickness isn't caused by an EV doing something *wrong*. It's caused by an EV doing something *unfamiliar*, and quietly removing the cues your brain has spent a lifetime learning to trust. ## Motion sickness 101: a prediction error in the brain To understand why EVs are uniquely provocative, you first have to understand that motion sickness is not really a sickness of motion. It's a sickness of **prediction failure.** Your brain estimates how your body is moving by fusing three streams of information: the vestibular system in your inner ear, your eyes, and proprioception (the pressure and stretch sensors in your muscles, joints, and skin). The vestibular system is the star player here. It has two parts: the semicircular canals, three fluid-filled loops that detect rotation, and the otolith organs (the utricle and saccule), which detect linear acceleration and the constant pull of gravity. A quirk of physics called the *gravito-inertial ambiguity* means the otoliths can't easily tell the difference between accelerating forward and tilting backward — both push the same way on the same sensors. The brain has to resolve that ambiguity by guessing, using context. And guessing is the key word. Your brain doesn't passively read these sensors; it runs a constantly updated internal model of how you're about to move. The dominant explanation for motion sickness, the **sensory conflict theory** (Reason & Brand, 1975; Reason, 1978), holds that nausea strikes when the motion your senses *report* doesn't match the motion your brain *predicted*. Reason called this predictive memory the "neural store": a library of expected sensory consequences built from every previous trip you've ever taken. When the prediction and the reality diverge, the brain reaches an unsettling conclusion. Evolutionarily, the most common reason your senses would disagree about which way is up is that you've been poisoned — so the brain triggers the toxin-expulsion response: nausea, cold sweat, dizziness, and ultimately vomiting. A second, complementary idea, the **postural instability theory** (Riccio & Stoffregen, 1991), adds that sickness also arises when we can't yet coordinate our posture against an unfamiliar pattern of forces. Both theories point to the same culprit: novelty and unpredictability. Anything that degrades your brain's ability to anticipate the next jolt makes you more likely to feel ill. One more detail matters enormously for EVs. Not all motion is equally nauseating. Decades of seasickness research show that slow, **low-frequency oscillation** is the most provocative of all — with a peak around 0.2 Hz for horizontal motion (Golding, Mueller & Gresty, 2001) and roughly 0.17 Hz for vertical motion (O'Hanlon & McCauley, 1974). In one classic experiment, *every single* highly susceptible subject got sick at 0.2 Hz, versus only some at faster or slower frequencies. That's roughly one gentle sway every five seconds — the rhythm of a boat on a swell. Keep that number in mind; it comes back later. ## The hidden work of engine noise and vibration Here's something you've never consciously noticed but your brain relies on constantly: a petrol car *tells you it's about to move* before it moves. Press the accelerator in a combustion car and a cascade of warning signals fires off a fraction of a second before the push hits your body. The engine note climbs. The whole cabin vibrates a little harder. You feel the transmission gather itself and shift. There's even a characteristic *lag* between flooring the pedal and the surge arriving. Over thousands of hours on the road, your brain has quietly built these into its neural store as **anticipatory cues** — a rising engine pitch becomes a reliable signal that says, *brace, a forward shove is coming.* Your otoliths and semicircular canals then receive exactly the acceleration your brain pre-loaded, the prediction matches the reality, and you feel nothing. An electric powertrain deletes almost all of it. There's no idle, no rev, no gear change, and only a faint electric whir even under hard acceleration. A 2020 study in *Applied Ergonomics* specifically singled out the absence of engine noise as a contributor to ride discomfort. Without that audible and tactile heads-up, the acceleration arrives as a complete surprise to the prediction system — the body lurches, but the brain never pre-loaded the lurch. Dr. William Emond, a motion-sickness researcher at the Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard in France, frames it as an experience problem. "If we are accustomed to traveling in non-EVs, we are used to understanding the car's motion based on signals such as engine revs, engine vibrations, torque," he has explained. Step into an EV and "it is a new motion environment for the brain, which needs adaptation." In other words, your brain is suddenly driving blind — forced to guess at when speed and direction will change, with most of its trusted cues switched off. ## Instant torque and the element of surprise If silence removes the warning, instant torque amplifies the shock that follows. Electric motors produce their maximum twisting force from a standstill. Zero rpm, no build-up, no waiting for revs to climb. The result is acceleration that is immediate, linear, and often startlingly strong. A light brush of the pedal can deliver a shove that, in a gas car, would have required a noticeable stomp and a second of engine wind-up. Many automakers deliberately tune EV throttles to feel *jumpy* off the line to advertise the car's effortless power. As automotive journalist John Voelcker told ABC News, that "abruptness of power delivery can be unsettling to some people." For a passenger whose internal model was calibrated on combustion cars, the prediction error is large in both timing and magnitude: the motion comes earlier than expected and hits harder than expected. The neural store under-forecasts, the otoliths over-report, and the gap between the two is precisely the conflict that breeds nausea. This is partly a habituation problem, which means it can fade. Emond draws a vivid comparison: "This is, for example, why almost everyone becomes sick in zero-gravity environments" — there's simply no prior experience for the brain to draw on. The first few weeks in an EV are a novel motion environment; some riders adapt and their symptoms ease, much as sailors find their sea legs. But adaptation takes repeated, attentive exposure, and passengers, who aren't steering, adapt more slowly than drivers. ## Regenerative braking: the one-pedal problem If instant torque is the opening act, **regenerative braking** is the part of the show that researchers keep coming back to. In an EV, lifting your foot off the accelerator does more than coast. The electric motor flips into generator mode, harvesting the car's kinetic energy back into the battery and, in doing so, slowing the car down. Sometimes firmly enough to bring it to a complete stop. This is what enables one-pedal driving, and it creates a deceleration profile unlike anything in a gas car. Three things make it a perfect storm for motion sickness: {{< listcards >}} {{< listcard >}} **No cue precedes it.** A passenger can't see the driver's foot move to a brake pedal, because there isn't one being used. The slowdown simply happens, unannounced. {{< /listcard >}} {{< listcard >}} **It's frequent and rhythmic.** In stop-and-go traffic, the car repeatedly slows and surges as the driver modulates the accelerator, producing a back-and-forth "seesaw" sway. {{< /listcard >}} {{< listcard >}} **It lands in the nauseogenic zone.** That smooth, repeated, low-frequency deceleration is exactly the slow oscillation — near that infamous 0.2 Hz band — that seasickness research identifies as the most provocative of all. It's why several EV owners describe the sensation not as jerky but as *floating*, like being on a boat. Motion-sickness expert John Golding notes that people don't get "horse sick" or "jogging sick" because that motion is high-frequency; it's the slow sway of a ship, a swaying camel, or an undulating ski slope that turns stomachs. {{< /listcard >}} {{< /listcards >}} The strongest direct evidence comes from a 2025 study in the *International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction* (Xie, Wang, Jiang, Huang, Wang & He). Researchers put 16 motion-sickness-prone participants through road tests and found a clear relationship: **the stronger the regenerative braking, the more nausea passengers reported.** Promisingly, the same team tested auditory cues as a countermeasure, using sound to re-supply the warning that the silent powertrain had removed. ## Why the back seat is the worst seat Notice who actually gets sick: it's almost never the driver. There's a clean neurological reason for that, and it explains why EV complaints cluster among passengers, especially those in the rear. The driver has the single most powerful anticipatory cue available: their own intentions. When you decide to turn, accelerate, or lift off, your brain issues the motor command and simultaneously generates an *efference copy* — a prediction of the motion that command will produce. Your internal model is always a half-step ahead of the car, so the sensory consequences arrive exactly as forecast. Drivers also keep their eyes on the road, giving the visual system a clean, motion-matched view of the world rushing toward them. Passengers have none of this. They don't generate the motion, so they can't predict it. And rear passengers often lose the horizon entirely — their visual field is filled with the still interior of the cabin and the backs of seats, a view that insists the world is stationary even as the inner ear screams otherwise. That visual-vestibular contradiction is textbook sensory conflict. As one neuroscientist put it to ABC News, in a combustion car "you hear the engine revving and know someone is stepping on the accelerator"; in an EV, "the auditory and visual inputs don't fit the model that you are actually moving." Strip away the sound, seat the rider in the back with no view out, and add unannounced regen deceleration, and you have assembled nearly every ingredient of motion sickness at once. ## What the research actually shows It would be easy to overstate this, so it's worth being precise about what the (still young) science does and doesn't establish. The largest study to date is a survey of 639 passengers in China (Xie, Huang, Wang & He), comparing electric and fuel vehicles. Its finding is more nuanced than "EVs make you sicker." In fact, respondents reported motion sickness *more frequently* in gas cars — but when sickness struck in an EV, the symptoms were more severe. Severity tracked with road conditions, what people were doing inside the car (screens being a notable aggravator), and individual susceptibility. So the honest takeaway is not that EVs are nausea machines, but that they produce a distinct, sometimes nastier flavor of motion sickness with its own triggers. A 2025 real-vehicle experiment published in *Frontiers in Psychology* drilled into which maneuvers matter most. Across six road scenarios, uphill and downhill S-curves provoked the worst symptoms, far more than straight-line acceleration or gentle turns, and the researchers could predict a passenger's sickness state with about 81% accuracy using physiological signals, with galvanic skin response (a sweat-based stress marker) the single best predictor. Two caveats keep this field humble. First, sample sizes are small (10 to 16 participants only) so conclusions are directional, not definitive. Second, sensory conflict, while the leading theory, isn't the whole story; low-frequency oscillation provokes sickness even when only one sensory channel is stimulated, which is why researchers are still refining their models. There's also a looming complication: autonomous driving. As cars take over the steering, every occupant becomes a passenger, and a distracted one at that, eyes down on a phone or laptop. A major review of motion-sickness countermeasures (published in *Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives*) notes that this is precisely the recipe for *more* sickness, since looking away from the road maximizes the visual-vestibular conflict. Because the first wave of self-driving cars is overwhelmingly electric, the silent-cabin and regen-braking problems and the eyes-off-road problem are set to arrive together. ## Fixes that actually work The good news: because EV motion sickness is fundamentally about *missing predictive cues*, it's a solvable problem. Some fixes are immediate behavioral changes; others are engineering solutions already in development. ### If you're a passenger - Sit up front if you can, and keep your eyes on the horizon or the road ahead, giving your visual system motion that matches what your inner ear feels. - Put the phone and book down; reading is one of the strongest aggravators. - Get cool, fresh air on your face, recline slightly, and crack a window. - Old remedies still work: ginger, acupressure wristbands, and antihistamines like dimenhydrinate (taken before the trip, not after symptoms start). ### If you're the driver - Be smooth on the accelerator. Resist the urge to exploit instant torque off every light. Your passengers feel every launch. - Dial down the regenerative braking. Most EVs (Tesla, BYD, Hyundai, MG and others) let you reduce regen strength or switch off one-pedal mode; a gentler setting trades a little range for a much calmer ride. - Brake and lift progressively rather than abruptly, especially in stop-and-go traffic. ### What automakers are engineering - **Anticipatory cues** that put the missing warnings back. Studies have shown that ambient light strips that glow before a turn, gentle haptic nudges in the seat, audio signals, and on-screen path previews can measurably reduce sickness and delay its onset by helping passengers predict the next maneuver. - **Comfort-tuned regen.** Control systems (some using neural networks) can shape deceleration to stay within the jerk limits defined by the ISO 2631 ride-comfort standard, smoothing the most provocative motion without losing much energy recovery. - **Synthetic feedback.** This is why some performance EVs deliberately add back what they removed. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N [simulates engine sound and even fake gear shifts](/posts/the-sound-of-silence-how-the-world-s-electric-cars-learned-to-speak/), and Mercedes-AMG has shown EVs that mimic a V8's sound and rumble. What looks like a gimmick may double as a genuine anti-nausea cue, restoring the audible signal your brain has always used to brace for acceleration. ## The short version EV motion sickness is a prediction-error problem: the silent, instant, regen-heavy powertrain strips away the cues your brain spent decades learning to trust, and passengers suffer because they can't predict or see what's coming. The fix is straightforward on both sides — smoother driving and lower regen settings today, anticipatory light/sound/haptic cues engineered into cars tomorrow. The science is real but young; sample sizes are small and a bigger reckoning is coming as autonomous EVs turn every occupant into a distracted, eyes-off-road passenger. ## Sources and further reading **Peer-reviewed research** - Xie, W., Wang, Z., Jiang, Y., Huang, C., Wang, J., & He, D. (2025). *Exploring the Effects of Regenerative Braking and the Auditory Cues for Alleviating Motion Sickness in Electric Vehicles.* International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 41(24), 15493–15505. [Record](https://researchr.org/publication/XieWJHWH25) · [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2499155) - Xie, W., Huang, C., Wang, J., & He, D. (2024). *Do Electric Vehicles Induce More Motion Sickness Than Fuel Vehicles? A Survey Study in China.* [arXiv PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22674) · [Author copy](https://personal.hkust-gz.edu.cn/hedengbo/assets/publicationPDFs/Xie_TRB_2024a.pdf) - *Investigating the impact of different road scenarios on the induction intensity of motion sickness in electric vehicle passengers.* (2025). Frontiers in Psychology. [Full text](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1615498/full) - *Motion sickness countermeasures for autonomous driving: Trends and future directions* (review). Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives. [Article](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666691X2300060X) - *Mitigating Motion Sickness by Anticipatory Cues.* (2024). Vibration, 7(4), 65 (MDPI). [Article](https://www.mdpi.com/2571-631X/7/4/65) - *Evaluation of a Human–Machine Interface for Motion Sickness Mitigation Utilizing Anticipatory Ambient Light Cues.* (2021). Information, 12(4), 176 (MDPI). [Article](https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/12/4/176) - *Reducing Motion Sickness in Passengers of Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles by Presenting a Driving Path.* (2025). arXiv. [Paper](https://arxiv.org/html/2506.23457) - *Regenerative Braking Control Strategy Based on AI Algorithm to Improve Driving Comfort of Autonomous Vehicles (CRBS).* (2023). Applied Sciences, 13(2), 946 (MDPI). [Article](https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/2/946) - *Efficient Motion Sickness Assessment: Recreation of On-Road Driving on a Compact Test Track.* (2024). arXiv. [Paper](https://arxiv.org/html/2412.14982v1) - *Research into the Regenerative Braking of an Electric Car in Urban Driving.* (2022). World Electric Vehicle Journal, 13(11), 202 (MDPI). [Article](https://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/13/11/202) **Foundational motion-sickness science (sensory conflict, vestibular system, ~0.2 Hz)** - Golding, J. F., Mueller, A. G., & Gresty, M. A. (2001). *A motion sickness maximum around the 0.2 Hz frequency range of horizontal translational oscillation.* [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11277284/) - *Moving in a Moving World: A Review on Vestibular Motion Sickness.* [PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4753518/) - *Prediction of the incidence of motion sickness from the magnitude, frequency, and duration of vertical oscillation* (McCauley dose model). [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3655126/) - *A comparison of the nauseogenic potential of low-frequency vertical versus horizontal linear oscillation.* [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1520219/) - *Effect of temporal relationship between respiration and body motion on motion sickness* (~0.2 Hz). [ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1566070209003865) - *Validating models of sensory conflict and perception for motion sickness prediction.* (2023). Biological Cybernetics. [Article](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00422-023-00959-8) - *The role of vision in sensory integration models for predicting motion perception and sickness.* (2024). [PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10894782/) · [Springer](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-023-06747-x) - Reason, J. T., & Brand, J. J. (1975). *Motion Sickness*; Reason, J. T. (1978) — sensory conflict / "neural store" model (foundational texts; no open URL). - Riccio, G. E., & Stoffregen, T. A. (1991). *An ecological theory of motion sickness and postural instability*, Ecological Psychology (foundational text; no open URL). **Expert commentary and reporting** - Dr. William Emond, Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard — [InsideEVs (2025)](https://insideevs.com/news/766726/electric-vehicle-making-you-carsick/) · [TechSpot (2025)](https://www.techspot.com/news/108757-evs-triggering-wave-motion-sickness-claims-scientists-investigating.html) - Prof. John Golding, motion-sickness researcher — [Health.com (2025)](https://www.health.com/electric-vehicles-car-sickness-11768698) - John Voelcker, automotive journalist — [ABC News (2024)](https://abcnews.com/Business/ev-drivers-passengers-motion-sickness/story?id=110131757) - [Drive.com.au (2024)](https://www.drive.com.au/caradvice/motion-sickness-electric-cars/) - [NDTV (2026)](https://www.ndtv.com/health/can-travelling-in-an-electric-car-worsen-motion-sickness-11125308) **Also cited via TechSpot's reporting** - 2020 *Applied Ergonomics* study singling out the lack of engine noise: [ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687020300211) - 2024 study linking EV seat vibrations to motion-sickness severity: [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1177/09544070241251521) *Note: EV motion-sickness research is an active, fast-moving field. Several findings rest on small experimental samples and should be read as strong directional evidence rather than settled conclusions.* [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: EV Charging in Australia: Public Networks vs Home Charging [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-charging-in-australian-public-networks-vs-home-charging/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-charging-in-australian-public-networks-vs-home-charging/) [POST DATE]: 2026-06-13 [START OF CONTENT] * includes PHEVs; source: Electric Vehicle Council, Jan 2026. ___ #### 01 / The Cost Gap ## Bottom line up front For the ~93% of Australian EV owners who can charge at home, this isn't a fair fight. Home charging on a dedicated EV tariff costs roughly **4.5–8c/kWh** (and near-zero with rooftop solar), versus **48–99c/kWh** at a public DC fast charger. That **6–20x cost gap** means the two models are **mostly complementary, not competitive**: home charging is the default that delivers ~70–85% of all energy, while public networks own the journeys home charging can't — road trips and the no-driveway minority. The real strategic contest is less "public vs home" and more **who owns the EV customer**: fuel majors and motoring clubs building charging networks, versus electricity retailers turning the home, and soon the car battery itself, into a managed grid asset. 6–20x
The cost gap between home charging and a public DC fast charger --- #### 02 / Head to Head ## The core comparison | Dimension | 🔌 Public charging networks | 🏠 Home charging (via energy retailers) | | ---------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Representative players | Tesla Supercharger, Chargefox, Evie, NRMA, bp pulse, Ampol AmpCharge, JOLT | AGL, Origin, EnergyAustralia, Amber, OVO, GloBird, Red Energy | | Energy price | ~48–99c/kWh DC fast (Tesla ~48c member; casual 59–75c; remote up to 99c). JOLT: first 7 kWh/day free | 4.5–8c/kWh on dedicated EV windows; ~0c with solar; ~29–32c if on a standard flat rate | | Speed | 25–350+ kW DC → 10–60 min | 2–7 kW (single-phase) to 22 kW (3-phase) → overnight "wake up full" | | Upfront cost to driver | None (pay-per-use); optional membership ($9.99/mo Tesla non-owner; club fees) | Wallbox + install ~$1,000–2,500; needs off-street parking + suitable switchboard | | Convenience | Essential for travel/top-ups, but ~5–13% can be offline; queues at peak | Zero detour, plug in at home; the default for ~70–85% of energy delivered | | Best-fit use cases | Long-distance/road trips; renters & apartment dwellers; fleets; emergency top-up | Daily commuting; overnight; solar self-consumption; anyone with a driveway | | Revenue model | Pay-per-kWh + subscriptions/[idle fees](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/); forecourt convenience; ads (JOLT); club loyalty | Electricity margin + customer retention; VPP/demand response; future V2G value-stacking | | Grid/smart angle | Site-level load management; some ToU pricing; battery-buffered remote sites | Smart scheduling, "solar soak", VPP, emerging V2G — turns the EV into a grid/home asset | | Ownership backdrop | Fuel majors (Ampol, bp), motoring clubs (Chargefox, NRMA), Tesla, infra investors (Evie) | Big-3 gentailers (AGL, Origin, EnergyAustralia) + tech-led challengers (Amber, OVO, GloBird) | --- #### 03 / Market context ## Why the structure looks this way * **Adoption is broadening, not exploding.** Combined EVs hit **13.1% of new-car sales in 2025** (up from 9.6% in 2024), with a December 2025 monthly peak of 16.7%. But the growth is increasingly **PHEV-led** (+131% in 2025) while BEV share crept up only ~1 percentage point. Total fleet: **454,000+ vehicles** (Electric Vehicle Council, Jan 2026). * **Home is overwhelmingly where charging happens.** ~**93% of current EV owners can charge at home**, and ~70–85% do most of their charging there (Evenergi/AER; EVC/ITLS 2025). Early adopters skew toward detached homes with driveways — and **~80% of home-chargers also have rooftop solar**, making their marginal charging cost close to zero. * **The "no driveway" segment is the structural growth engine for public charging.** ~6 million Australians live in strata; an estimated **25,000 EV owners already have no off-street parking, growing ~1,000/month**. As EVs move from early adopters to the mainstream, this renter/apartment cohort grows, and they *can't* access cheap home tariffs. * **Public infrastructure is scaling but patchy.** 1,310+ DC fast-charge sites and 3,436+ DC plugs, growing ~8.5% per quarter. Reliability is the persistent weak point: **up to ~13% of public chargers can be unavailable** at any time, dogged by first-generation Tritium hardware failures. Tesla is the outlier at ~99.5% uptime. --- #### 04 / The Public Networks ## A crowded field, consolidating A crowded, capital-hungry field consolidating around a few models: | Network | Owner & model | Footprint (2025–26) | Speeds | Indicative price | | ------------------ | ------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- | -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Tesla Supercharger | Tesla; vertically integrated | 152 sites / 817 plugs; ~72% open to non-Tesla | 125–250 kW | ~48c/kWh median (member); up to 85c non-member peak; $9.99/mo non-Tesla membership; ~99.5% uptime | | Chargefox | Motoring clubs (NRMA, RACV, RACQ, RAA, RAC, RACT) | ~400+ DC locations (largest) | 50–350 kW | ~45–68c/kWh; club members save 10–20c | | Evie Networks | StB Capital (Trevor St Baker) + RACQ | 300+ locations, 1,000+ plugs | 50–400 kW | 49c member / 59c non-member; up to 75c ultra-fast | | NRMA Electric | NRMA (mutual); $78.6m federal co-funded | 100+ highway locations, national | 50–150 kW+ | 69c standard; 75–99c remote; 5c member discount | | [bp pulse](/posts/bp-pulse/) | bp plc; forecourt | 220+ charge points | 75 kW (upgradeable to 150) | ToU, app-only (~50–60c); AGL customers −6c | | Ampol AmpCharge | Ampol; forecourt | 73 sites / 208 sockets | 50–180 kW | ~75c/kWh flat | | [JOLT](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) | Ad-supported kerbside | 4 major cities (urban) | 25→50 kW | First 7 kWh/day free, then ~46c/kWh | *Also notable:* **Exploren** (Intellihub-backed B2B platform / "network of networks," absorbed ENGIE's ~200 ANZ chargers in 2025) and **Tritium** — the Brisbane hardware maker whose collapse and gen-1 reliability problems are a live drag on network uptime. Prices are rising across the board as operators chase utilisation-driven economics. The field is splitting into highway DC (Tesla, Chargefox, Evie, NRMA), forecourt (bp, Ampol), and urban kerbside (JOLT, [EVX](/posts/evx-power-pole-charger/), AGL) lanes. Reliability and price opacity remain the reputational weak points — bp and Ampol are app-only, and Australia still lacks UK-style mandatory uptime penalties. --- #### 05 / Home Charging & The Free-Window Revolution ## The price war moved to the middle of the day Retailers are giving away the midday "solar soak" — there's now so much rooftop solar that wholesale prices routinely hit zero or go negative around noon. Free electricity has quietly become a customer-acquisition weapon. #### Genuinely free (0c/kWh) home windows |PLAN | FREE BLOCK | DAYS | STATES | | -------------------- | ---------------------- | -------------------- | -------------------- | | OVO "Free 3" | 11am–2pm (3 hrs) | Daily | VIC, NSW, QLD, SA | | Powershop "EV Day" | 12–2pm (2 hrs) | Daily | VIC, NSW, SA, SE QLD | | Red Energy "Red EV Saver" | 12–2pm (2 hrs) | Weekends only | NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, ACT | | GloBird "Free Lunch" REPORTED | 12–2pm | Daily | verify directly | | ActewAGL evEnergy | 12–2pm | Weekends | ACT | | Solar Sharer Offer FROM 1 JUL 2026 | 3 hrs, up to 24 kWh | Daily | NSW, SE QLD, SA (mandated) | #### Near-free overnight windows (cheap, not free) | Retailer | EV-window rate | When | Notes | | -------------------- | ---------------------- | -------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | OVO Energy | ~4.5c/kWh | Overnight (~12–6am) | Cheapest fixed EV window; multi-state | | GloBird (EASYEV) | 6c/kWh | Overnight + 11am–2pm | Only dual night + "solar-soak" daytime window | | Powershop EV Night | ~5c | overnight | companion to EV Day| | EnergyAustralia | 7c/kWh | EV window | NSW only | | AGL | 8c/kWh | Fixed EV window | Cross-promo: −6c/kWh at public bp pulse chargers (time-limited) | | Origin (EV Power Up) | ~8c/kWh | App-scheduled | Smart-charges into solar/overnight price troughs automatically | | Amber | Wholesale pass-through | Dynamic | Near-zero/negative on good days; SmartShift automation; V2G pilot leader | | Red Energy / Engie | EV add-on / credit | Off-peak | Engie offers a $100 Chargefox sign-up credit | Reference points: a standard flat usage rate is ~29–32c/kWh; standard time-of-use off-peak is ~10–20c. So a dedicated EV plan typically halves or better even the off-peak rate — and solar self-consumption beats all of it. Policy spotlight · The July Change THE SOLAR SHARER OFFER (SSO) **From 1 July 2026**, every retailer in the relevant regions must offer at least one plan with **a 3-hour free midday block (0c/kWh)**. It makes the free-window model — which Powershop, OVO and others pioneered voluntarily — government policy. EVs are an explicit target: the AER's chair has said the regulator "would like to see EVs being charged in the middle of the day." The honest catch: the free block is roughly cost-neutral for people who don't shift load — retailers recover it through slightly higher rates outside the window. You only win by genuinely moving consumption into it. A 3-phase home charger can pull 20–30 kWh in those 3 hours, making an EV close to the ideal way to monetise it. --- #### 06 / The Free-Charging Question ## Is free charging still happening? Yes — but it has migrated. Free charging moved off the public network (where it's nearly gone) and into the home midday window (where it's expanding and now mandated). |PUBLIC CHARGING TYPE | STILL FREE?| | -------------------- | -------------------- | | Highway DC fast | NO All major networks paid (Tesla never free here; Evie/Chargefox always paid; NRMA paid since Sep 2023; QESH since 2018) | | Urban DC top-up | JOLT ONLY First 7 kWh/day free (≈45–50 km), then ~46–54c | | AC destination | OFTEN FREE Tesla Destination (~665 venue sites), hotels, wineries, shopping centres | | AC council / kerbside | MIXED Many now metered at low cost; some legacy free chargers remain | | Workplace | OFTEN FREE To staff — but not public-facing | ### The free → paid timeline Early networks were grant- and demonstration-funded to seed adoption, then switched to user-pays once grants ended, queues appeared, and the cost of expanding and maintaining (read: reliability) had to be covered. The "free kWh" has become a retailer acquisition tool, not a charging-network one, reinforcing that energy retailers, more than networks, are winning the battle to own the EV customer. Powershop "EV Day" gives 2 hours of free electricity, 12pm–2pm daily (VIC, NSW, SA, SE QLD; owned by Shell Energy Australia). That midday timing is the tell — it's a solar-soak offer, not a traditional overnight tariff. A companion "EV Night" plan runs ~5c/kWh overnight for those who'd rather charge while they sleep. --- #### 07 / Where they actually compete ## It's about the customer, not the kilowatt Because home charging dominates the *energy*, competition is concentrated here:
  1. Marginal, away-from-home kWh for road trips and top-ups. Here public networks have no real substitute, and the competition is between operators, not against the home.
  2. No-home-charging customer renters and apartment dwellers. This is the one segment where public/kerbside (powerpole) charging is a genuine primary substitute for home charging, and it's the fastest-growing. Nobody has fully cracked strata/kerbside/powerpole economics yet.
  3. Customer relationship and data is the deepest battleground. Fuel majors (Ampol, bp) and motoring clubs (Chargefox/NRMA) are using charging to retain the customer they're at risk of losing as petrol declines. Retailers are using EV tariffs + VPP + (soon) V2G to lock in the household. Convergence is the theme: Ampol now sells fuel-forecourt charging and home electricity (Ampol Energy has been acquired by AGL); AGL cross-promotes with bp pulse; motoring clubs straddle both sides via memberships and Chargefox.
--- #### 08 / Forward Battlegrounds ## What's next _**Policy headwinds.** Most state purchase subsidies have ended; the **[PHEV FBT exemption](/posts/how-fbt-exemption-is-driving-ev-adoption-in-australia/) ended April 2025** and the BEV exemption stages down from ~2027, modestly cooling the demand tailwind._ --- #### 09 / Outlook ## The bottom line Expect the **structural cost advantage of home charging to persist and widen** (solar + smart tariffs + eventual widespread V2G), keeping public networks firmly in the *complement* role: premium convenience for travel and a lifeline for the no-driveway segment, not a day-to-day substitute. Public networks will **consolidate** (the weakest balance sheets and worst-reliability hardware shake out) and segment into highway / forecourt / kerbside / powerpole lanes. The biggest value shift goes to **retailers that orchestrate the home** (tariff + solar + battery + VPP + V2G) — making the electricity retailer, more than the charging network, the likely long-term "owner" of the EV customer. --- *Sources: Electric Vehicle Council State of EVs & ownership surveys (2025–26); AEMO Draft 2026 ISP; DCCEEW / Minister for Energy releases, ABC News and SolarQuotes on the Solar Sharer Offer (Jan–Jun 2026); Powershop, OVO, AGL, Origin, EnergyAustralia, Amber, GloBird, Red Energy plan pages; Tesla, Chargefox, Evie, NRMA, bp pulse, Ampol, JOLT and Exploren network pages; Queensland Government, RAC WA announcements; Carloop / Zecar / WhySolar infrastructure & tariff comparisons (2025–26).* **Caveats:** public-charging and retail-plan pricing change frequently and vary by site, state, and membership; several networks publish rates app-only; [V2G timelines](https://thedriven.io/2026/05/29/amber-to-supercharge-v2g-pilot-to-more-than-1000-evs-with-government-funding-boost/) depend on standards and OEM decisions still in flux.* [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: 400+ People, 20 Electric Grills, Off Grid [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-big-bbq-guiness-world-record/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-big-bbq-guiness-world-record/) [POST DATE]: 2026-06-07 [START OF CONTENT] # 400+ people, 20 electric grills, zero grid power - **359** Official world record participants (previous record: 336, US) - **20** Electric grills running simultaneously - **~14** BYD EVs supplying all power via V2L - **0** Generators or grid connections - **$50,000** OzHarvest fundraising goal A world record attempt happened today on the NSW Central Coast, and the most interesting part isn't the cooking. The Big BBQ is running 20 electric grills across Zestiny Farm in Central Mangrove entirely on Vehicle-to-Load power — meaning the electricity comes from about 14 BYD EV batteries parked on site, not from a generator or a grid connection. That's a non-trivial amount of load. Cooking for ~~400~~ 359 people simultaneously, for about 45 minutes, on portable electric grills, without a gas or wood in sight. ![The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm](/images/posts/bigbbq1.jpg) V2L (Vehicle-to-Load) has been available on a handful of EVs for a few years now — the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Ford F-150 Lightning, the BYD Atto 3, and others can push power out through a dedicated outlet or the charge port. Most owners use it for camping gear or running power tools on a worksite. Using a fleet of them to power a large outdoor cooking event is a different scale of application, and it's a reasonable proof of concept for what [bidirectional EV technology](/posts/every-car-park-should-be-a-power-plant/) can actually do when you think beyond the car. These EV utes didn't ruin the weekend. They made it possible. ![The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm](/images/posts/bigbbq5.jpg) The event is at [Zestiny Farm](https://zestinyfarm.com), a family-run certified organic property that has been farming on Mediterranean principles for over 50 years and now runs paddock-to-plate events alongside its regular produce operation. The farm supplies the ingredients directly — zucchini, beetroot, corn, black beans — for the veggie burgers participants will cook. The lemons grown there also go into Oh! Lemonaid, a product from OzHarvest Ventures, which is the charity partner for the event. Every ticket contributes toward a $50,000 fundraising goal for **OzHarvest**, whose yellow vans rescue 250 tonnes of food per week across Australia. ![The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm](/images/posts/bigbbq2.jpg) The record being attempted is **the world's largest BBQ cooking lesson**. The format is straightforward: everyone cooks the same two dishes at the same time, following a lead instructor on PA. The dishes are an Aussie veggie burger and a charred garlic flatbread, both using produce from the farm. The current record stands at 336 people, in the US/Texas. After the Guinness verification, there's a free sausage sizzle and live music for the rest of the afternoon. ![The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm](/images/posts/bigbbq4.jpg) What makes this worth writing about isn't the world record angle. It's the V2L application. Outdoor events have a power problem — you either run a long cable from a building, or you bring a generator. Generators are noisy, smell, and burn diesel. The Big BBQ is using neither. If the event runs cleanly on EV battery power, it's a concrete demonstration that V2L has practical uses well beyond individual camping trips. ![The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm](/images/posts/bigbbq6.jpg) Australia didn't hold any BBQ world records. Until now! 359 people participated (with 5 disqualifications), setting a new record, for Australia. That's probably the least interesting fact about today, but it's the hook that got 400 people to the Central Coast hinterland on a Sunday in June. In fact, there will be at least 6 more activation events (Big BBQ Lesson was number 1) as they head toward their title event: 'Australia Hosting The World's Largest BBQ,' which requires 50,000 people to take the title from Mexico... ![The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm](/images/posts/bigbbq8.jpg) The event was sold out. You can follow it at [@bigbbqau](https://www.instagram.com/bigbbqau/) on Instagram. The Big BBQ - Zestiny Farm [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The Sound of Silence: How the World's Electric Cars Learned to Speak [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-sound-of-silence-how-the-world-s-electric-cars-learned-to-speak/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-sound-of-silence-how-the-world-s-electric-cars-learned-to-speak/) [POST DATE]: 2026-06-06 [START OF CONTENT] AVAS = Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System: an artificial sound an electric or hybrid vehicle emits at low speed (and in reverse) so people nearby can hear it coming. You step toward a crossing, glance up the road, and a car is already there, gliding past in near-total silence. No engine sound, just the hiss of tyres. For most of us it's a small surprise. For a blind pedestrian or a child near the kerb, there's no warning at all. The car industry's answer is a piece of safety engineering called **AVAS** (Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System). It's why your neighbour's new EV hums or whirs as it pulls out of the drive: why those sounds exist, where they're required, and how carmakers turned a legal obligation into a branding playground, complete with a Hollywood composer, a Paris music lab, and one sound so futuristic that test subjects looked up at the sky. ## What Exactly Is AVAS? An Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System is a speaker-and-software package that makes an electric or hybrid vehicle emit a deliberate sound at low speed and when reversing. Below roughly 20–30 km/h (about 12–19 mph), an EV's tyres and wind noise are too faint to warn anyone nearby, so the AVAS fills that gap with an engineered tone that **rises in pitch and volume as the car accelerates** and changes character in reverse. What makes a good AVAS sound: - **Detectable** it must cut through city background noise without being annoying. - **Directional and informative** listeners should be able to tell where the car is and whether it's speeding up or slowing down. - **On-brand** increasingly, manufacturers want the sound to *feel* like their marque. AVAS is not the same as the *interior* "engine" sounds many EVs now offer (think Hyundai's Active Sound Design or BMW's cabin soundscapes). AVAS faces *outward*, to protect people outside the car, and in almost every market the driver is **not allowed to switch it off**. ## Why It Matters: The Safety Case The push for AVAS wasn't a marketing idea. It came from hard safety data and years of advocacy by blind and low-vision communities. - **A landmark 2008 study at UC Riverside,** funded by the U.S. National Federation of the Blind, found that a Prius in electric mode could only be heard when it was **11 feet away**, versus **36 feet** for a petrol Honda Accord, leaving pedestrians a fraction of the reaction time. - **The U.S. NHTSA** repeatedly found hybrids more likely than petrol cars to hit pedestrians during low-speed maneuvers (turning, slowing, reversing). Its research (DOT HS 812 371) put the odds roughly **20% higher overall and about 50% higher** for those low-speed situations, with elevated risk for cyclists too. - **In its rulemaking for the U.S. standard, NHTSA** estimated that without a sound requirement, quiet vehicles would cause on the order of **2,800 additional pedestrian and cyclist injuries** a year once they became common, and that AVAS was a cost-effective way to prevent them. Advocacy did the rest. In the U.S., the National Federation of the Blind helped drive the **Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010**. In the U.K., **Guide Dogs** campaigned hard and later helped *design* the sound for London's first electric bus route. Canada's **CNIB** played the same role north of the border. AVAS is accessibility legislation that everyone benefits from. ## The Global Rulebook: 20 km/h vs. 30 km/h Almost every major market now mandates AVAS, though they split into two technical camps that disagree mainly on the **cut-off speed**. UN Regulation No. 138 EU · UK · JAPAN · S. KOREA · AUSTRALIA · MOST OF THE WORLD
0–20 km/h
 FMVSS No. 141 UNITED STATES · CANADA (CMVSS 141)
0–30 km/h + stationary
 **Around the world:** Japan issued early guidelines as far back as 2010 and aligns with UN R138. China published a national AVAS standard (GB/T 37153-2018, a *recommended* standard) effective July 2019, also using a 20 km/h threshold. The UK carried UN R138 into its post-Brexit GB type-approval scheme. And Australia's ADR 113/00 took effect for new models in November 2025, notably spelling out that trucks and buses are covered too, with the government estimating it will prevent dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries over coming decades. ### How we got here: A timeline of AVAS mandates A global mandate, market by market *(A few national fine points — exact binding dates in Japan and South Korea, and whether China pairs its recommended standard with a mandatory one — vary or are less clearly documented; the thresholds and direction of travel, however, are consistent worldwide.)* ## How Carmakers Found Their Voice The regulation dictates *how loud* and *up to what speed* but leaves the **character** of the sound wide open. That blank canvas sparked an unexpected creative competition. - **BMW — IconicSounds Electric.** BMW hired Oscar-winning film composer **Hans Zimmer**, working with in-house sound designer Renzo Vitale, to score its EVs (i4, iX, i5). Drivers can even select different cinematic soundscapes per drive mode. - **Nissan — "Canto."** Italian for *"I sing,"* Canto is a two-tone signature first developed with New York's Made Music Studio and refined for Europe by Nissan's own engineers. Nissan later repurposed the idea into *ANIMALERT*, a sound aimed at warning **wildlife**. - **Jaguar — and the sound that looked at the sky.** Jaguar spent four years on the I-PACE's Audible Vehicle Alert System, co-testing with Guide Dogs UK. Its first, spacey prototype was scrapped after testers instinctively **looked upward** for a hovering craft instead of toward the road. - **Renault — Z.E. Voice.** Renault was an early mover, fitting a pedestrian sound to the Zoe back in **2012**, years ahead of any mandate, in a long-running collaboration with the Paris acoustics-and-music institute **IRCAM**. - **Volkswagen — the ID. family.** VW developed its futuristic hum with composer-producer **Leslie Mandoki**, unveiling it in 2019. - **Porsche — purist to the core.** For the Taycan, Porsche's Weissach team built the sound **only from real vehicle components** (motor, transmission, tyres), refusing both synthesizers and celebrity composers. (Its optional *Electric Sport Sound* is a separate, driver-facing enhancement, distinct from the mandatory AVAS.) - **Volvo — a calming choir.** Volvo's Active Sound Experience studio in Gothenburg built the EX30 and EX40 (XC40 Recharge) sound from a human vocal sample, layered into a slowly pulsing choral tone designed to soothe rather than startle, audible from about six feet and fading out near 29 km/h. A Volvo patent spells out the philosophy: shape the car's own road, tyre and motor noise into something pleasant, explicitly not a "spaceship" sound or a "branded" jingle. (It's the same team whose turn-signal click began life as a spruce twig snapping in a Swedish forest; they recorded 300 sticks to find the right one.) - **Audi, Mercedes-Benz and the engineers' approach.** Audi's *e-sound* layers dozens of recordings, projected from a speaker ahead of the front wheel. Mercedes tunes each EQ model's *e-sound* in an anechoic chamber using a binaural "dummy head," and pointedly **rejected** faking a combustion engine. - **Hyundai & Kia — mind the distinction.** Their exterior pedestrian warning (sometimes badged VESS) is separate from the *interior* Active Sound Design profiles (Stylish/Dynamic/Cyber on the EV6; [simulated gearshifts on the Ioniq 5 N](/posts/the-quiet-ride-that-makes-you-queasy/)). - **Tesla — the Boombox saga.** Tesla added an external speaker around 2019, then let owners pipe custom audio through it via "Boombox": goat bleats, applause, you name it. The fun ran into the law: in 2022 NHTSA recalled roughly **578,000** cars because Boombox could play *while driving* and mask the mandatory warning tone. Tesla limited it to Park via an over-the-air update. Others are distinctive in their own right: the Fiat 500e adds an Italian-flavoured musical motif, Lucid leans futuristic, Polestar insists on "responsible" non-intrusive design (explicitly no spaceship sounds), and Toyota equips its hybrids and the bZ range with a gentle low-speed hum. ## Beyond Cars: Trucks, Vans & Buses Cars get most of the attention, but the same rules apply to heavy vehicles, and arguably matter *more* there. A silent 40-tonne truck is a far bigger surprise to a pedestrian than a silent hatchback, and researchers (at TU Dresden and Chalmers, the latter with Scania) have shown that simply copying a car's high-pitched AVAS onto a truck is a mistake: pedestrians expect **low-frequency sound that conveys mass**, and an under-pitched truck can be mistaken for something small and slow. - **Volvo Trucks** built a bespoke **four-sound suite** (moving, idling, reversing, transitions) for its FH/FM/FE/FL Electric range, deliberately engineering the sounds **not to penetrate building walls** so electric trucks can make quiet night-time deliveries without waking residents. - **Mercedes-Benz Trucks** gave the eActros front and rear speakers that **exceed** the UN minimum by 10–15 dB. The flip side: in early 2026 Mercedes had to recall its **eSprinter** van because the **reverse** alert was too *quiet* to comply: proof that AVAS is an enforced standard, not a token gesture. - **Tesla Semi** as a U.S. Class-8 electric truck, falls under the same FMVSS 141 low-speed requirement, even if Tesla hasn't publicised a signature sound for it. - **Buses** got the most community-driven treatment: **Transport for London** trialled a custom electric-bus sound on **Route 100** in 2019, co-designed with **Guide Dogs UK** and accessibility groups, sounding below ~12 mph and at stops. ## The Ongoing Debate AVAS carries some inherent tensions: 1. **Safety vs. noise pollution.** Cities fought hard to *reduce* traffic noise; deliberately adding sound back feels paradoxical. The regulations try to thread the needle with volume caps and sounds that fade out once tyre noise takes over above the threshold. 2. **The mute question.** Early EVs sometimes let drivers silence the system; modern rules largely forbid that, precisely because the people who benefit (pedestrians, the blind) aren't the ones holding the switch. 3. **Consistency vs. personality.** Accessibility advocates value **predictable** sounds people can learn to recognise, while brands want **distinctive** ones. The Tesla Boombox recall is the cautionary tale of personality going too far. The likely future is more *standardised intent* with *branded execution*: recognisable as "a car approaching" to anyone, while still sounding unmistakably like a BMW, a Nissan, or a Porsche. --- ## Hear It for Yourself: 29 AVAS Videos The best way to understand AVAS is to listen. Below a ready-made YouTube playlist spanning passenger cars, trucks, buses, and explainers: **Signature passenger-car sounds** 1. [The Driving Sound of the first electrified BMW M (Hans Zimmer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNpeuQFfSlE) - *BMW M* 2. [The Sound of the BMW Concept i4 - Hans Zimmer & Renzo Vitale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep-tlvql_j0) - *BMW Group* 3. [Iconic Sounds by Hans Zimmer in the BMW iX M60 (all modes)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqmN-2j2cb8) - *Kroysplace* 4. [Porsche Taycan - Porsche Electric Sport Sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUjeaCrxT8) - *Autowizja* 5. [Porsche Taycan Turbo S - the future sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxSBMTwE858) - *Automann-TV* 6. [Nissan "Canto" AVAS explained (Paul Speed-Andrews)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0qGRUmhtY4) - *Nissan Greece* 7. [Mercedes-Benz e-sound - AVAS for electric cars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k82rjRxl6Gk) - *The Wheel Network* 8. [Audi e-tron artificial engine sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUcbXplAvSc) - *Car Tech Connect* 9. [Jaguar I-PACE - Safety Sounds for the Visually Impaired](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13JwfssNI3I) - *Jaguar (official)* 10. [Hyundai Ioniq 5 - pedestrian/reverse sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtY6sVyA6yo) - *Ever* 11. [Hyundai Ioniq 5 N - Active Sound demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSIguemKIbQ) - *DPCcars* 12. [Kia e-Niro - virtual engine / VESS warning sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZwVJPN0Ow) - *crospotter13* 13. [MINI Cooper SE - reverse AVAS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov62ILHTc-o) - *Ever* 14. [Fiat 500e - pedestrian alert + Italian chime](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo-RSW4kzVs) - *TFLEV* 15. [BYD Seal - AVAS low-speed sound (OTA update)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQwmDVC7auM) - *Ludicrous Feed* 16. [BYD Seal - AVAS toggle walkthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXxxVmETNdw) - *Ludicrous Feed* 17. [Lucid Gravity - EV pedestrian sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlHdTUwFN9w) - *car du jour* 18. [Toyota bZ - pedestrian warning sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cicAEHML4Hk) - *Ever* 19. [Toyota hybrid/EV warning sounds demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80VKMkrJ6CA) - *Toyota KC Region* 20. [Ford F-150 / Mach-E pedestrian + reverse speaker](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_jZJxMrNrY) - *Jake Reviews All* 21. [Volvo - a calming choir.](https://youtu.be/1qRYuiAtP7g?si=kfBfVb6v7gUMjxi2&t=39) - *Carless Stockholm* **Trucks & buses** 22. [Volvo FH Electric - review covering its AVAS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OxZiFSSKHQ) - *Rubetrans Logistics* 23. [Metroline BYD electric double-decker, London](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsoRYWcD0O8) - *SHOWBUS.com* 24. [Tesla Semi close-up - "notice how little sound there is?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP0vIH8r-tE) - *My Tesla Adventure* **Explainers, accessibility & context** 25. [Why do some cars have speakers outside? (Tesla Boombox & AVAS)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-8RUwAl9g) - *DriveOS* 26. [HARMAN HALOsonic - how external EV sound is engineered](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gBi_rNGoQQ) - *HARMAN* 27. [AVAS vs. Rear Cross-Traffic Alert explained](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHcnaaehxow) - *Gateway Toyota* 28. [Electric cars and the blind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95O14kUgmBI) - *Fully Charged / Everything Electric* 29. [Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (EV section)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8) - *Not Just Bikes* --- ## The Takeaway AVAS gives back a layer of safety that the electric revolution quietly removed, without dragging combustion noise back into our streets. And the sounds themselves turned out to be more than compliance: even a legally mandated alert can carry a brand's character, whether scored by Hans Zimmer or built from the whir of a real motor. So the next time an EV slips past you with a soft, rising hum, listen closely. That sound was argued over by safety regulators, blind-rights campaigners, acoustic engineers and film composers, all so that you, and everyone around you, can simply hear it coming. --- *Sources: UNECE Regulation No. 138; EU Regulation 540/2014; U.S. NHTSA FMVSS No. 141 and rulemaking dockets; UC Riverside / National Federation of the Blind (2008); manufacturer press materials (BMW, Nissan, Jaguar, Renault, Volkswagen, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo Trucks, Daimler Truck); Transport for London. Some national implementation dates vary by market; figures are rounded for readability.* [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: National Press Club address: Sovereign Power, a public energy builder for Australia's industrial future [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-sovereign-power/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-sovereign-power/) [POST DATE]: 2026-06-03 [START OF CONTENT] # Australia needs a public energy builder, not another bailout On 3 June 2026, Michael Wright, Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, and Alison Pennington, Chief Economist at the McKell Institute, addressed the National Press Club in Canberra to argue for a new Commonwealth entity — Sovereign Power — that would build, own, and operate renewable generation assets to supply Australian industry at cost. The address was not a campaign launch so much as a diagnosis with a prescription attached. Wright opened with the workers: James from Collie, Kurt and Joseph from Whyalla Steelworks; tradespeople whose jobs sit squarely in the middle of an energy market that, in his words, "_just isn't right for the job._" ## The problem they're naming Australia's coal and gas-fired power plants are ageing out. They are kept running by union members working under increasingly difficult conditions, but they will not produce energy much longer. The generation gap they leave is arriving at exactly the moment demand is climbing: EVs, electrified rail, industrial heating, data centres, and AI infrastructure are all drawing on the grid. Wright put this plainly — Australia is not building to 82% renewables, or even 100%. Once fossil fuel substitution across transport, industry and heating is accounted for, the effective build target is something like 700% of the current grid. That demand surge is colliding with a private investment market that is not moving fast enough, at the right price, or on the right time horizons. Power purchase agreements from legacy generators are expiring, and industry is finding no replacement contracts on offer. Pennington cited the consequence: Australian heavy industry pays roughly three times more for energy than US competitors. Five key industrial sites have required government bailouts in three years because the market could not supply them with long-term, competitively priced power. Foreign governments — China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore — now own more of Australia's renewable generation capacity than the Australian federal government does. ## What Sovereign Power would do The proposal is a new Commonwealth entity, funded by direct equity injection, that builds and owns renewable generation projects and sells electricity to eligible industries at cost, not at a profit-seeking market rate. The financial logic rests on borrowing costs. Where private developers carry a weighted average cost of capital of around 7% in real terms, the Commonwealth borrows at roughly a third less. On a $23 billion investment, Pennington estimated that gap translates to around $19 billion in avoided capital costs over a project's life. That saving is what allows Sovereign Power to offer electricity at approximately $65 per megawatt hour against a market average of $117. Contracts would run 15 to 25 years, long enough for industry to plan capital investment, hire, train, and expand rather than wait out rolling uncertainty. Eligible industries track the Future Made in Australia strategic industries list: green metals, critical minerals processing, green hydrogen, low-carbon fuels. Data centres are explicitly excluded, consistent with current federal and state government positions that data centre operators should add generation capacity rather than draw on subsidised supply. Because Sovereign Power assets sit on the public balance sheet as equity, not debt financing, the entity does not register in the underlying cash balance the same way recurrent spending does. Pennington described it as building public wealth, an asset that recovers its costs and could, over time, return a small surplus to the budget. The entity would also free up grid capacity by carving off energy-intensive industrial loads, which in turn reduces competition between smelters and households and puts downward pressure on broader electricity prices. ## The historical parallel Pennington drew from postwar economic history to frame the proposal. Nugget Coombs, appointed to lead postwar reconstruction under Curtin, responded to trade disruption and inflation by treating the crisis as an opening to build new economic architecture. The state electricity commissions that followed delivered some of the lowest industrial and household electricity prices in the developed world for most of the twentieth century. The joint coal board established under Bill McKell — for whom the McKell Institute is named — powered industrial expansion. Wright made the same point without the historical apparatus: Tomago aluminium is in the Hunter Valley because public energy put it there. Most competitor nations, including parts of the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and across Europe, still run heavy industry on low-cost public power. Australia's heavy industry is paying a price for the choice to privatise and deregulate that its competitors did not make. ## Questions the address had to answer Tom Connell pressed on efficiency. The standard argument against public ownership is that private operators are leaner. Wright's response was direct: solar panels and modular batteries do not carry the engineering complexity of a hydro tunnel through a mountain. Operation costs are near zero once built. Private ownership does not change the weather, and the historical efficiency arguments against public delivery do not straightforwardly apply to generation assets with vanishing marginal operating costs. On the budget question, whether at-cost power means the government absorbs any shortfall, Pennington clarified that the entity is designed for cost recovery, not subsidy. The price difference comes from cheaper public borrowing, not from taxpayers making up a gap. The asset sits on the public books and earns back what it costs. Wright also addressed the social licence question around infrastructure deployment in regional areas. Polling data his team has seen shows community opposition in regions is lower when infrastructure is publicly owned; when communities believe the sacrifice of land and landscape returns something to them and to the country. He was careful to note that Sovereign Power is not meant to replace private investment; the energy build required is large enough that public and private generation are additive, not competing. ## Skills, and what wasn't in the speech Wright said the ETU agonised over whether to pitch sovereign power or skills at the press club. They chose sovereign power. The skills crisis, though, kept surfacing. There is currently a projected shortfall of 42,500 electricians by 2030, and by 2050 total labour shortages in the electrical trades could exceed 100,000. Electrical apprenticeship enrolments have fallen year on year since 2022. Wright named the housing agenda, the energy transition, the defence build, and the Brisbane 2032 Olympics as concurrent demands on a workforce that is already short. Sovereign Power is partly an answer to this because it enables sequencing. A four-year apprenticeship cannot be completed on a two-year project. A public entity with a continuous pipeline of work (project to project, region to region) provides the continuity that private contracts on fixed timelines do not. ## The political path Wright confirmed the proposal has been shared with the government. He was measured about the response: receptive, but not a guarantee. The ETU plans to take it to the ALP National Conference in Adelaide in July, alongside a resolution on fixing the skills crisis. ## What they're asking for The proposal does not require new money so much as redirected purpose. Using existing mechanisms, like the National Reconstruction Fund as well as Future Made in Australia funding, and reorienting them toward publicly owned generation rather than crowding-in private capital is the practical ask. That would require a change to the NRF's investment mandate. The framing Wright returned to throughout was simple: Australia has the resources, the skills, and the institutional capacity. Electricity is the missing input. Without it, heavy industry limps between bailouts. With it, the industrial base (aluminium, steel, copper, lithium processing) can invest, hire, and expand on something firmer than a short-term contract. Whether that argument lands at national conference in July, or eventually through the pressure of circumstance, Wright said he believes the government will eventually have to act. The alternative is managing a slow contraction of industrial capability with no clear floor. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: May 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-05-may/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-05-may/) [POST DATE]: 2026-05-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Why Charging to 80% Is Almost Always the Right Call [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/why-charging-to-80-percent-is-almost-always-the-right-call/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/why-charging-to-80-percent-is-almost-always-the-right-call/) [POST DATE]: 2026-05-02 [START OF CONTENT] If you spend any time in EV communities, you will quickly encounter the 80% rule: charge to 80% on DC fast chargers and move on. Some drivers follow it religiously. Others dismiss it as overcaution. Most know it is a thing without quite knowing why. The reason is worth understanding — because it is actually several reasons stacked on top of each other, and they all point the same direction. ## The chemistry EV batteries are not like fuel tanks. You cannot fill them at a constant rate until they are full. During a DC fast charging session, the charging curve (the rate of power delivery plotted against the battery's state of charge) tells the real story. From around 10% to 80% SoC, most EVs accept charge at or near their peak rate. A 150 kW vehicle charges at close to 150 kW. Things move quickly. At around 80%, the Battery Management System begins tapering the charge rate. For NMC and NCA chemistries (used in most non-Chinese EVs), the electrochemistry above 80% becomes sensitive to a phenomenon called lithium plating, where lithium ions deposit on the anode surface instead of intercalating cleanly. Charge too fast at high SoC and you degrade the cell. The BMS knows this, so it throttles back. The practical result: the last 20% of charge takes approximately as long as the previous 60%. Charging from 20% to 80% might take 25 minutes. Charging from 80% to 100% might take another 20–25 minutes — for a range addition less than a third as large. ## The maths on the road If you are on a long trip with multiple charging stops, this asymmetry compounds. Stopping at 80% each time and pushing on to the next charger means you move faster and charge more often but briefly. Waiting for 100% at each stop means longer pauses with diminishing returns. Route planning apps like [ABRP](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) account for charging curves per vehicle model in their time estimates: optimal plans almost never include 100% charges unless the next segment demands it. The rule of thumb: arrive at each charger as low as you comfortably can; leave at 80% or whatever the next leg requires, whichever is higher. ## The exception: LFP batteries LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries have a different electrochemical profile. They are more tolerant of high-SoC charging and, importantly, their Battery Management System actually requires periodic full 100% charges to calibrate the SoC display. Without that calibration, the estimated remaining range drifts. If your EV uses an LFP battery (common in BYD vehicles, some Teslas, and most Chinese EVs), the advice from most manufacturers is to charge to 100% regularly at home. On a fast charger during a trip, the 80% logic still applies for time efficiency. Guilt-free 100% home charging is the recommendation, not the exception. ## The pricing signal On top of the chemistry, there is now a financial signal reinforcing the same behaviour. At busy highway Superchargers (including the Coolac NSW site on the Hume Highway), Tesla applies a [congestion fee](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/) of $0.50 per minute once your battery exceeds 80% SoC and the site is marked as busy. The fee also accrues if you are plugged in but have stopped charging. This is not arbitrary. The congestion fee is a direct translation of the charging curve into financial terms. Charging from 80% to 100% occupies a stall for roughly the same time as charging from 10% to 80% — but delivers far less energy and range. At a congested site, that last 20% costs one driver very little extra while potentially delaying several others. At 750 kW of total site capacity, a Coolac Supercharger cycling drivers through at 80% can serve roughly 13 vehicles per hour, each leaving with about 300 kilometres of range. If even a handful of vehicles top to 100%, throughput falls. The congestion pricing is designed to make the maths visible in real time. ## What actually happens at Easter The [Easter 2026 queues](/posts/ev-charging-congestion-is-real-and-fixable/) at highway Superchargers were covered extensively, mostly as evidence that EV infrastructure has failed. The reality is more nuanced. One thing is clear from the per-minute occupancy data: the sites were at capacity. Every extra minute a vehicle occupied a stall above 80% SoC was a minute of delay for someone in the queue. Congestion pricing helps, but it cannot override the physics. The most effective tool at a congested site is collective behaviour: drivers who understand the charging curve and act on it. ## The practical summary The 80% rule survives scrutiny because it is not a rule at all — it is just what the chemistry, the maths, and the economics all independently recommend. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: April 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-04-april/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-04-april/) [POST DATE]: 2026-04-26 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: EV Charging Congestion Is Real, but Fixable [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-charging-congestion-is-real-and-fixable/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-charging-congestion-is-real-and-fixable/) [POST DATE]: 2026-04-22 [START OF CONTENT] Over Easter 2026, social media lit up with photos of queues at EV charging stations along major Australian highways. The Coolac NSW Tesla Supercharger (a 12-bay site on the Hume Highway about 15 kilometres north of Gundagai) became the poster child for a narrative that goes like this: the charging network isn't ready, EVs are stranded, the whole thing is a disaster. The congestion was real. But the narrative deserves a closer look. ## What actually happened at Coolac Carloop, a platform that tracks per-minute occupancy across ten Australian charging networks, published data on the Coolac site around the same time. The numbers are instructive. Good Friday: the station ran at over 95% occupancy for roughly eight hours, from 10am to 6pm. Easter Monday: same story, another eight hours. Both periods were genuinely difficult — and worse, every other DC fast charger within 100 kilometres on the Hume Highway was simultaneously congested. There was nowhere to redirect. The social media posts weren't wrong. On those two days, on Australia's busiest interstate, EV drivers faced real queues with no viable alternatives. ## But here's the full picture Carloop's data covers the Coolac site from late January 2026 to mid-April. Over that full period, the station ran at 90% or higher occupancy for just 0.65% of the time. Its average occupancy was 10.3%. That is a congested site for two days of public holidays. For the other 98-odd days in the sample, it was fine. Compare that to a 12-stall urban Supercharger in Box Hill, Victoria. Average occupancy: 30% — three times higher than Coolac. Congestion above 90%: 0.4%. Urban drivers top up opportunistically and leave when a site looks busy. Highway drivers on a 600km road trip don't have that option. ## Understanding the hardware The Coolac site uses Tesla's V4 architecture, which is worth understanding. Each 250kW power cabinet serves three or four charging stalls. At full occupancy, four vehicles sharing one cabinet each receive a maximum of 62.5kW, meaningfully slower than the headline spec. The station's total capacity is 750kW across three cabinets and twelve stalls. Tesla addresses this with [congestion pricing](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/): $0.50 per minute once your battery exceeds 80% state of charge and the site is busy. The fee also accrues if you're plugged in but have stopped charging, discouraging the habit of topping to 100% while others wait. If the pricing does its job, the site cycles through roughly 13 vehicles per hour, each getting enough energy for about 300 kilometres of highway driving. That is actually a reasonable throughput number. The problem is the queue that forms when demand spikes past even that. ## The comparison that matters Here is the number that should make charging operators uncomfortable: the smallest petrol station in the Coolac area has enough bowsers to service more than four times as many vehicles per hour as the Coolac Supercharger at peak. Even with congestion pricing maximising throughput, the infrastructure gap is significant. There are at least nine petrol stations in that 100km stretch of highway. EV drivers had seven charger sites, and on Good Friday, they were all full at the same time. ## What the data actually says This is not an argument against EVs. It is an argument for building more [charging infrastructure](/posts/planning-guide-for-ev-charging-infrastructure/) on high-traffic routes, faster. The commercial case is clearly there. As per Carloop, the Coolac site has generated an estimated $73,863 in charging revenue since January 2026, and that figure will only grow as EV adoption — now past 15% of new light vehicle sales — continues climbing. The demand exists. The revenue exists. The constraint is physical infrastructure. The solution is straightforward if unglamorous: more sites, more stalls per site, higher-power cabinets on major highway corridors. The Hume Highway alone likely needs three to four times its [current charging capacity](/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/) to handle peak holiday travel without queuing. In the meantime: if you're heading south on a long weekend, there is a six-stall Tesla Supercharger in Gundagai, ten kilometres from Coolac. Leave a gap between the two in your plan, [charge to 80% and move on](/posts/why-charging-to-80-percent-is-almost-always-the-right-call/). > The Easter queues were a preview of what happens when EV adoption outpaces infrastructure investment. The answer is not to slow the adoption. ## Reference [Carloop](https://carloop.com.au/charging/ev-charger-congestion-2026-separating-fact-from-fiction/) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Electric Truck Sales Have Already Crossed 50% in China. What That Means for Australia. [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/electric-trucks-have-already-crossed-50-percent-in-china/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/electric-trucks-have-already-crossed-50-percent-in-china/) [POST DATE]: 2026-04-09 [START OF CONTENT] - **53.9%** Electric truck share of new heavy-truck sales in China, December 2025 - **700,000** Electric buses China operates — ~90% of every electric bus on earth - **85%** Lower energy costs for electric vs diesel over a truck's life - **A$2m+** Diesel fuel costs per prime mover over ten years - **700 km** Windrose E700 loaded range on a single charge - **870 kW** Peak charging speed via Megawatt Charging System (MCS) In December 2025, 45,300 new energy heavy trucks were sold in China. That was 53.9% of the monthly total — the first time electric heavy trucks crossed 50% penetration in the world's largest freight market. This did not make much news in Australia. It should have. ## How we got here To understand where freight electrification is going, it helps to see where it came from. - **Over a decade** China builds 700,000 electric buses — 90% of the world fleet. LFP battery packs, high-power charging and grid software are proven at scale. - **Buses → Trucks** The ecosystem flows directly into heavy freight. Battery costs fall. Range improves. Charging standards mature. - **December 2025** 53.9% of new heavy trucks sold in China are electric — the first month above 50% in the world's largest freight market. - **Early 2026** Seasonal pullback to 20–25% (Chinese New Year; construction slowdowns). The floor has permanently moved up. - **2026 · Sydney–Canberra** Windrose E700 trialled on Australia's busiest freight corridor: 700 km loaded range, 870 kW MCS charging, A$450–500k. - **When, not if** Heavy freight electrification: the same compounding logic as passenger EVs, applied to Australia's most diesel-intensive segment. China now operates roughly 700,000 electric buses, roughly 90% of every electric bus on earth. That transition happened over a decade, driven not by mandate but by economics: electric buses have dramatically lower fuel and maintenance costs on routes where vehicles return to a central depot each night. The operational case was overwhelming. The technology and manufacturing ecosystem built for buses (large LFP battery packs, high-power charging infrastructure, grid integration software) did not stay in buses. It flowed directly into trucks. Battery costs fell. Range improved. Charging standards matured. By the time the heavy truck market was ready, the hard problems were largely solved. The December 2025 number is the result. The seasonal pullback in early 2026 (back to around 20–25%) does not signal a reversal — it reflects Chinese New Year and construction slowdowns. The floor has permanently moved up. ## The economics that are doing the work No government is forcing Chinese trucking companies to go electric. They are doing it because the numbers work. A diesel prime mover running heavy freight over ten years accumulates more than A$2 million in fuel costs — and that figure is hostage to oil markets, geopolitics, and refinery margins. An equivalent battery-electric truck carries energy costs up to 85% lower, and those costs come from electricity: a commodity that can be generated domestically, stored, and priced predictably. The upfront price premium is real. An electric long-haul truck currently costs roughly twice a diesel equivalent. But fleet decisions are made on total cost of ownership over the vehicle's life, not on the sticker price; on that measure, electric is increasingly winning. There is also a structural wrinkle that changes the incentive permanently: oil price spikes no longer reinforce diesel dependence. For fifty years, every price shock caused pain and then doubled down on the same system. Now, a spike in diesel prices accelerates the TCO calculation toward electric, pulls forward adoption, and reduces future diesel demand — which then feeds back as volatility, which drives more substitution. The loop is inverting. ## Australia's first long-haul electric truck Australia already has a candidate vehicle on its most important freight corridor. The **Windrose E700** is a battery-electric prime mover capable of approximately 700 kilometres of loaded range, using a 700 kWh LFP battery pack that charges at up to 870 kW via the MCS (Megawatt Charging System) standard. It has been trialled on the Sydney–Canberra route (about 280 kilometres each way, well within a single charge) at a purchase price of approximately A$450,000–$500,000. The Sydney–Canberra corridor is not the most demanding application imaginable. But it is a real route, with real payload, run by real operators looking at the same TCO spreadsheet as their Chinese counterparts. ## What the infrastructure needs to look like The Megawatt Charging System (MCS), developed by industry consortium CharIN and aligned with emerging ISO standards, is the freight charging standard now taking shape. At roughly 1 MW of charging power, it can add several hundred kilometres of range in a rest stop break. Freight charging hubs are also being built differently from public EV charging. They combine onsite solar, grid-scale battery storage, and smart scheduling software. The charging load is managed, not dumped onto the grid. Vehicles charge when energy is cheap; stored solar covers the peaks. This is not a future concept. It is the model already operating in China and beginning to appear in Australia. ## The question is when, not if Heavy freight is the largest remaining source of diesel demand in Australia's transport sector. Its electrification is the next major phase of the energy transition — the same compounding logic that turned passenger EVs from curiosity to 15% of new car sales in twelve months, applied to the most energy-intensive segment of the vehicle fleet. The Chinese data says the technology works at scale. The Windrose trial says Australia has access to it. The TCO numbers say the commercial incentive is already there. The transition will not happen overnight. But it has started. ## References [ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-30/electric-truck-delivery-sydney-canberra/106472780) [New Energy Transport](https://newenergy.com.au) [Windrose](https://windrose.tech) [SCMP](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3348742/chinas-electric-truck-revolution-powerful-painkiller-iran-war) [Electrive](https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric-trucks-outsell-diesel-for-the-first-time-in-china/) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: March 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-03-march/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-03-march/) [POST DATE]: 2026-03-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Every car park should be a power plant [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/every-car-park-should-be-a-power-plant/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/every-car-park-should-be-a-power-plant/) [POST DATE]: 2026-03-26 [START OF CONTENT] Stand in any large car park at noon on a sunny day and you'll notice two things: an expansive flat surface baking in the sun, and a lot of hot, uncomfortable cars. All that energy hits the tarmac and bounces back as heat. None of it gets captured. No one is cooled. Nothing is charged. It's just waste, sitting on land that's already been paved over and written off. That's the starting absurdity. Car parks cover enormous areas (shopping centres, offices, hospitals, stadiums) in some of the most solar-productive parts of the country. They face the sky all day. And increasingly, they're filling up with large batteries on wheels. The fix is obvious: put a roof on it. Not an ordinary roof, a solar canopy. ## Three European car parks that proved the model Before getting into the argument, it helps to know this isn't a theory. Three large-scale solar carports in Europe are already running, and their numbers are worth sitting with. These are not prototypes. They are operational infrastructure at tens of megawatts each. ## It's already happening in Australia Australia doesn't need to look to Europe for proof. There are at least eleven operational solar carport installations across the country right now at shopping centres, universities, a leagues club and a produce market. The largest is **Elizabeth City Centre in Adelaide**, where Vicinity Centres has installed 3.2 MW of solar carport capacity as part of a 5.9 MW total system, the largest single solar installation on any Australian retail property. Around 1,400 parking spaces are shaded, four EV charging stations are integrated, and the site generates roughly 11.5 GWh per year shared with the adjacent Castle Plaza development. Castle Plaza itself has 2,244 kW of carport solar, a 548 kWh battery storage trial, and its own EV chargers — deployed using semi-flexible panels on a large-span mounting system. Up in Townsville, **Willows Shopping Centre** has 1.5 MW across 500 shaded spaces, with 4,800 panels managing high daytime loads in one of Australia's most demanding solar climates. **Sydney Markets** in Flemington has 640 kW covering around 350 spaces, saving an estimated 936 tonnes of CO₂ per year and reportedly hundreds of thousands of dollars off the electricity bill annually. And closer to (my) home on the Central Coast: **Deepwater Plaza in Woy Woy** completed a 253.4 kW solar carport in November 2020, 768 panels over 100 spaces in the Coles car park off Charlton Street. The centre was sold in 2023 for A$111 million at a 6.5% cap rate. The solar installation was part of a broader value-add upgrade that reduced operating costs and improved the asset's appeal to institutional buyers. It's the kind of local example that sits alongside the broader [Central Coast charging gap](/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/) and the later [Central Coast new chargers](/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/) rollout. ![Deepwater Plaza Solar Carport](/images/posts/deepwaterplazasolar.jpg) The full picture across Australia: | Site | Capacity | Annual generation | Notes | |------|----------|-------------------|-------| | Elizabeth City Centre, SA | 3.2 MW carport / 5.9 MW total | 11.5 GWh (shared) | Largest AU retail solar; ~1,400 spaces; EV chargers | | Castle Plaza, SA | 2,244 kW | 11.5 GWh (shared) | Battery trial; EV chargers; semi-flexible panels | | Willows Shopping Centre, QLD | 1.5 MW | 2,500 MWh | 500 spaces; 4,800 panels | | Wagga Wagga Solar Carport, NSW | 818 kW | 1,213 MWh | 1,209 t CO₂/yr saved | | Barwon Prison, VIC | 773 kW | 1,070 MWh | Fast-install steel construction | | Monash University, VIC | 723 kW | - | Education sector | | Sydney Markets, NSW | 640 kW | - | 350 spaces; 936 t CO₂/yr | | West Illawarra Leagues Club, NSW | 365 kW carport / 590 kW total | - | 120 spaces; 4× 22 kW EV chargers | | Deepwater Plaza, Woy Woy, NSW | 253.4 kW | 253 MWh | 100 spaces; sold 2023 for $111M | | Northam Boulevard, WA | - | 1,871 MWh | 40% of centre's energy demand | | PA Central, Brisbane, QLD | 100 kW | - | 30–40% energy cost reduction | The West Illawarra Leagues Club example is worth a closer look for anyone thinking about installation logistics. The club used Canyon Solar prefabricated pods: 36 individual units, 7.5 m × 2.6 m each, with bifacial panels factory-fitted. Combined with an existing 225 kW rooftop system, the 590 kW total covers around 30% of the club's electricity. The prefab approach brought the full installation in under a month, roughly three times faster than a traditional build, which matters when you're closing parking bays for construction. ## Tesla is doing it at Superchargers too Solar canopies aren't only turning up at shopping centres. Tesla has installed solar canopies at two NSW Supercharger stations, co-funded by the NSW Government, with open-access conditions requiring both sites to serve all EV brands — part of the same broader charging build-out covered in [NSW's 300 new planned chargers](/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/). **Raymond Terrace** has 70 kW — the first Tesla solar canopy in Australia. **New Italy** has 80 kW across 12 bays, including a pull-through bay for towing, making it the largest Tesla solar canopy in the country so far. Planning complexity has slowed further rollout — Coolac had both a solar canopy and a Megapack planned, but both were dropped. Queensland sites at Tully and Cairns are under consideration. ## Why carports beat remote solar farms for urban energy Large-scale centralised solar works. The Midong plant in Xinjiang runs at 3.5 GW and supplies roughly two million homes. But it requires dedicated land, and the energy has to travel long distances before it reaches someone who can use it, with losses at every step. Solar carports invert this logic. Generation happens where the demand already is. Lower transmission losses. Vehicles are shaded in summer, which reduces the energy needed for cabin pre-cooling before you get in. And every carport becomes a natural EV charging point without separate infrastructure. The timing fits well too. Midday solar peaks when offices, shopping centres, and stadiums are already full. Instead of exporting surplus solar to the grid and then importing grid electricity to charge parked EVs — two round-trips, two sets of losses — the carport closes the loop. Solar goes straight into the car in the bay below. This is the same logic behind [smart home charging](/posts/living-smart-festival-2025/): the best time to charge an EV is midday, not 6pm when the grid is under pressure. A solar carport makes midday the default, not a scheduling exercise. ## The financial case in Australia Self-consumption is what makes the numbers work. NSW grid electricity exceeds 30c/kWh. Feed-in tariffs pay 5–10c/kWh. Every kilowatt-hour used on-site is worth three to six times more than every kilowatt-hour exported, so systems sized for self-consumption rather than export return far better. Typical payback windows for Australian commercial solar carports: | System size | Annual savings | Payback | |-------------|---------------|---------| | 30 kW (small retail/office) | A$9,000–$10,000 | 3.5–4.5 years | | 50 kW (medium commercial) | A$15,000–$18,000 | 3–4 years | | 100 kW+ (large-scale) | A$30,000–$35,000 | 3–6 years | At institutional scale, Vicinity Centres projects roughly 12% IRR across its ~A$73 million solar carport portfolio. Two federal incentive schemes apply, both running until 2030. Systems under 100 kW qualify for Small-scale Technology Certificates (STCs), which provide approximately 30% off the installed cost as an upfront discount. Systems above 100 kW generate Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs), roughly A$25 per MWh generated, as ongoing tradeable income. A 500 kW system generating ~700 MWh/year adds around A$17,500/year in LGC income on top of the self-consumption savings. Both schemes end in 2030. For systems under 100 kW, the upfront discount erodes each year until it disappears entirely. That's not an abstract deadline. There's also a climate angle that reframes the conversation for property managers. Adelaide's Elizabeth City Centre has recorded 45°C peak temperatures; Castle Plaza, 44°C. A solar canopy shades vehicles during those peaks, reducing cabin temperature and the air-conditioning load when drivers return. In hail-prone parts of eastern Australia, a rigid canopy is also physical protection against storm damage claims. That shifts the budget conversation from "energy project" to "asset protection infrastructure." ## The V2G angle There's a longer-term dimension. As [bidirectional charging](/posts/the-big-bbq-guiness-world-record/) spreads, parked EVs won't only be consuming power, they'll be able to push it back to the grid during demand spikes. A car park with several hundred V2G-capable EVs becomes a distributed grid battery that charges from the canopy above and discharges when the network needs it. Australia's grid doesn't yet support V2G at residential or commercial scale, the bidirectional infrastructure, metering standards, and regulatory framework are still catching up. But the hardware is coming, and the car parks will already be there. A solar canopy built today is V2G-ready infrastructure for when the grid is ready for it. The most advanced commercial installations are already moving in this direction. Melbourne Airport operates as a GreenPower-approved provider, supplying on-site solar directly to tenants — a car park functioning as a microgrid utility. Castle Plaza's battery trial points the same way. ## Why it's still not the default The technology works. The economics stack up. Deployment is still the exception rather than the rule, and the reasons aren't technical. **Ownership fragmentation.** The car park owner, the canopy installer, the energy metering operator, and the electricity retailer are often different parties with different incentives. **Property owner resistance.** Retail operators don't *want* to become energy managers. It's outside their core business, and the upfront capital commitment is real even with STCs reducing the cost. That hesitation is exactly why the [NSW Fast Chargers](/posts/hosting-a-fast-charger-in-nsw/) host-site program matters: it lowers the barrier for landowners willing to make space available without becoming charging operators themselves. **Utility friction.** Distributed generation on existing commercial property competes with centralised utility revenue. Grid connection approvals don't always move quickly. **Structural complexity.** Tensile fabric shade structures, a common sight in Australian commercial car parks, require specialist re-engineering before solar can be added, as rigid PV panels change the load and wind dynamics. A solar-ready canopy designed from scratch costs less than retrofitting an existing shade structure. This last barrier is slowly inverting. Solar carports directly improve NABERS and Green Star environmental ratings, which increasingly govern access to institutional funding and high-tier tenants. A car park without a solar canopy is now an active drag on a property's environmental score. The Deepwater Plaza sale shows how a solar installation makes for a more attractive story for institutional buyers. ## France didn't wait for the market In 2023, France legislated: any car park with 80 or more spaces must install solar canopies covering at least 50% of the area. Both existing and new sites. Not a tax break, not a grant, not a target — a requirement. The estimated national impact is 7–11 GW of new generating capacity. By treating solar canopies like fire exits, a standard condition of operating a large parking facility, France is on track to add capacity equivalent to several large power stations, from surfaces that already exist. The voluntary path didn't produce that. The Disneyland Paris car park existed for decades before the solar went on in 2023. Australia has no equivalent law. Every major shopping centre, hospital campus, office tower and stadium car park is sitting in the sun generating nothing. The tools exist, the incentives exist until 2030, and eleven operational sites across the country prove the model works locally. The question isn't whether car parks should be power plants. It's what we're waiting for. --- *Related: [Strategic planning guide for commercial EV charging infrastructure](/posts/planning-guide-for-ev-charging-infrastructure/) · [NSW Fast Chargers](/posts/hosting-a-fast-charger-in-nsw/) · [NSW's 300 new planned chargers](/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/)* --- ### References:
1. [Solar Carports. Australia's No.1 Best Kept Secret,](https://www.pioneersolar.com.au/the-solar-carport-explained/) 2. [Commercial Solar Carports – Off The Grid,](https://offthegridenergy.com.au/commercial-solar-carports/) 3. [Solar-Ready Carports in Australia: The Future of Sustainable Vehicle Protection,](https://professionalchoicesheds.com.au/solar-ready-carports-in-australia-the-future-of-sustainable-vehicle-protection/) 4. [Future-Proofing: Solar EV Car Park Canopies in AU - Versatile Structures,](https://versatilestructures.com.au/solar-integrated-car-park-canopies-ev-charging/) 5. [Commercial Solar Carports for Businesses - Melbourne - Energis,](https://energis.com.au/commercial-solar-carports/) 6. [Woy Woy, NSW, 2256 - Solar Power & Battery Systems,](https://www.solarquotes.com.au/location/woy-woy-2256-nsw/) 7. [Deepwater Plaza Goes Solar - SolarQuotes Blog,](https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/dexus-solar-renewables-mb1771/) 8. [Commercial Solar Carports in Australia | Kuga Energy,](https://www.13kuga.com.au/solar-carport/) 9. [Planet | Vicinity Centres,](https://www.vicinity.com.au/sustainability/planet) 10. [The best solar carport structures for homeowners & businesses 2026 - Nova Mounting,](https://novamounting.com/blog/the-best-solar-carport-structures-for-homeowners-and-businesses/) 11. [Commercial Solar Carports | Large-Scale Design, Supply & Installation - Mass Energy,](https://massenergy.com.au/commercial-solar-carports/) 12. [Solar Car Park Structures - PV Structures,](https://pvstructures.com.au/solar-car-park-structures/) 13. [Commercial Solar in 2025: ROI Analysis for Business Leaders - Energy Action,](https://energyaction.com.au/commercial-solar-2025-roi/) 14. [Government rebates and loans for solar | energy.gov.au,](https://www.energy.gov.au/solar/financial-benefits-solar/government-rebates-and-loans-solar) 15. [Government Grants and Rebates for Commercial Solar Panels,](https://www.pscenergy.com.au/blog/government-grants-and-rebates-for-commercial-solar-panels/) 16. [Australian Federal Government Solar Rebates & Incentives: Ultimate Guide,](https://www.solarchoice.net.au/learn/solar-rebates/government-solar-rebate/) 17. [Government incentives | EnergyAustralia,](https://www.energyaustralia.com.au/commercial-and-industrial/solar-pv-and-battery/government-incentives) 18. [The ROI of Commercial Solar for Australian Businesses: What You Need to Know,](https://hitechsolar.com.au/the-roi-of-commercial-solar-for-australian-businesses-what-you-need-to-know/) 19. [Maximising Your Commercial Solar ROI: A Practical Guide for Businesses,](https://classaenergysolutions.com.au/maximising-your-commercial-solar-roi-a-practical-guide-for-businesses/) 20. [Commercial Solar ROI in Sydney: 30kW, 50kW & 100kW Systems Explained,](https://projectsolargroup.com.au/commercial-solar-roi-in-sydney-30kw-50kw-100kw-systems-explained/) 21. [Deepwater Plaza sold for $111 million, completing $284.1 million in disposals by Dexus,](https://propertymarkets.news/deepwater-plaza-sold-for-111-million-completing-284-1-million-in-disposals-by-dexus/) 22. [Australia's Largest Solar Car Park Installation Complete,](https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/vicinity-solar-parking-mb1337/) 23. [Australia's largest car park solar program completed in SA - Vicinity Centres,](https://www.vicinity.com.au/about-us/newsroom/vicinity-news/australia-s-largest-car-park-solar-program-completed-in-sa) 24. [Vicinity completes Australia's largest solar car park installation,](https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/12/19/vicinity-completes-australias-largest-solar-car-park-installation/) 25. [Australia's largest solar panel installation - Charter Hall,](https://www.charterhall.com.au/News/news-article/2019/01/24/taking-logistics-to-new-levels) 26. [CQR Annual Report 2024 - Charter Hall Retail REIT (ASX:CQR) - Listcorp.,](https://www.listcorp.com/asx/cqr/charter-hall-retail-reit/news/cqr-annual-report-2024-3071802.html) 27. [Optimising peak demand and supporting grid stability through batteries | Property News,](https://propertymarkets.news/optimising-peak-demand-and-supporting-grid-stability-through-batteries/) 28. [Brisbane Airport Solar Upgrade Project,](https://www.bne.com.au/corporate/projects/completed-projects/airport-wide-rooftop-solar) 29. [Impact of the Glare effect on the airport functionality - Arka360,](https://arka360.com/ros/glare-effect-airport-functionality) 30. [Solar - Melbourne Airport,](https://www.melbourneairport.com.au/community/solar) 31. [How to Choose the Most Cost-Effective Solar Carport? 2025 Investor's Guide - WANHOS,](https://wanhos.com/how-to-choose-the-most-cost-effective-solar-carport-2025-investors-guide/) 32. [Developing a Successful Commercial Solar Project - Spinifex Energy,](https://www.spinifexenergy.com.au/developing-a-successful-commercial-solar-project/) 33. [Australia Solar Carport Market Size & Outlook, 2025-2033,](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/solar-carport-market/australia)
[END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: National Press Club address: Birol on the worst energy shock in history [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-birol-global-energy/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-birol-global-energy/) [POST DATE]: 2026-03-24 [START OF CONTENT] Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, appeared at the National Press Club in Canberra as part of a 24-hour stopover between Paris and Tokyo. He was mid-circuit through Asian capitals while the Middle East crisis continued disrupting global oil and gas flows. He skipped a prepared speech. What followed was closer to a live briefing. ## How bad is it Birol's framing was direct. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises each cost the world around five million barrels per day. Combined: ten million. The current disruption has removed eleven million barrels per day. Add the gas losses — about 140 billion cubic metres wiped from supply, versus roughly 75 BCM lost after Russia's invasion of Ukraine — and Birol described the aggregate as two oil crises and one gas crisis stacked together. He also noted the disruption extends well beyond oil and gas: petrochemicals, fertilizers, sulfur, and helium are all affected, with downstream consequences for agriculture and food prices if the situation persists. The IEA's 400-million-barrel coordinated stock release in March — the largest in the agency's history, approved unanimously by all 32 member countries — cut prices by $18 per barrel on announcement. The gains were erased when bombing resumed. Birol was clear about what the release was designed to do: reduce economic pain, not solve the supply problem. The only solution, he said, is reopening the Strait of Hormuz. ## Australia's specific exposure Australia holds about 30 days of diesel, 30 days of jet fuel, and 38 days of petrol — well below the IEA's 90-day membership requirement, which successive Australian governments have failed to meet. Birol described 38 days as a "solid number" for now, with more shipments en route, but said demand-side conservation measures were worth adopting regardless — as preparation rather than emergency response. On the flip side, Australia's LNG exports have become more strategically significant than usual. Qatar is currently exporting nothing. Australia is now among the top one or two LNG exporters globally, and Birol described its decades-long track record as a reliable supplier as a genuine asset — more important now than at any prior point. He was careful on one question about resource taxation. Investors in energy, he said, are sensitive to abrupt policy changes in ways that can cause them to exit markets quickly. For a country with Australia's reputation for investment predictability, sudden changes to tax regimes carry risk. That said, he acknowledged that Australians, as the owners of the resource endowment, have a legitimate interest in receiving a fair return from it. ## The demand-side menu The IEA released ten demand-reduction recommendations the Friday before the NPC address. They draw on measures tested in Europe after 2022 and include working from home, reducing highway speed limits, and cutting non-essential business air travel. Several countries in the region — Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam — had already adopted some of them by the time Birol arrived in Canberra. He presented them as a menu, not a mandate. He was asked whether a COVID-style enforcement model was implied. It was not. His point was that these measures demonstrably reduce energy consumption and household costs even outside a crisis — Europe's experience after Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed they work. On fuel rationing specifically: he noted some emerging economies are likely to move toward it sooner than wealthier ones, given weaker currencies and smaller fiscal buffers. The risk of a repeat of the 1970s debt spiral for developing and emerging markets was something he raised more than once. ## The transition question Birol does not see this crisis slowing the energy transition. He sees it accelerating it, for the same reason Europe's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine accelerated renewable deployment: domestic energy sources are insulated from geopolitical disruption in ways that imported fossil fuels are not. Security, not climate, becomes the driver. He pointed to 2024 data: 85% of all new power generation installed globally was renewable, with solar alone accounting for 75% of that. Battery installations grew 40% in a single year. Electric vehicles went from 5% of global car sales five years ago to 25% last year. He expects this crisis to push EV uptake further, including in Australia, where uptake has lagged Europe and China. On nuclear: Birol has been consistently bullish on a nuclear comeback and said it again here. He called Germany's decision to shut down its working reactors a historical mistake. He does not think Australia needs to build nuclear plants — the country has more solar potential than it can readily use — but he suggested Australia could position itself as a uranium supplier as nuclear expands elsewhere. ## Where Australia fits over the next decade Birol described Australia as a potential "rising star of the global energy economy," citing its LNG and critical mineral reserves, its reputation as a reliable trading partner, and what he described as a capable government team. The combination of resource depth, geopolitical credibility, and a predictable investment environment puts Australia in a better position than most to benefit from the structural changes the current crisis is likely to accelerate. He also raised Africa — half of which still lacks electricity access — as the part of the global energy story that rarely gets discussed, and noted that COP31, co-hosted by Australia and Turkey, could make African electrification a central agenda item. He said Australia's Chris Bowen had expressed strong support for exactly that. ## The ten-year view Asked to close with a ten-year outlook, Birol listed the trends he sees as durable regardless of how this crisis resolves: solar continuing to grow, wind following closely, nuclear making a sustained return, batteries changing the economics of intermittent renewables, and global energy efficiency improving. Oil and gas will still be in use. The overriding shift, though, is the one he called the "age of electricity" two years ago: electricity demand is growing twice as fast as total energy demand, driven by data centres, electric vehicles, and air conditioning. Who generates how much electricity, at what cost, will increasingly determine economic position. That, he said, is the context in which Australia's choices over the next decade will matter most. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: February 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-02-february/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-02-february/) [POST DATE]: 2026-02-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: January 2026 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-01-january/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2026/2026-01-january/) [POST DATE]: 2026-01-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: December 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-12-december/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-12-december/) [POST DATE]: 2025-12-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The 2025 Wrap-up [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/2025-wrap-up/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/2025-wrap-up/) [POST DATE]: 2025-12-14 [START OF CONTENT] Another year is coming to an end, and it’s time for a wrap-up of 2025 in the Aussie EV world, and a look ahead to 2026. >[Our short 2025 Wrap-Up](/projects/wrapped/2025/) Or revisit [the 2025 Events Timeline](/projects/timeline/2025/) or [News Archive](/news/) for more details. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Strategic planning guide for commercial EV charging infrastructure [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/planning-guide-for-ev-charging-infrastructure/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/planning-guide-for-ev-charging-infrastructure/) [POST DATE]: 2025-12-02 [START OF CONTENT] ## The Dwell Time-Speed Equilibrium: Planning guide for EV charging infrastructure ### 1. Introduction: replacing "petrol thinking" Commercial property owners stand to benefit from the growth of EV adoption, but the return depends on choosing the right charging approach. Installing chargers isn’t just an amenity upgrade; it affects operating expenses, customer satisfaction, and long-term site value. The first obstacle is habit. People still default to the petrol-station model: wait until empty, then find the quickest possible refill. EV drivers rarely need that pattern, and properties that plan around it often overspend on hardware that delivers little benefit. A more accurate model is "charge where you park." Workplaces, hotels, retail centres, and restaurants already provide built-in parking time. Turning those hours into charging time creates a smoother experience for drivers and a more efficient use of infrastructure. Building a strategy around dwell time — *how long people typically remain on site* — sets the foundation for a cost-effective deployment. ### 2. Core ideas: balancing cost, speed, and convenience _Charger speed_, _installation cost_, and _customer experience_ are linked. The fastest option is often the most expensive and least practical for both the property owner and the driver. Key trade-offs include: * **Higher capital cost**. Faster chargers require heavier electrical service upgrades and carry far higher equipment prices. * **Fewer total stalls**. Because high-speed units are expensive and power-hungry, the same budget buys far fewer plugs. This restricts access during busy periods. * **Operational friction**. To keep fast chargers available, owners usually need [idle fees](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/) or time limits. Drivers then have to interrupt their visit to move their car. * **Pricing pressure**. To recover costs, DC fast charging must be priced much higher per kWh. In some regions, this can approach or exceed the fuel cost of petrol cars, which discourages repeat use. The best experience is one where the driver doesn’t need to think about charging at all. If the vehicle gains the required energy while the driver is already at work, asleep, or shopping, the process feels invisible. The infrastructure should match the expected parking pattern of each user group. >Balancing installation cost, charging speed, and customer convenience ### 3. Matching charging solutions to your property type Charging needs vary widely by location. A layout that works well at an office park won’t serve a grocery store effectively. Decisions should track the typical visit length. #### 3.1 Long-dwell properties: offices and hotels These sites offer the most predictable charging window. **Office properties** Workers often remain parked for a full day, so the priority is access, not speed. * Prioritize more plugs over faster plugs. Consider an office with 20 EV-driving employees: * Scenario A: Sixteen 3 kW chargers and four 6 kW chargers. Everyone plugs in when they arrive, and all cars leave with the range they need. * Scenario B: Ten 7.2 kW chargers. Half the drivers must come back during the day to move cars, and others must wait for a stall to open. The first layout offers a simpler, more predictable experience. * Recommended mix. Many low-power stations (1.5 kW or 3 kW) for routine use, a small number of 7 kW Level 2 chargers for employees with higher daily range needs, and possibly a single 25–50 kW DC unit for fleet or emergency use. **Hotels** Guests typically park overnight, making moderate-speed Level 2 charging the most consistent match. * Single-night guests: 7 kW chargers supply a full charge by morning. * Multi-night guests: A combination of 3 kW and 7 kW chargers covers both short and extended stays without straining the electrical load. * Fast charging: Not necessary. The long dwell time makes DC fast chargers both expensive and redundant. #### 3.2 Mid- and short-dwell properties: retail, dining, entertainment Shorter visits require more targeted power levels so drivers leave with useful range. | Venue type | Typical dwell time | Recommended charging power | |------------|--------------------|-----------------------------| | Sit-down restaurants | ~1+ hour | 50–70 kW | | Counter-service dining, fast food | ~30 minutes | ~100 kW | | Grocery stores | 20–40 minutes | 50-120 kW | | Shopping centres | 30–120 minutes | Mix of 10 kW, 40 kW, 150 kW | | Cinemas | ~2 hours | 40 kW plus some 7 kW stalls | Shopping centres and cinemas have wide variation in stay length, so a mix of speeds works best. Lower-power stations suit longer outings, while mid- and high-power units help customers on brief stops. This approach broadens usefulness without overbuilding the site around a single type of visitor. ### 4. A closer look at high-speed charging as a standalone business Some operators consider building ultra-fast charging hubs in urban areas, similar to petrol stations. This model faces structural problems. * *Who uses them*: Mostly drivers without home or workplace charging, or those still learning EV habits. * *Why they leave*: As soon as they gain regular access to cheaper Level 2 charging at everyday destinations, they stop relying on expensive fast chargers. * *Core weakness*: The business depends on a customer group that shrinks as more properties offer slower, low-cost charging during normal parking. High-power charging has one clear fit: rural motorway rest stops where drivers want to minimize travel time. Even here, profitability is difficult (ex. Sydney to Canberra vs Sydney to Orange). Very high-power equipment and the required grid capacity are costly, and utilization must stay high to cover expenses. Traffic volume outside [major corridors](/posts/ev-charging-congestion-is-real-and-fixable/) rarely supports this. Across most use cases, the commercially sustainable path is to integrate charging into locations where people already spend time rather than recreating the petrol station template. ### 5. Framework for property owners A durable charging strategy focuses on predictable parking habits rather than maximum charging speed. Slower charging, applied at scale, usually gives drivers a better experience and provides better returns for the property. A straightforward planning process: 1. Study typical dwell times. Look at how long employees, shoppers, guests, or diners stay on site. 2. Choose the slowest speed that meets the need. Match charging power to the time window rather than assuming faster equipment is superior. 3. Install more stalls instead of faster stalls. More plugs reduce queues, reduce the need for penalties or time limits, and serve a wider group of drivers. 4. Think about [solar canopy integration](/posts/every-car-park-should-be-a-power-plant/). Longer dwell times make it easier to align solar production with charging demand. Designing charging to match routine parking keeps costs under control and aligns the infrastructure with the way people naturally use your property. ![EV Charging: Match the Speed to the Stop](/images/posts/dwell-time-speed-equilibrium.jpg) ### References and further reading: [DCFC vs L2: Is faster always better?](https://evercharge.com/blog/dcfc-vs-l2-is-faster-always-better) [How Much Does It Cost To Charge An Electric Car?](https://qmerit.com/blog/comparing-long-term-cost-analysis-of-ev-home-charging-vs-public-charging/) [DC Charging: Minute vs kWh Pricing – What’s More Cost-Effective?](https://tayniu.com/dc-charging-by-minute-vs-kwh-pricing-guide/) [How Much Does Public EV Fast Charging Actually Cost?](https://www.recurrentauto.com/questions/how-much-public-ev-fast-charging-cost) [Understanding the Charging Curve and the 80% Rule for Your EV](https://estation.ie/understanding-the-charging-curve/) [What Are Typical EV Charging Times?](https://www.evconnect.com/blog/typical-ev-charging-times/) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: November 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-11-november/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-11-november/) [POST DATE]: 2025-11-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The story of General Motors' EV1 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-story-of-gm-ev1/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-story-of-gm-ev1/) [POST DATE]: 2025-11-22 [START OF CONTENT] The story of General Motors' EV1 is a compelling chapter in automotive history — one that blends innovation, controversy, and a legacy that continues to shape the electric vehicle (EV) landscape today. For earlier chapters, see the [early history of the EV](/posts/ev-early-history/) and [La Jamais Contente](/posts/the-story-of-la-jamais-contente/). Here's a look at the EV1's journey, from its ambitious beginnings to its controversial end, and the lasting impact it left on the world. * * * ### Origins and Development: A Vision for a Cleaner Future The EV1's roots trace back to the late 1980s, when environmental concerns and regulatory pressures began to mount in the United States. In 1990, General Motors (GM) unveiled the “Impact” concept car at the Los Angeles Auto Show, a direct response to California's new Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which required major automakers to offer a percentage of zero-emission vehicles if they wanted to continue selling cars in the state. The Impact, developed in partnership with AeroVironment and inspired by GM's solar-powered Sunraycer, was met with enthusiasm and demonstrated that a practical, modern electric car was within reach. Encouraged by the positive reception and regulatory pressure, GM committed to producing a consumer-ready electric vehicle. The result was the EV1, a purpose-built, all-electric car that would become the first of its kind from a major automaker in the modern era. ### Key Features and Specifications: Engineering a Pioneer The EV1 was a technological marvel for its time, featuring several innovations that would later become standard in the EV industry: * Body and Design: The EV1 was a two-seat, two-door coupe with an aluminum spaceframe and plastic body panels, resulting in a lightweight yet sturdy structure. Its aerodynamic teardrop shape achieved a drag coefficient of just 0.19, a record at the time. * Powertrain: It used a 137-horsepower (102 kW) three-phase AC induction motor, delivering 110 lb-ft of torque instantly from 0 to 7,000 rpm. Power was sent to the front wheels via a single-speed reduction gearbox. * Batteries: The first-generation (Gen I) EV1s used 16.5–18.7 kWh lead-acid batteries, offering a real-world range of 85–130 kilometers per charge. The second-generation (Gen II) models, introduced in 1999, featured 26.4 kWh nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, extending the range to 160–225 kilometers. * Charging: The EV1 introduced the Magne Charge inductive charging system, which allowed for safe, weatherproof charging at home or at public stations. * Other Innovations: The car boasted regenerative braking, keyless ignition, a heat pump HVAC system, and low-rolling-resistance tires. ### Market Launch and Customer Experience GM began leasing the EV1 in late 1996, initially in California and Arizona, later expanding to a few other markets. The car was never offered for sale — only through a lease program, with monthly payments ranging from $399 to $549. In total, just over 1,100 EV1s were produced between 1996 and 1999. Drivers praised the EV1 for its smooth, quiet ride, quick acceleration (0–60 mph in about 8 seconds), and the convenience of home charging. However, the car's limited range, two-seat configuration, and lack of a purchase option restricted its appeal to a niche market. ### The Controversial End: Why Was the EV1 Discontinued? Despite a devoted fan base and positive press, GM discontinued the EV1 program in 2002. The reasons for this decision remain a subject of debate and controversy: * Economic Factors: GM cited high production costs, limited consumer demand, and the inability to make the program profitable. Each EV1 reportedly cost GM far more to build than the lease payments could recoup. * Regulatory Changes: California's ZEV mandate was weakened after legal challenges from automakers, reducing the pressure to continue producing electric vehicles. * Technical Limitations: Battery technology of the era limited range and performance, and public charging infrastructure was sparse. * Conspiracy Theories: Some allege that GM, under pressure from the oil industry and internal interests, deliberately sabotaged the EV1 to protect profits from gasoline vehicles and spare parts. When the leases expired, GM refused to sell the cars to lessees, instead recalling and crushing nearly all of them. Only about 40 EV1s were spared, donated to museums and universities with their drivetrains disabled. ### Cultural Impact and Legacy The abrupt end of the EV1 sparked outrage among environmentalists, lessees, and EV advocates. The story was immortalized in the 2006 documentary _Who Killed the Electric Car?_, which explored the various forces that led to the program's demise and became a rallying point for the modern EV movement. Key aspects of the EV1's legacy include: * Technological Influence: The EV1 pioneered many features now standard in electric vehicles, such as regenerative braking, advanced aerodynamics, and efficient power electronics. * Industry Impact: The program's cancellation is widely seen as a missed opportunity for GM, which could have established itself as a leader in electric mobility. Instead, companies like Tesla would later fill that void. * Public Awareness: The EV1's story raised public consciousness about electric vehicles, environmental issues, and the challenges of transitioning away from fossil fuels. * Policy and Innovation: The lessons learned from the EV1 influenced subsequent EV programs, including the Chevrolet Volt and Bolt, and helped shape regulatory and market approaches to EV adoption. ### Further Reading and Documentaries For those interested in a deeper dive, several resources provide detailed accounts of the EV1's development and legacy: * Book: _The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle_ by Michael Shnayerson offers an in-depth look at the EV1's creation. * Documentary: _Who Killed the Electric Car?_ (2006) is available on various streaming platforms and remains the definitive film on the subject. * Museum Collections: Surviving EV1s can be found in institutions like the Smithsonian and The Henry Ford Museum. * * * ### Final Thoughts The General Motors EV1 was a bold experiment that arrived before its time. While its commercial life was short and its end controversial, the EV1's influence on automotive technology, environmental policy, and public perception of electric vehicles is undeniable. Today's thriving EV market owes much to the lessons — both technical and political — learned from the EV1's brief but impactful existence. ### References: * [General Motors EV1 - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1) * [Who Killed The Electric Car? - Apple TV](https://tv.apple.com/au/movie/who-killed-the-electric-car/umc.cmc.68gcr4wtzkfvdjz9z2rscionz?mt=8&at=10l7vI) * [Who Killed The Electric Car? - Prime Video](https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Who-Killed-The-Electric-Car/0I9X71SI8UD8E3ZSA2ZFMXEYHK) * [Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) - Plot - IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/plotsummary/) * [What happened to the General Motors EV1? - NPR](https://www.npr.org/2024/12/06/nx-s1-5116270/ev1-general-motors-electric-vehicle) * [Sunraycer - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunraycer) * [The General Motors EV1 Program](https://drivewayenthusiast.com/the-general-motors-ev1-program/) * [Rearview Mirror: The rise and fall of the General Motors EV-1](https://driving.ca/auto-news/news/rearview-mirror-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-general-motors-ev-1) * [Here's What Really Happened To The GM EV1 Electric Car](https://www.topspeed.com/heres-what-really-happened-to-the-gm-ev1-electric-car/) * [Mythbusting: The truth about the GM EV1](https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/gm-ev1-true-inside-story/) * [The Short History of GM's First Electric Car](https://www.aa1car.com/library/who_killed_electric_car.htm) * [How General Motors' First Electric Car Failed](https://www.howtogeek.com/808031/how-general-motors-first-electric-car-failed/) * [GM EV1: The OG of Electric Cars | Green Car Journal](https://greencarjournal.com/electric-cars/gm-ev1-the-og-of-electric-cars/) * [GM EV1 : The Pioneering General Motors EV1: A Revolution in Electric Vehicle Technology](https://christianbaghai.medium.com/gm-ev1-the-pioneering-general-motors-ev1-a-revolution-in-electric-vehicle-technology-b439086b0b09) * [[PDF] GENERAL MOTORS EV1 - Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity](https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/fsev/genmot.pdf) * [Tested: 1997 GM EV1 Proves to Be the Start of Something Big](https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a32944084/tested-1997-general-motors-ev1-proves-to-be-the-start-of-something-big/) * [The EV1 Was GM's First Modern EV. This Retro Review ... - InsideEVs](https://insideevs.com/features/729174/gm-ev1-retro-review-how-fare-we-ve-come/) * [[PDF] Guide to the General Motors EV1 Records - siris](https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/NMAH.AC.0912.pdf) * [General Motors EV1 - Electric Vehicles News](https://www.electricvehiclesnews.com/Footer/History/Companies/General_Motors_EV1.html) * [The GM EV1 Electric Car Lives On in Today's EVs - MotorTrend](https://www.motortrend.com/features/mercedes-benz-eqxx-gm-ev1-feature) * [1998 GM EV1 Gen II Lead-Acid specifications, technical data, performance](https://www.carfolio.com/gm-ev1-gen-ii-lead-acid-109186?car=109186) * [General Motors EV1 - AutoZine](http://www.autozine.org/Archive/GM/old/EV1.html) * [The Car You Can't LEGALLY Own SOLD Today For $104,000](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aSyCJX2Pd0) * [EV1 Electric Cars - West Hills Collision Center](https://www.westhillscollision.com/upperv.php?article=ev1) * ['That Was Really Quite A Car.' GM President Admits Canceling The ...](https://www.theautopian.com/gm-president-admits-cancelling-the-ev1-was-a-mistake/) * [Years before Tesla and Rivian, GM gifted us with the EV1](https://www.fastcompany.com/91128970/looking-back-at-the-gm-ev1) * [How GM's EV1 experiment proved to be the false dawn of the electric car](https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/cars-bikes-and-boats/gm-had-an-electric-car-in-1998-why-did-it-fail-20230424-p5d2s7) * [Why Did General Motors Scrap the EV1? | GetJerry.com](https://getjerry.com/insights/general-motors-scrap-ev1) * [Who Killed the Electric Car?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F) * [Revolutionizing the Road: The Impact of the 1996 General Motors EV1 Release on Electric Vehicle Innovation | Volts & Volts](https://voltsandvolts.com/1996-release-of-the-general-motors-ev1/) * [A Walk Down Memory Lane: The GM EV1 - Top Speed](https://www.topspeed.com/remembering-the-gm-ev1/) * [How The GM EV1 Kicked Off A Modern EV Revolution In The 1990s](https://insideevs.com/features/733199/history-electric-vehicles-the-evolution/) * [Report: With EV1, GM sparked the era of the electric car but didn't follow through](https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1131994_report-with-ev1-gm-sparked-the-era-of-the-electric-car-but-didn-t-follow-through) * [A significant technological, historical and social event: How GM's EV1 was received in its day](https://www.hemmings.com/stories/ev1-impact-and-public-reaction/) * [EV1: A legacy in a new light](https://www.autonews.com/ev1) * [The car that could : the inside story of GM's revolutionary electric vehicle | WorldCat.org](https://search.worldcat.org/title/34355067) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Sustainable Future Festival 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/sustainable-future-festival-2025/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/sustainable-future-festival-2025/) [POST DATE]: 2025-11-15 [START OF CONTENT] # Sustainable Future Festival - The Entrance ## Reconnecting with place: reflections from the Reconnection & Regeneration Panel discussion The Sustainable Futures Festival brought together a group of speakers, lead by [Lottie Dalziel](https://banish.com.au/pages/meet-lottie), featuring voices from Indigenous culture, permaculture, environmental activism, and community gardening. What linked them wasn’t a single strategy or slogan, but a shared interest in helping people rebuild a relationship with the places they live. ![Reconnection & Regeneration Panel](/images/posts/sustainablefuture-1.jpg) ### Seeing Country as family Tim (Selwyn) opened with a view that set the tone for the whole session: land, water, plants and animals form a family system, not a backdrop. He described the sky, soil and underground life as connected layers of one body. When he spoke about walking “softly” and slowing down enough to sense where you stand, the room fell quiet. His reminder that no one needs permission to reconnect with the land — because being born here already ties you to it — landed strongly. > “Land, plants, animals are our family.” – Tim ### Permaculture as everyday decisions Kerry (Anderson - Synergy Permaculture) shifted the focus from worldview to routine. She described permaculture as a set of ethics that shape small choices: how we grow food, what we give during high-waste seasons, where we shop, and how we share tools or skills with neighbours. Her stories about gratitude rituals around food and community composting groups made the idea feel practical rather than abstract. She also stressed that resilience grows through community, not isolation. Lottie Dalziel ### What emotions tell us about the world John (Seed - Rainforest Information Centre) drew on decades of direct action — from Terania Creek to the Franklin River and the Daintree. He explained that blocking bulldozers protected specific forests, but the larger issue is the belief that humans sit apart from the rest of the living world. He spoke plainly about emotions like grief and fear. Instead of seeing them as obstacles, he described them as signals passed down from ancestors who had to read their environment accurately to survive. When people push those feelings away, they often freeze instead of acting. > “The illusion of separation is the core of the environmental crisis.” – John ### Curiosity as a daily practice Costa (Georgiadis - Gardening Australia) approached the topic from another angle. For him, curiosity is a steadying tool. He spoke about bird counts that require twenty minutes of stillness, or noticing pollinators while walking. These aren’t grand gestures; they’re interruptions to a routine that usually runs too fast. They create a pocket of attention where connection can grow. He encouraged people to treat these moments as part of their week, not as occasional treats. > “Become your own time machine. Generate time.” – Costa ### Examples speak louder than arguments A theme that kept resurfacing was the idea that persuasion rarely works on its own. People tend to change after watching someone else live in a way that feels honest and doable. A reusable cup at the café, a small veggie bed on a balcony, a visit to a community garden — simple actions are surprisingly influential because they’re concrete. ### Local places that weave people together The panel pointed toward many starting points: neighbourhood compost hubs, repair cafés, produce swaps, local art and cultural gatherings, and regional climate actions. These aren’t niche subcultures; they’re meeting places where people can participate at their own pace. Costa the Garden Gnome ### A quiet message running underneath Across all the conversations, one idea held steady: connection comes from repeated, small moments. Long walks, brief pauses, shared meals, tending a plant, joining a working bee — these habits shape how people see the world around them. Big shifts often begin with changes that barely register at first. The panel ended with a simple challenge: create time for the things that matter, rather than waiting for the schedule to clear. As Costa put it, time isn’t found; it’s generated by changing what you treat as important. https://www.sustainablefuturefestival.com.au See also [Living Smart Festival 2025](/posts/living-smart-festival-2025/) for another regional sustainability event. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: EV Chat - Updated AI Chat About EVs [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-chat/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-chat/) [POST DATE]: 2025-11-14 [START OF CONTENT] Introducing the updated EV Life [EV Chat](https://chat.electricvehicle.life/)! Go ahead and chat about EVs with AI. This replaces the earlier [Ask AI About EVs](/posts/ai-ev-faqs/) experiment. Things you never knew AI knew, about EVs. Still with Disclaimer: >AI can make mistakes. Please verify important information. So check the facts, yes? [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: October 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-10-october/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-10-october/) [POST DATE]: 2025-10-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: September 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-09-september/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-09-september/) [POST DATE]: 2025-09-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Living Smart Festival 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/living-smart-festival-2025/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/living-smart-festival-2025/) [POST DATE]: 2025-09-20 [START OF CONTENT] # Living Smart Festival The [Living Smart Festival](https://www.lakemac.com.au/Events-directory/Council-events/Living-Smart-Festival) is [Lake Macquarie](https://www.visitlakemac.com.au)’s largest free community event and one of Australia’s biggest sustainability gatherings. Now in its 14th year, the festival returned to Speers Point Park, running from 9am to 3pm. Drawing more than 10,000 visitors in previous years, the event combines a relaxed atmosphere with workshops, demonstrations, market stalls, and cultural activities. Highlights include a native plant giveaway, sustainability-focused presentations, and the “Charged up – electrification” panel exploring household and vehicle electrification. The 2025 program is headlined by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, who will share insights from his decades of science communication and climate change advocacy. ## Lake Macquarie City Council (LMCC) key sustainability achievements include: * Since 2009, the Council has installed 35 solar PV systems on its buildings, totalling 1,950 kW of capacity. * Over 50 electric vehicle chargers are now available in Lake Macquarie City Centre (LMCC), making owning an electric vehicle easier than ever. * In Lake Mac, over 27,542 residential solar systems have been installed, saving households approximately $1,491 annually. * Council has three large-scale solar PV systems registered as power stations. These systems collectively generate over 5.3 GWh of electricity. * In 2023, after receiving Bushfire Local Economic Recovery (BLER) funding from the NSW State and Federal Governments, Lake Mac installed a solar PV microgrid. This microgrid comprises 20 dual 22kW EV chargers and a 500kWh battery. It has the capacity to power approximately 5000 homes and enables the Council to continue providing essential services during power outages. * [Electrify 2287](https://www.electrify2287.org) is a new local community initiative that aims to help households in Wallsend and nearby suburbs reduce their energy bills, improve home efficiency, and prepare for the future. ## “Charged Up: Electrification” panel - Dan Wigmore, Engagement Officer, [NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water](https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/dcceew) - Kristen McDonald, Director of Strategic Programs, [Rewiring Australia](https://www.rewiringaustralia.org), and Coordinator, [Electrify 2515](https://www.electrify2515.org) - Lexi Crouch, Climate Change and Sustainability Program Lead, [City of Newcastle](https://newcastle.nsw.gov.au/living/environment/climate-action) - Steve James, Business Development Manager, [Jet Charge](https://jetcharge.com.au/) - Gayle Russell, Lake Mac [Sustainable Neighbourhood Alliance](https://www.sustainableneighbourhoods.org.au) member and [Sustainable House Day](https://sustainablehouseday.com) participant ### How to make the grid work for households * Shift flexible loads to the middle of the day. Hot water can be ~30% of home energy use; moving heat-pump hot-water to run when rooftop solar is abundant eases evening peaks and uses cleaner power. Panelists urged the same mindset for EVs: avoid everyone plugging in at 6 pm; day-time charging helps the grid.  * Practical EV charging math: a ~70 kWh battery takes ~35 hours on a ~2 kW plug, ~10 hours on a 7 kW home charger. Many drivers cover ~35 km/day, so a short home top-up often suffices.   * Use solar-aware chargers. Smart chargers can detect export and divert it to the car, cutting costs by soaking up surplus solar.  ### What councils are doing * City of Newcastle described “lead by example” actions: 100% renewable electricity from 2019, solar on most council buildings, and a council-owned public EV charging network.  * Policy shift: Newcastle decided to remove gas from all new residential developments, making new housing all-electric.  ### Solar Neighbourhoods: removing barriers Residents reported three blockers to going solar/batteries—up-front cost, complexity, and trust. In response, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, and Newcastle councils launched Solar Neighbourhoods with vetted products, extra discounts beyond existing rebates, strong warranties, post-install checks, and options for EV chargers.  Newcastle also cited surging local EV uptake—up 1,729% over five years—while expanding the charging network.  >“If it dies, electrify.” ### EV adoption and infrastructure: what’s changing * Market share: new-car EV sales lifted from ~9% last year to ~12% this year, a ~38% rise (see [Electric Vehicle Sales 2025 Turning Point](/posts/electric-vehicle-sales-2025-turning-point/)).  * Model range and prices are broadening: about 14 medium SUVs under $60k and several small EVs under $30k; average battery sizes have grown toward ~70 kWh, improving range.  * Public fast charging expanded from ~460 DC units in 2022 to 1,800+ now, closing corridor gaps (see [NSW's new planned chargers](/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/)).  ### Community-led retrofits: Electrify 2515 Rewiring Australia’s [Electrify 2515](https://www.electrify2515.org) began with a survey target of 500 homes in three months; the community returned 500 responses in three days. The team then secured ARENA’s first community-led electrification pilot and is retrofitting 500 diverse existing homes to streamline processes and cut installation costs—aiming to produce learnings that scale.  [Electrify 2287](https://www.electrify2287.org)   ### Renters, split incentives, and equity * The “split incentive” problem—tenants pay bills but landlords fund upgrades—is being studied with [RACE for 2030](https://www.racefor2030.com.au), RMIT, and UTS; participants received $500 home energy assessments to inform owners.   * Victoria’s recent minimum rental standards give renters the right to an electric replacement when an appliance fails, and new homes will be fully electric — cited as a model for NSW reform.  * A simple negotiation example: one tenant arranged landlord-funded solar and paid ~$25/week extra rent, covered by bill savings.  * For households locked out of solar, Newcastle is piloting an energy-bill comparison service after research showing ~80% of Australians overpay by not switching plans; rollout is planned locally, with retailers offering cheap or free midday power on some tariffs.  ### Household tactics that worked * “***If it dies, electrify.***” Replace failed gas or inefficient units with electric, and plan upgrades appliance-by-appliance rather than all at once.  * Use local action plans. The Go Electric Action Plan from Lake Macquarie and Newcastle lists efficient models by category and helps schedule replacements.  * Building basics from a Sustainable House Day participant: orient living spaces for winter sun, draught-proof, insulate, and zone rooms; simple roof-cavity exhaust reduced indoor heat on hot days.   ### Resilience and financing ideas * Every battery installed through the council program includes blackout protection, building local resilience to storms and outages.  * Panelists floated a HECS-style, government-backed low-interest loan repaid on property sale to unlock upgrades for low-income households.  ### Lived EV experience in brief * Daily-life charging largely happens at home from solar; one speaker reported ~40,000 km with only two public charges thanks to solar-integrated home charging.   * Range anxiety is fading as models improve; anecdotes included a Wollongong–Newcastle trip in a BYD Dolphin arriving with 55% battery remaining.  ![Living Smart Festival 2025](/images/posts/livingsmart_lakemac.jpg) --- The Living Smart Festival is held on the traditional lands of the [Awabakal People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awabakal). See also [Sustainable Future Festival 2025](/posts/sustainable-future-festival-2025/) at The Entrance. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: August 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-08-august/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-08-august/) [POST DATE]: 2025-08-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Canberra Winter Trip 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/canberra-winter-trip-2025/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/canberra-winter-trip-2025/) [POST DATE]: 2025-08-16 [START OF CONTENT] ## Gosford to Canberra in Aussie Winter Second trip with the [Volvo](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/) to Canberra, again in winter, with 1°C Canberra mornings, now with wife and dog. The ACT is a 360km drive from the lower [Central Coast](/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/) where we are. Winter driving drops down EV range significantly, as does highway speeds. In that sense, EV driving discourages speeding, as tests have shown *[driving 130km/h](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdVKeBM79Qs)* (Euro speed) drops the Volvo’s range down to 279km, while at 110km/h (the max speed limit in NSW) shows a range of 320km. Volvo though is very truthful, not overpromising range (unlike I feel my [Tesla](/posts/adjo-tesla/) did), showing me indeed about 320km at its 95% SOC, far less than the advertised 485km (in ideal conditions and mixed driving). But I already knew that from my previous trip. Our first stop was a new (for me) fast charger along the way down to Canberra, at [Ampol](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) Pheasants Nest, both northbound and southbound directions offering 6 plugs each way, in a very European setup. Love it! We need more stops like this. On the way back home, we noticed (but too late) there was even an off-leash dog park! How cool and considerate is that? It was a quick coffee and pee break, 11 minutes for 16.74 kWh, enough to get us into Canberra without anxiety. ![Cold battery](/images/posts/volvo_cold_battery.jpeg) _Weird thing is, this was at 13°C in Canberra. I never got this message even at 7°C in the morning on the Central Coast._ ## Canberra charging infrastructure Once in Canberra, I wanted to top us up again (from 11% SOC), and stopped at a [Chargefox](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/)/ENGIE charger which was advertised as a 150kWh charger, but it only provided 65 kWh. This was at a sports centre with no public ammenities. ![Chargefox](/images/posts/chargefox_volvo.jpeg) _Chargefox_ After 16 minutes (for 15.77 kWh) we unplugged and continued to the lake where we had a stroll followed by brunch (at On-Lake). We still had time before our appointment, so we drove to an [Evie](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) charger in Fyshwick fresh food market — unfortunatly closed at this time — where we charged for 21 min (for 25.5 kWh). ![Evie Fyshwick](/images/posts/evie_fyshwick.jpeg) _Evie Fyshwick_ After our appointment, we visited Mount Ainslie Lookout, and then checked into the hotel. Mercure Canberra has two [Exploren](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) byo-cable chargers (at a slow AC 7.3kW/h), of which one was ICEd (boo!). This hotel accommodates larger dogs like ours. By now it was late afternoon. We went to the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture garden, followed by dinner at the lake. Back at the hotel after dinner, the single remaining EV spot was still available and I plugged in for the night. ## Next day The Volvo was fully charged (44 kWh delivered) in the morning. Or rather about 95%, as I try to avoid going full 100. I preconditioned the car while getting ready, and before breakfast vacated the EV spot. I didn’t even realise all cars’ windows were frozen up, as I saw people scraping of the ice. Something I didn’t need to do as I remotely preheated the car, which defrosted my windows. We had a morning stroll with the dog along Lake Ginninderra, and then met up with family outside of Canberra. We ended up back in Canberra for fish and chips lunch at Snapper & Co. The sail club there happened to have another Exploren (AC 11kW/h) charger. Something I hadn’t looked into, but was a fortunate surprise. Canberra is well equiped with EV chargers. After lunch and a stroll around the lake, the Volvo was fully charged again (95% SOC) and ready for our trip back north to the Central Coast. We skipped Gouldburn (and the new Tesla Supercharger at the Big Merino) again, and stopped at Evie Sutton Forest West for a 12 minute charge (for 17.4 kWh) and some snacks and drinks. I guess this new Tesla Supercharger with 20 stalls (the biggest in the southern hemisphere), which is open to all EV brands, will alleviate pressure on the Evie and Ampol motorway chargers. About 35 minute later we stopped again at the AmpCharge Pheasants Nest for a toilet stop of 13 minutes and let the dog out (but we missed the off-leash dog park here). It was half-price Tuesday in August at Ampol AmpCharge, which was nice, only $4.68 for 12.64 kWh. I now was back at a 85% charge. I certainly didn’t need to stop from a battery SOC point of view. I really needed the toilet. We did notice one charger was out of service. ![Ampol dog park](/images/posts/ampol_dogpark.jpeg) _Ampol dog park location_ Then it was another 2h homeward stretch (in Western Sydney evening peak traffic) to the Central Coast, where we arrived with a 49% SOC at about 6pm. ## Volvo eco mode A thing I learned about the Volvo on this trip (which I didn't realize last time). In combination with the in-car Google Maps, the car will enable an "eco" mode, dependent on the planned travel distance, arrival SOC and weather conditions. Before our first stop, I was using Google Maps on CarPlay (because I had trip planned on my iPhone), which annoyingly didn’t use the instrument cluster console. After the charge, using in-car Google Maps, the Volvo dropped down to an eco mode limiting full power acceleration, as the predicted arrival SOC was only 10%. The car itself doesn’t offer a selectable Eco mode like other brands (ex. Tesla’s Chill mode), it only has Standard and Off-Road modes. ## Conclusion The trip was uneventful. Yes, road tripping in an EV is different (but oh so smooth): - it requires a bit of planning. For example, ideally your hotel would have EV chargers. You want to know what fast charging options are available along your route and at your destination. This time around, I learned about some new fast charger options. - all EVs have different range and efficiency, and handle cold better or worse, which mean you may need to charge more often. You need to be aware of your car's limits. - different chargers use different apps or RFID cards. Make sure they are all set up before you start your trip. Check if you’re logged in, and your payment information is up to date. In fact, because I don't use Exploren chargers often, my Exploren app did have old CC details which I needed to update on the spot. Check out this article about *[different charging apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/)*. [In Europe](/posts/ev-europe-trip/), the charging networks have "roaming" implemented, allowing you to use different networks on one app, without needing multiple accounts. Evie might be working on something similar. - some AC chargers require you to bring your own AC charging cable, like the Exploren ones. - some chargers apply *[congestion and idle fees](posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/)*, especially at Tesla Superchargers. Keep charging etiquette in mind, or pay more for your charging session. In an ICE car, you’d filled up the tank at the start, and probably again once driving back home. But at no point do I feel we really wasted time charging. I’d still wouldn’t go back to ICE again. ## Some numbers From my receipts: Day One: | Location | Cost | kWh | Duration | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | AmpCharge (Pheasants Nest) | $12.55 | 16.74 kWh | 11 min on DC | | Chargefox (ENGIE, Next Gen sports centre) | $10.88 | 15.77 kWh | 16 min on DC | | Evie (Fyshwick Fresh Food Markets) | $16.12 | 25.5 kWh | 21 min on DC | | Exploren (Mercure) | $14.56 | 44.13 kWh | 11h13m on AC | Day Two: | Location | Cost | kWh | Duration | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Exploren (Sailclub) | $7.89 | 15.78 kWh | 1h26m on AC | | Evie (Sutton Forest West) | $12.18 | 17.4 kWh | 12 min on DC | | AmpCharge (Pheasants Nest) | $4.68 | 12.64 kWh | 13 min on DC (half price Tuesdays) | | Evie (Erina) | $10.61 | 20 kWh | 16 min on DC | Drove 835km, charged 167.77 kWh, payed $89.47. Averaged paid $0.53/kWh (which is quite low), used 20kWh/100km (the Volvo isn't the most efficient EV for sure), which is $10.6/100km. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: July 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-07-july/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-07-july/) [POST DATE]: 2025-07-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: How Idle and Congestion Fees Are Shaping EV Charging Etiquette [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/) [POST DATE]: 2025-07-15 [START OF CONTENT] # How Idle and Congestion Fees Are Shaping EV Charging Etiquette As electric vehicle (EV) adoption accelerates, public charging infrastructure faces a new challenge: keeping up with demand. Fast-charging stations are essential for long-distance travel and daily convenience, but charger hogging — when drivers leave their vehicles plugged in long after charging is complete — has become a major bottleneck. To solve this, many charging networks take a 'carrot and stick' approach: as 'carrot', providing cheaper charging in down periods (up to 10c/kWh cheaper), and now as 'stick', the use of idle fees and congestion fees. These additional charges encourage drivers to unplug and move on, improving charger availability for everyone and fairness across the network. Here we explains how these extra fees (the 'sticks') work, the behaviors they promote, and how EV drivers can stay informed and avoid unnecessary costs. --- ## What Are Idle Fees? ### A Nudge Toward Considerate Charging Idle fees are penalties applied when a vehicle remains connected to a charger after reaching its target state of charge, especially when the station is partially or fully occupied. Typical structure of idle fees: Idle fees serve as a behavioral nudge, reminding drivers that chargers are shared infrastructure — not personal parking spots. --- ## What Are Congestion Fees? ### Prioritizing Throughput Over Full Charges Congestion fees are designed for high-traffic charging locations. They encourage drivers to take only as much charge as they need to reach their next destination, rather than topping off to 100%. Congestion fees may apply when: Drivers are typically notified via in-app alerts or on-screen messages, and a short grace period (e.g. 5 minutes) is usually provided before fees begin accruing. --- ## Why These Fees Matter Public fast-charging stations are a shared resource. When drivers occupy chargers longer than needed, others are left waiting—especially in busy urban areas or on [popular travel corridors](/posts/ev-charging-congestion-is-real-and-fixable/). Idle and congestion fees are not about punishment; they're about promoting responsible, efficient charging habits that benefit all users. Charging network operators want to enable a seamless experience, where EV owners can quickly find available chargers without delays caused by inattentive or inconsiderate use. --- ## How Drivers Are Notified Most modern EV charging systems are integrated with [mobile apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) or vehicle dashboards that provide real-time charging updates. Drivers typically receive: By staying connected and responsive to these alerts, drivers can avoid unnecessary fees and support better charger turnover. --- ## Payment and Exceptions ### How Fees Are Billed Fees are usually charged automatically to a stored payment method within the charging network's app. If billing fails, charges may be added to future service or account activity. ### Do They Apply to Free Charging Offers? Yes. Vehicles that benefit from free charging credits or incentives are often still subject to idle or congestion fees if they occupy the charger after charging is complete or contribute to congestion at busy locations. These policies ensure that free charging doesn't equate to unrestricted charger use. --- ## Charging Network Fee Comparison (Typical Ranges) | **Fee Type** | **When It Applies** | **Typical Range** | **Grace Period** | | -------------- | ------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------ | ---------------- | | Idle Fee | After charging is complete at ≥50% station load | \$0.50–\$1.00 per minute | \~5 minutes | | Congestion Fee | Charging above 80% or session ended at busy sites | \$0.50–\$1.00 per minute | \~5 minutes | Note: Actual fees vary by network and location. --- ## Fast-Charging Etiquette: What Every EV Driver Should Know To promote better access and reduce frustration, here are five habits every EV driver should adopt: 1. **Monitor your session.** Use app notifications to stay informed. 2. **Move promptly.** Unplug and vacate the space once charging is complete. 3. **[Avoid topping off](/posts/why-charging-to-80-percent-is-almost-always-the-right-call/).** Charge only what's needed when stations are busy. 4. **Respect grace periods.** Don't test the limits — fees can escalate quickly. 5. **Know the rules.** Understand the fee policies of your charging network. --- In conclusion, idle and congestion fees are reshaping how we interact with public EV charging stations. These fees aren't just about revenue — they're a practical way to ensure fairness, reduce wait times, and maintain a smooth charging experience for all drivers. As more EVs hit the road, efficient charging behavior becomes a collective responsibility. With a little awareness and courtesy, we can all keep the network flowing, one unplugged cable at a time. ## Reference [Tesla Supercharger Idle Fees](https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/support/charging/supercharger/fees) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Electric Vehicle Sales 2025 Turning Point [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/electric-vehicle-sales-2025-turning-point/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/electric-vehicle-sales-2025-turning-point/) [POST DATE]: 2025-07-04 [START OF CONTENT] - **12%** EV share of new-car sales, H1 2025 (up from 9.6% in H1 2024) - **16%** Record monthly high — June 2025 - **14,000+** More EVs sold than in the same period in 2024 - **~100** EV models now available in Australia ## Electric Vehicle Sales Surge in Australia: The 2025 Turning Point Electric vehicle adoption in Australia has hit an all-time high in 2025, signaling a profound shift in the nation’s transport landscape. The first half of the year saw over 14,000 additional EVs sold compared to the same period in 2024. With electric vehicles (BEV + PHEV) now accounting for nearly 12% of all new car sales, and a record-breaking 16% in June alone, Australians are embracing EVs at an unprecedented pace. We explore the key drivers behind this surge, the role of supportive government policies, the changing attitudes of Australian consumers, and what’s next for the electric future of Australia. --- ## The Growth Story: How EV Sales Are Accelerating in 2025 ### Record Sales and Market Share Milestones According to the [Electric Vehicle Council](https://electricvehiclecouncil.com.au/media-releases/ev-sales-power-ahead-in-2025/) (EVC), EV sales in Australia have not only increased in raw numbers but have also achieved significant market penetration: * **12% of all new cars sold in H1 2025 were EVs (BEV + PHEV)**, up from 9.6% in H1 2024. * **June 2025 set a new monthly record**, with EVs making up nearly 16% of total vehicle sales. This rapid growth reflects a decisive consumer shift towards cleaner, more sustainable transport options. --- ## Key Drivers Behind the EV Surge ### 1. Federal Government Support and Incentives Federal policies and incentives are playing a crucial role in making EVs more accessible: * Introduction of the **[New Vehicle Efficiency Standard](https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure-transport-vehicles/vehicles/new-vehicle-efficiency-standard)** in 2025. * Increased affordability and [variety in EV models](#faq). * Financial incentives that make the transition more appealing for everyday Australians. > *“The transition to electric vehicles is picking up speed because of federal government support and more Australians recognising that making the switch is good for the environment and their wallets.”* , Julie Delvecchio, CEO, Electric Vehicle Council ### 2. Growing Consumer Awareness Australians are becoming more aware of the environmental and economic benefits of EV ownership: * Lower running costs compared to petrol vehicles. * Contribution to reducing emissions and improving air quality. * A growing perception that EVs are the future of transport, not a niche alternative. * New charging stations popping up at shopping centres, workplaces, and public spaces, making EV ownership more convenient. ### 3. Expanded Vehicle Choices Thanks to the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, consumers now have **more affordable and diverse EV options**, from compact hatchbacks to family SUVs and commercial vans. This diversity is critical in meeting the needs of: * Families * Tradespeople * Small businesses * Urban commuters --- ## The New Australian EV Owner: A Changing Profile The EV market is no longer limited to early adopters or environmentally conscious consumers. Today’s EV drivers in Australia include: * **Families** choosing EV SUVs for school runs and weekend trips. * **Small business owners** using electric vans for deliveries. * **Tradespeople** using electrified utes (mostly still PHEV). * **Everyday commuters** opting for compact EVs for city driving. Once Australians make the switch to electric, the data suggests they rarely look back. --- ## What’s Next: The Road Ahead for EVs in Australia ### Infrastructure Expansion To sustain the growth in EV sales, **charging infrastructure must scale rapidly.** Accessible and fast-charging options are essential to support the increasing number of EV drivers, both in the city, suburbs and regional areas (like the Central Coast, Hunter Valley, Blue Mountains, and beyond...). ### Continued Policy Support Ongoing government backing will be critical: * Further incentives for EV purchases. * Support for [vehicle-to-grid](https://www.ausgrid.com.au/About-Us/Future-Grid/Electric-Vehicles/V2G) technologies. * Regulatory frameworks that continue to encourage manufacturers to bring affordable models to market. ### Industry Innovation Australia's EV ecosystem is ripe for innovation, particularly in: * **Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) solutions** which allow EVs to supply energy back to the grid. * **Advanced battery technologies** that improve range and charging speed. * **[New financing models](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/how-fbt-exemption-is-driving-ev-adoption-in-australia/)** that make EV ownership even more accessible. > *“More EVs on our roads benefit all Australians, delivering quieter streets, cleaner air, and greater protection for our environment.”* , Julie Delvecchio, Electric Vehicle Council --- 2025 is shaping up as a landmark year for Australia’s electric vehicle journey. With record-breaking sales, strong government support, increasing consumer confidence, and a rapidly diversifying market, the shift to electric transport is no longer a distant goal, it’s happening now. To maintain this momentum, Australia must continue investing in infrastructure, policy innovation, and public education. The benefits of this transition are clear: cleaner cities, lower carbon emissions, and a transport system that’s ready for the future. --- ## FAQ **Q: What percentage of new car sales in Australia were EVs (BEV + PHEV) in June 2025?** A: EVs made up nearly 16% of all new vehicles sold [in Australia in June 2025](https://www.aaa.asn.au/research-data/electric-vehicle/). **Q: Who is driving EV adoption in Australia?** A: A wide range of Australians, including tradespeople, families, small business owners, and city commuters, are now embracing EVs. **Q: Why is infrastructure critical for EV growth?** A: A [reliable, widespread charging network](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/) is essential to support the growing number of EVs on Australian roads and to alleviate consumer concerns about charging accessibility. Australia needs lots more. **Q: How can EVs contribute to a cleaner environment?** A: EVs produce zero tailpipe emissions, leading to improved air quality and reduced greenhouse gas emissions compared to traditional petrol or diesel vehicles. (See also [Life Cycle Assessment](/posts/life-cycle-assessment/) and [Car Manufacturing LCA](/posts/car-manufacturing-life-cycle-assessment/) for the full picture.) **Q: What are some of the EV brands and models (BEV + PHEV) available in Australia?** A: The nearly 100 different EV models sold in the first half of 2025 include a wide range of options, from compact cars to SUVs and commercial vehicles, catering to diverse consumer needs. They include (in # sales order): *Tesla Model Y, BYD Sealion 7, Tesla Model 3, Kia EV5, MG 4, BYD Atto 3, [Geely EX5](https://www.geely.com.au/EX5), BYD Seal, BYD Dolphin, Kia EV3, BMW iX1, MG ZS EV, BMW iX2, Volvo EX30, Polestar 4, Porsche Macan, BMW i4, Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV, Audi Q4 e-tron, Mercedes-Benz EQA, Chery Omoda E5 / E5, Toyota bZ4X, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Polestar 2, [Zeekr X](https://www.zeekrlife.com/en-au/models/x), Mercedes-Benz EQB, Mini Aceman, Volvo XC40 Recharge / EX40, Mini Countryman E, Hyundai Kona Electric, GWM Ora, Cupra Born, MG S5, Mini Cooper E, BMW i5, Kia EV6, Ford Mustang Mach-E, BMW iX3, Hyundai Inster, BMW iX, [Leapmotor C10 EV](https://www.leapmotor.net/au/c10), Volkswagen ID.4, Cupra Tavascan, Kia EV9, Volvo C40 Recharge, Volkswagen ID. Buzz, [Renault Megane E-Tech](https://www.renault.com.au/vehicles/megane-e-tech/), Audi Q6 e-tron, Porsche Taycan, Subaru Solterra, Skoda Enyaq, Volvo EX90, Polestar 3, Volkswagen ID. Buzz Cargo, Deepal S07, Volkswagen ID.5, Mercedes-Benz EQE, Hyundai Ioniq 6, Fiat 500e / Abarth 500e, [Zeekr 009](https://www.zeekrlife.com/en-au/models/009), LDV eDeliver7, Nissan Leaf, Kia Niro EV, Ford E-Transit, Jeep Avenger, Mercedes-Benz eVito van, Peugeot E-Partner, MG Cyberster, Mercedes-Benz G-Class EV, Lexus RZ, Audi Q8 e-tron, LDV eDeliver 9, Mercedes-Benz eVito Tourer, Audi e-tron GT, Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV, Renault Kangoo E-Tech, Lexus UX300e, BMW i7, Ford E-Transit Custom, Mercedes-Benz EQV, [Peugeot E-308](https://www.peugeot.com.au/models/e-308-peugeot-preview-program.html), Genesis GV70 Electrified, Peugeot E-Expert, Genesis GV60, Rolls-Royce Spectre, LDV eT60, Mercedes-Benz eSprinter van, Lotus Eletre, Genesis G80 Electrified, Jaguar I-Pace, LDV Mifa 9, Lotus Emeya, Mercedes-Benz EQS, Skoda Elroq, Mazda MX-30 Electric, Maserati GranTurismo / GranCabrio Folgore and Renault Trafic E-Tech.* [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: June 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-06-june/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-06-june/) [POST DATE]: 2025-06-27 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: EV Essential Mobile Apps [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) [POST DATE]: 2025-06-14 [START OF CONTENT] Driving an EV, in Australia in 2025, will still require some adjustment. One such adjustment is having a dozen extra apps on your phone, for charging and trip planning. Your phone becomes your co-pilot, route planner, and payment terminal all in one. Below is an overview of the apps I sometimes have to rely on for both charging and planning. Whether you’re topping up during your weekly shopping run or embarking on a multi-day adventure, these tools will help you charge smarter and travel farther. ⸻ ## ⚡ Charging Apps Remember apps need an internet connection to connect and pay. Some chargers could be underground, where you might need an RFID/NFC card instead. In no particular order: ### 1. Evie Charging [evie.com.au](https://evie.com.au) * Network: Often at shopping centres, with multiple CSS2 and a single CHAdeMO plug. Shop and charge! * Key Features: * **[Autocharge](https://evie.com.au/autocharge/)** feature , mimicking the ease of use for Teslas on Tesla’s own network: plug in and walk away. Soo good! * Map with real-time charger availability and pricing * RFID/NFC card support for quick access: Yes. * In-app payment with stored cards on account. * Interactive map showing charger status (available, in use, offline) * Push notifications (app, txt, email options) when charging is complete (as idle fees apply) * Detailed session history and receipts * Idle fees apply * Evie are working on a network roaming feature, like is custom in Europe, as a one-stop shop for Aussie charging networks —- no need to juggle multiple logins. But that’s probably still a while away (2026+). * _On the Central Coast: Only one location, at Erina Fair Shopping Centre (2x 75kWh chargers, of which 3x CCS2, 1x CHAdeMO)._ ### 2. Chargefox [chargefox.com](https://chargefox.com) * Network: Australia’s largest public charging network, owned and operated by NRMA, RACV, RACQ, RAA, RAC and RACT. Still free at some locations (but less so than it used to be). * Key Features: * Ultra-fast chargers (up to 350 kW) * Membership tiers for discounted rates * Discount for NRMA members (10%) * Simple “plug, tap & charge” RFID/NFC support * Woolworths rewards at Woolworths Chargefox chargers (only) * _On the Central Coast : NRMA Ocean Beach Resort, Lake Haven Centre (Engie)_ Collection of RFID/NFC cards for offline charging: ![rfid cards](/images/posts/rfidcards.jpg) ### 3. [bp pulse](/posts/bp-pulse/) [bp.com](https://www.bp.com/en_au/australia/home/products-services/bppulse.html) * Network: BP’s expanding charging network across Australia, at their petrol stations * Key Features: * Transparent per-kWh pricing, time base discounted tarrifs * Push notifications when charging is complete * Real-time charger availability * Detailed session history and receipts * Use the “Favorites” feature to bookmark frequently visited stations. * [Idle fees](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/) apply * _On the Central Coast : Tumbi Umbi (single 75 kWh charger, close to fast food). Wyong (next to Aldi => shop and charge!) has 4x 150 kWh chargers (and 2x CHAdeMO) + a double "ultra-fast" 300 kWh charger, but note that the 300 kWh charger costs 7c/kWh more than the 150 kWh chargers._ ![Jolt charger](/images/posts/revolution-0004.jpg) ### 4. Ampol [ampcharge.ampol.com.au](https://ampcharge.ampol.com.au) * Network: Ampol’s EV charging sites, co-located on their petrol stations, some with convenience stores * Key Features: * In-app pay-as-you-go charging * Station finder with filters (e.g., fast charger only) * Integration with Woolworths Rewards * Often only one single 75 kWh charger with a CCS2 and CHAdeMO plug * Idle fees apply * _On the Central Coast: Gosford, Charmhaven, Kincumber and Bateau Bay._ Still disappointing that despite their large petrol station network, charging is still limited to very few stations. Although I don’t belief a petrol station is the right location for charging your EV (unless around motorways). Still, they could expand their brand to shopping centres for charging without the petrol (as they also provide Ampol AmpCharge Energy electricity at home). bp pulse, EVX, Evie apps: ![ios_apps](/images/posts/ios_apps.jpg) ### 5. [EVX](/posts/evx-power-pole-charger/) [evx.tech](https://evx.tech) * Network: NSW network growing in metro and regional areas, network of [power pole chargers](/posts/evx-power-pole-charger/) used with bring-your-own cable. * Key Features: * Live charger availability * Simple “plug & charge” RFID/NFC support on select stations * Slower Type 2 AC charging (up to 22 kW) with bring-your-own cable * _Not available on the Central Coast_ EVX charger near Newcastle, NSW, with bring-your-own cable: ![Power Pole charger](/images/posts/powerpolecharger.jpg) ### 6. JOLT [jolt.com.au](https://jolt.com.au) * Network: Boutique metropolitan charging and advertisement network in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane suburbs. * Key Features: * **Daily 7 kWh free charging**, advertisement based * Live charger availability and countdown when plug becomes available. * Some have a CHAdeMO plug available. * Live charger availability * Membership options to get more free daily charging as well as timed discounts, **reservations** * Idle fees apply * _Not available on the Central Coast._ Jolt charger on the Northern Beaches, Sydney: ![Jolt charger](/images/posts/revolution-0017.jpg) ### 7. Everty [everty.com.au](https://everty.com.au) * Network: Slow Type 2 AC, bring-your-own cable * Live charger availability * Tip: Check the reliability score on PlugShare before deviating from your route to charge. * _On the Central Coast: Glenworth Valley only (slow 7kWh)._ _Else, Lake Macquarie's Swansea behind the Library there at 25kWh, close to Coles._ Everty charger in Swansea: ![Everty charger in Swansea](/images/posts/revolution-0015.jpg) ### 8. Exploren [exploren.com.au](https://exploren.com.au) * Network: Regional network focused on underserved areas. Slower (but cheaper) Type 2 AC charging only, bring-your-own cable * Key Features: * Integration with caravan parks, tourist sites, RSL clubs * RFID/NFC support * Live charger availability * Why It Matters: Keeps you moving through rural zones where coverage is sparse. * _On the Central Coast: Gosford RSL Club (3x), Narara Eco Village (2x), The Entrance Leagues Club (3x) close to Bateau Bay Square, Mingara Leisure Club, Bridgeview Motel (2x). Few around Lake Macquarie council area._ ### 9. Tesla [tesla.com/findus](https://www.tesla.com/findus) * Network: Tesla Supercharger network. Also open to other EVs at select sites * Key Features: * On Teslas, seamless “plug-and-charge” without any additional app steps * "Ultra-fast" power DC charging (up to 250 kW+ on V3 stalls) * Live station occupancy overlays * No Chademo * Idle fees apply * Pay less with a membership plan ($10/month, making it $0.53/kWh vs. $0.72/kWh). * Worth Knowing: Even if you don’t drive a Tesla, some stations are accessible via the Tesla app—just check compatibility first. * _On the Central Coast: Tuggerah for Teslas only (V2 chargers). Gosford for all EVs (12x V3 250 kWh chargers). Some destination chargers may or may not support other EVs._ Tesla Tuggerah charger - above Bunnings: ![Tesla Tuggerah charger](/images/posts/revolution-0016.jpg) ⸻ ## 🗺️ Mapping & Trip Planning Apps Your car may come with a built-in navigation system, optimized for your EV, dedicated mapping and trip planning apps add another layer of convenience and functionality. These apps are designed to help you plan your route, find charging stations and local amenities, and manage your trip more effectively, especially useful for long trips or when venturing into areas with limited charging infrastructure. ### 1. PlugShare * Coverage: Crowd-sourced database of every public charger worldwide * Key Features: * User photos and reviews of stations * Customizable filters (network, connector, speed) * “Trip” mode to plot charging stops automatically * Why I Use It: The community insights (e.g., “this site’s broken” or “great café next door”) are invaluable. ### 2. Chargetrip Go * Coverage: Global, with intelligent route optimization * Key Features: * Calculates optimal stops based on vehicle model, battery state, and desired arrival charge * Live traffic integration and weather overlays * EV cost calculator per trip * Pro Tip: Pre-set your car’s make/model for more accurate range estimates. ### 3. EV Navigation * Coverage: Focused on Australia & New Zealand networks * Key Features: * Offline support for multi-day trips * Integration with CarPlay for on-screen directions * Battery-level warnings and detour suggestions * When to Open It: In CarPlay mode when you want seamless, voice-guided charging directions. ### 4. A Better Routeplanner (ABRP) * Coverage: Worldwide, with very detailed vehicle profiles * Key Features: * Fine-tune charging curves per vehicle and charger type * Customizable “comfort” vs. “speed” optimization * Weather, elevation, and driving style adjustments * Why go paid: Their premium subscription unlocks live data overlays, CarPlay and advanced predictors (but to be honest I was quite disappointed when I tried the paid features). Chargetrip Go: chargers around Crows Nest, NSW; map showing how far your car goes on a full charge down to zero, from Gosford? ![Chargetrip Go](/images/posts/chargetripgo_ios.jpg) A Better Routeplanner: from Canberra to Narara, Central Coast; showing the route, timing, and one charging stop. ![A Better Routeplanner](/images/posts/abtp_ios.jpg) ⸻ ### Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your EV Apps 1. Pre-Load Payment Methods: Save your credit card or Apple Pay info in each charging app to avoid fumbling at the station. Double check after app updates. 2. Combine Tools: Use a mapping app like ABRP or Chargetrip Go to plot your trip, then switch to the native charging app (e.g., Chargefox or Evie) to initiate the charging session. 3. Monitor Charger Health: Check user reviews or “reliability scores” before you detour — an alternative 5 km down the road might save you 30 minutes. 4. Stay Offline-Ready: Download offline maps or screenshots in remote areas; some mapping apps (like EV Navigation) will function without cell service. 5. Leverage Rewards: Sign up for membership programs to earn free kWh or discounted rates. 6. Plan for Amenities: Use PlugShare’s community photos to find AC chargers near cafés, toilets, or picnic spots — turn charging time into a mini-break. ⸻ ### 🚀 Conclusion With the right suite of apps on your phone, range anxiety becomes a thing of the past. Charging and mapping tools each bring unique strengths—combined with your in-car mapping app. Experiment with a combination that matches your driving patterns, and you’ll unlock smoother, more confident trips whether you’re zipping around town or exploring Australia’s vast highways. Safe travels, and happy charging! See also [So Many Apps](/posts/soo-many-apps/) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: May 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-05-may/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-05-may/) [POST DATE]: 2025-05-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: New Planned NSW EV Fast Chargers [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/) [POST DATE]: 2025-05-27 [START OF CONTENT] New NSW EV Fast Chargers: “Fast Chargers on the Way for NSW Drivers”: ### Scope & Funding * The NSW Government’s latest Fast Charging Infrastructure grants (third round) will deliver over 300 new fast-charging ports at 103 locations statewide, backed by $16.1 million in public funding ⁠— part of a broader $149 million commitment to reach 1,000+ fast bays by 2025.  * In parallel, a ministerial media release details 246 fast and ultra-fast chargers to be installed across 38 suburbs, with the same $16.1 million in grants boosted by $25.1 million in private co-investment (BP, Energy Australia, Plus ES, Tesla, NRMA) for a $41.2 million total rollout.  ### Partners & Locations * Key network partners include [BP](/posts/bp-pulse/), [Evie](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/), [Tesla](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/), NRMA, Energy Australia and Plus ES, ensuring broad geographic reach across metro and regional NSW.  * The ministerial release specifically names 38 suburbs , while the NRMA announcement covers 103 locations selected to close “[critical charging gaps](/posts/ev-charging-congestion-is-real-and-fixable/).”  ### Charger Specifications & Accessibility * Both programs focus on fast (50–150 kW) and ultra-fast (up to 350 kW+) chargers, capable of replenishing 10 → 80% battery in 10–15 minutes, dramatically reducing “range anxiety.”  * Installations will include pull-through bays for **caravans/trailers** and **disability-accessible** chargers to accommodate a wide range of users.  ### Strategic Goals & Impact * These investments accelerate NSW’s transition to EVs, support the state’s Net Zero targets, and encourage wider adoption by making long-distance travel and everyday charging more convenient and reliable.   > “We are already seeing the benefits of NSW Government investment here in Heathcote where today I have cut a ribbon to celebrate BP’s newest EV charging station, making it easier for EV drivers to hit the road quickly.” said Member for Heathcote, Maryanne Stuart at a BP charging station launch in Heathcote. With over 300 new ports rolling out under matched funding streams, NSW drivers can look forward to a vastly expanded, fast-charging network powered by renewable energy, paving the way for seamless EV travel across the state. Planned new NSW EV Fast Charger locations: ![planned_nsw.jpg](/images/posts/planned_nsw.jpg) _Includes two new planned locations on the [Central Coast, NSW](/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/): Tuggerah and Ourimbah._ ⸻ [Read on NRMA](https://www.mynrma.com.au/open-road/news/2025/300-new-ev-charging-ports-for-nsw) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: How the Fringe Benefits Tax Exemption is Driving Electric Vehicle Adoption in Australia [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/how-fbt-exemption-is-driving-ev-adoption-in-australia/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/how-fbt-exemption-is-driving-ev-adoption-in-australia/) [POST DATE]: 2025-05-20 [START OF CONTENT] Discover how Australia’s Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) exemption on electric vehicles works, who qualifies, how much you can save, and why novated leases are key to unlocking these benefits. ## Introduction: Novated Lease FBT exemption policy Electric vehicles (EVs) are [rapidly gaining traction in Australia](/posts/electric-vehicle-sales-2025-turning-point/), thanks in part to government incentives that make them more financially accessible. One of the most significant of these is the Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) exemption on EVs—a policy that can substantially reduce the cost of owning an electric car when financed through a novated lease. But how exactly does this tax exemption work, and who stands to benefit the most? In this article, we explore the mechanics of the FBT exemption, its eligibility criteria, financial advantages, and key considerations for anyone thinking of making the switch to an electric vehicle. ## What is the Fringe Benefits Tax Exemption on EVs? The Fringe Benefits Tax is a levy applied to non-cash benefits provided by employers to their employees, such as company cars. Normally, if you choose a car for personal use through your employer, that vehicle would attract FBT. However, under Australia’s current policy, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are exempt from this tax if financed via a **novated lease**. This exemption allows employees to pay for the vehicle and its running costs entirely from their **pre-tax income** (*salary sacrifice*), significantly reducing the taxable portion of their salary. ### Key Conditions: * **Applies to BEVs and fuel cell EVs** purchased **new or used** on or after **1 July 2022.** * **Plug-in hybrid EVs** qualify **until 31 March 2025.** * **Vehicle must be below** the **Luxury Car Tax (LCT) threshold**
(e.g., \$91,387 for fuel-efficient vehicles in FY 2024-2025). * **Only accessible through** a **novated lease arrangement**. ## What is a Novated Lease and Why Does It Matter? A **novated lease** is a three-way agreement between you, your employer, and a leasing company. It enables you to finance a vehicle using **pre-tax salary deductions**, often resulting in significant tax savings. ### Novated Lease Features: * Lease payments and running costs (insurance, servicing, registration) come from pre-tax income (salary sacrifice). * You retain responsibility for the lease if you change jobs. * Employers typically face no financial risk; they simply facilitate payroll deductions. Without the FBT exemption, a portion of the lease would need to be funded with after-tax salary to offset FBT liabilities. Thanks to the exemption, all payments can now be made **entirely from pre-tax salary,** increasing the financial appeal. ## Who is Eligible for the FBT Exemption? ### Vehicles That Qualify: * Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) * Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs) * Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) purchased *before 31 March 2025* * Cars purchased on or after **1 July 2022** * Vehicles **below the LCT threshold** when factoring in accessories and dealer delivery ### Vehicles That Do Not Qualify: * Cars purchased before **1 July 2022** * Vehicles that have ever been subject to LCT * Fossil fuel-powered cars * PHEVs purchased after **1 April 2025** ## Financial Advantages ### Tax Savings Scale with Income The higher your taxable income, the greater your potential savings. Employees on higher tax brackets can save more because their lease payments reduce taxable income at a higher marginal tax rate. **Important:** These savings include registration, insurance, servicing, and tyre costs but **exclude home charging costs**, which remain a grey area for tax reimbursements. ## Novated Lease vs. Traditional Financing: Which is Better? ### Novated Lease Benefits: * Fixed interest rate for the lease term. * Pre-tax salary deductions. * Access to fleet discounts. * Save on GST (up to $6,334) * Running costs are bundled into one payment. You don't end up owning the vehicle outright, but you can often purchase it at the end of the lease term for a residual payment. ### Traditional Loan Drawbacks: * Potentially variable interest rates. * No tax benefits on repayments. * Running costs are separate and fully post-tax. But you do own the vehicle outright, which may be preferable for some. ## What Happens If You Change Employers? * **Option 1:** Transfer the lease to your new employer (if they agree). * **Option 2:** Continue making payments directly to the lease provider from post-tax income. * **Option 3:** Sell the vehicle to cover outstanding payments. Consider **Lease Protection Insurance** to safeguard your payments in the event of involuntary redundancy or other disruptions. ## Other Tax Implications to Watch Although you won’t pay FBT on qualifying EVs, the benefit must still be **reported on your income statement.** This can impact: * Private health insurance rebate eligibility * Parental leave payments * Childcare subsidies * HECS/HELP repayments * Medicare levy obligations It’s essential to **consult a tax advisor** to understand how a novated lease might affect your overall tax position. ## Conclusion The Fringe Benefits Tax exemption on electric vehicles is a powerful incentive that can significantly reduce the cost of EV ownership—especially when leveraged through a novated lease. However, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Employees must weigh the immediate tax savings against long-term considerations like changing jobs, residual lease payments, and potential impacts on other financial entitlements. For many Australians, this policy represents a pivotal moment to make the switch to electric, but it’s crucial to fully understand the mechanics, eligibility, and possible flow-on effects before signing the dotted line. ## References [ATO: Electric cars FBT exemption](https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/hiring-and-paying-your-workers/fringe-benefits-tax/types-of-fringe-benefits/fbt-on-cars-other-vehicles-parking-and-tolls/electric-cars-exemption) [Novated Lease Australia - electric cars](https://www.novatedleaseaustralia.com.au/electric-cars) [Oly Novated Lease - electric cars](https://www.oly.com.au/novated-lease/electric-cars) [Oly Novated lease: everything you need to know before you switch](https://www.oly.com.au/info-and-news/electric-car/novated-lease-electric-car-everything-you-need-know-you-switch) ## FAQs **Q: Can I get the FBT exemption if I buy an EV with cash or a personal loan?** No. The exemption only applies if you finance the vehicle through a novated lease. **Q: Do used EVs qualify for the exemption?** Yes, provided they were purchased on or after 1 July 2022 and have never attracted Luxury Car Tax. **Q: What happens at the end of the novated lease?** You may need to make a residual payment (often around 37.5% of the vehicle’s original purchase price) or refinance the remaining amount. **Q: Will my FBT-exempt EV affect my eligibility for government benefits?** Yes, the reportable benefit can influence entitlements like childcare subsidies, HECS repayments, and Medicare levy calculations. **Q: Can I include optional extras in the vehicle purchase?** Yes, but ensure that the total cost, including extras, does not exceed the Luxury Car Tax threshold to remain eligible for the exemption. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: April 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-04-april/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-04-april/) [POST DATE]: 2025-04-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Australia's energy debate, distilled: Bowen vs O'Brien at the National Press Club [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-bowen-obrien-energy-debate/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/npc-bowen-obrien-energy-debate/) [POST DATE]: 2025-04-10 [START OF CONTENT] Ten days before the May 3 federal election, Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Shadow Minister Ted O'Brien debated energy policy at the National Press Club. The exchange was combative, technically detailed in patches, and evasive on the questions that mattered most. Here is what each side actually argued, what they refused to answer, and where the numbers broke down. ## The core positions Bowen's case rested on momentum. Renewables were at 33% when Labor took office and reached 46% in the final quarter of 2024. Renewables are projected to overtake coal as the largest electricity source in 2025. The government's plan — renewables backed by storage, gas peaking, household batteries, and transmission — is, in Bowen's framing, what every authoritative body recommends: AEMO, the CSIRO, the Australian Energy Regulator. The risk of abandoning it now is stranding billions in private investment and leaving the grid dependent on coal infrastructure he described as held together by little more than the effort of union members. On the day of the debate, 4.7 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity was offline. O'Brien's case was that Labor's plan has already failed on the one measure ordinary Australians use: the bill. More families are on hardship arrangements with retailers than at any prior point. The government abandoned its own Reputex modelling mid-term, he argued, leaving its 82% renewables and 43% emissions targets without any economic foundation. The coalition's alternative is more gas in the short term — 7% lower household gas bills, 3% lower retail electricity bills, according to Frontier Economics modelling for 2025-26 — and nuclear replacing retiring coal plants in the medium term, with a claimed 44% total system cost saving over Labor's path to 2050. ## The numbers that were disputed The 44% figure was the most contested of the debate. Moderator Tom Connell pressed O'Brien directly: even the coalition's own modelling, like for like, shows a 21-25% cost advantage, not 44%. The 44% emerges from comparing the coalition's smaller grid against Labor's projected grid, which is built on assumptions that EV uptake is near-universal by 2050 and that green hydrogen becomes a major export industry. O'Brien defended the comparison as valid; if Labor is going to overbuild the grid on assumptions that may not materialise, the cost of that overbuild is real. Bowen's counter was that planning for a larger grid is the responsible approach; building to a 44%-smaller economy is not a saving, it's a constraint. The nuclear capital cost was similarly contested. Bowen cited the Smart Energy Council's figure of up to $600 billion. O'Brien said the CSIRO's own costings support around $120 billion and that Labor had multiplied the CSIRO number by five. Connell described the $600 billion as the top end of one lobby group's range, with the CSIRO's building-cost figure at $116 billion. Neither side resolved this cleanly in the room. O'Brien's modelling used Frontier Economics, not the CSIRO. Bowen argued that Frontier ignored the CSIRO's first-of-kind premium, operating cost estimates, and refurbishment costs over the plant lifetime. O'Brien replied that the coalition's policy specifies next-of-kind reactors, not first-of-kind, and that the comparison is therefore valid. In Australia, Bowen said, the first reactor built would by definition be the first of its kind in the country. The distinction was not resolved. ## The price question neither would answer cleanly Bowen declined to commit to whether electricity prices would be higher or lower in nominal terms by the end of a second Labor term, citing geopolitical uncertainty. He pointed to the Australian Energy Market Commission's projection of a 13% reduction over ten years if current policy continues; but was careful to call this the expert view rather than an election pledge. His record on the $275 reduction promised before the 2022 election was raised repeatedly; he did not dispute that bills had risen, instead citing the three rounds of Energy Bill Relief and arguing that wholesale electricity prices had fallen from $317 per megawatt hour under the coalition to $88. O'Brien's short-term modelling covers 2025-26 only. He declined to make commitments about price trajectories beyond the first year, though he raised network charges as a cost risk under Labor's transmission build (up to 28,000 kilometres of new lines) whose impact on retail bills is not yet fully visible. ## Gas Both sides accept there is a domestic gas supply problem. They differ on how to fix it. Labor's gas code of conduct has, Bowen said, secured 640 petajoules of guaranteed domestic supply. He described the coalition's gas policy document (released the day before the debate) as thinner than a Chinese restaurant menu, and noted it described an "incentive" for gas producers rather than a genuine reservation scheme. He also pointed out that the policy is close to a carbon copy of Angus Taylor's 2020 Gas-Fired Recovery document, which was released when gas was $4 a gigajoule; by the 2022 election it had reached $34.70. O'Brien's policy targets the three major LNG exporters in Queensland, requiring each to contribute to a 100-petajoule domestic supply obligation with no free-riding. On the Santos anomaly — Santos draws from the domestic market to fill its own export contracts — O'Brien said this would be addressed in negotiations within the first 100 days of government. On the pipeline constraint (Queensland gas cannot physically reach southern markets fast enough to cover winter peaks), he said a $1 billion critical infrastructure fund would work toward a solution over three years, with storage as the near-term bridge. ## Nuclear O'Brien was asked whether a coalition election loss would end his advocacy for nuclear. He said no, the policy is right regardless of the outcome. He was also asked whether the coalition would change Australia's 43% emissions reduction target and whether it would leave the Paris Agreement. He declined to confirm or deny both, saying targets would be set after analysis of emissions trajectory, the state of the economy, and the coalition's own policy suite. Bowen interpreted this as an effective confirmation that the coalition would change the target; lowering the nationally determined contribution requires renegotiating it under Paris. On the question of whether nuclear has a role in the global energy mix, there was no argument. Both sides acknowledged it does. The dispute is whether it has a role in Australia specifically, given the country's solar and wind resources, the cost of building a first reactor, and the time required; O'Brien's own modelling assumes nuclear comes online no sooner than 12 years from a decision to proceed. ## What the debate did not resolve Neither side put a credible number on retail electricity prices at the end of the next parliamentary term. The total system cost debate generated more heat than clarity, partly because net present value and nominal cost comparisons are genuinely different things, and partly because both sides had incentives to use whichever framing made their position look better. The 82% renewables target came up in the context of whether Labor is on track to meet it; Bowen said yes, several questioners suggested otherwise, and no definitive answer emerged. The exchange on international emissions commitments left the coalition's position ambiguous on Paris. That ambiguity is likely to matter more after the election than it did in the room. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: March 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-03-march/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-03-march/) [POST DATE]: 2025-03-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Everything Electric Sydney 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/everything-electric-sydney-2025/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/everything-electric-sydney-2025/) [POST DATE]: 2025-03-07 [START OF CONTENT] ## Everything Electric at the Sydney Showground in Sydney Olympic Park Visited first day Friday (only) of the three-day event. Talks wise, same discussions as previous years (see [Everything Electric Australia 2024](/posts/everything-electric-australia/) and the original [Fully Charged Live Sydney](/posts/fully-charged-live-sydney/) in 2023), but the exhibition was more interesting with lots more vendors and products. Lots of new Chinese EV brands. In addition to BYD and MG we already know well, there were Geely and Zeekr, Leapmotor (joint venture with Stelantis), Deepal, and XPeng, which to be honest were all quite impressive, compared to, for example, the VW models on display. Test drove an electric Mini (had a Mini D some 10 or so years ago), which had an annoying fake sound which can only be turned off in eco mode? First time T*sla was present, with a large booth, with the new MY and the truly ridiculous CT. ![](/images/posts/everythingelectric2025.jpg) As always, find my photo album on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/halans/albums/72177720324312978 [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: February 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-02-february/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-02-february/) [POST DATE]: 2025-02-28 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: January 2025 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-01-january/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2025/2025-01-january/) [POST DATE]: 2025-01-25 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: December 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-12-december/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-12-december/) [POST DATE]: 2024-12-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: November 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-11-november/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-11-november/) [POST DATE]: 2024-11-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: October 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-10-october/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-10-october/) [POST DATE]: 2024-10-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: September 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-09-september/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-09-september/) [POST DATE]: 2024-09-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: NRMA EV Drive Day St Ives 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/nrma-ev-drive-day-st-ives-2024/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/nrma-ev-drive-day-st-ives-2024/) [POST DATE]: 2024-09-21 [START OF CONTENT] ### What & Why * NRMA, supported by the NSW (and ACT) Government, runs a series of free “EV Drive Days” to give people first-hand experience with electric vehicles (EVs).  * Aimed at both individual consumers and fleet/business managers, the events help clear up confusion around EV ownership—covering purchasing, charging, and real-world driving.  ### Event Format * Test Drives: Hands-on drives or passenger “ride-alongs” in various EV models with a qualified instructor. * Expert Presentations & Q&A: Sessions with industry experts, vehicle manufacturers, charging-equipment providers and energy companies. * Info Stalls: Manufacturer displays, plus food and beverage stalls (paid).  * Walk-through of EV features, paired with a driving expert on each test drive.  * Fleet-Specific Days: Dedicated events tailored to business and fleet decision-makers, showcasing commercial EV options. ### Who Can Attend * Open and free to everyone—NRMA members and non-members alike. Bring friends and family!  * Ideal for “EV curious” first-timers, current EV owners, and fleet managers exploring electrification. * No entry fee—but if you want to test-drive, you must pre-book timeslots (limited availability). * Free on-site parking. Check each event listing for venue details. ![NRMA EV Drive day on Flickr](/images/posts/nrmaday_flickr.jpg) See the full album on [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/halans/albums/72177720320581838/). For larger EV expos in NSW, see [Fully Charged Live Sydney 2023](/posts/fully-charged-live-sydney/), [Everything Electric Australia 2024](/posts/everything-electric-australia/), and [Everything Electric Sydney 2025](/posts/everything-electric-sydney-2025/). ⸻ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: August 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-08-august/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-08-august/) [POST DATE]: 2024-08-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: July 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-07-july/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-07-july/) [POST DATE]: 2024-07-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: June 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-06-june/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-06-june/) [POST DATE]: 2024-06-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Glossary of Key EV Terms [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-life-glossary/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-life-glossary/) [POST DATE]: 2024-06-23 [START OF CONTENT] Here’s a **glossary of 51+ key terms related to Life with an Electric Vehicle**, alphabetized and concisely explained. For practical companions, see [101 essential tasks for EV life](/posts/101-essential-tasks-for-ev-life/) and the [EV Essential Mobile Apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) guide. --- # 🚗 Life with an Electric Vehicle: Glossary of Key Terms | **Term** | **Explanation** | | ---------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | AC Charging | Alternating Current charging, typically used for home and public Level 1 and Level 2 chargers. | | Australian Electric Vehicle Association (AEVA) | A national, non-profit EV advocacy and education group in Australia. | | Battery Capacity | The total amount of energy a battery can store, usually measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). | | Battery Degradation | Gradual reduction in a battery’s capacity and range over time. | | Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) | An EV powered entirely by electricity with no petrol engine. | | Battery Management System (BMS) | Software that monitors and protects battery performance and health. | | BEV | See Battery Electric Vehicle. | | CCS (Combined Charging System) | A fast charging connector standard used by most modern EVs. | | CHAdeMO | A DC fast charging standard commonly used by some Japanese EVs. | | Charging Curve | The rate at which an EV charges, typically fastest between 20%-80% battery capacity. | | Charging Network | A system of public EV chargers operated by specific providers like Chargefox or Tesla. | | Charging Station | A location where EVs can be recharged, either at home or publicly. | | Charging Time | The duration required to recharge an EV battery from one level to another. | | DC Charging | Direct Current charging, typically used for fast and ultra-fast public chargers. | | DC Fast Charger | A high-power public charger that can recharge most EVs to 80% in 30–45 minutes. | | Destination Charging | Chargers typically located at hotels, shopping centres, or tourist spots for longer stops. | | Electric Motor | The component in an EV that converts electrical energy into motion. | | Electric Vehicle (EV) | A vehicle that runs partially or entirely on electricity. | | EV Lifestyle Plan | A personalized strategy covering EV choice, charging habits, costs, trips, and sustainability. | | EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) | The formal term for all EV charging hardware. | | Fast Charging | Charging that delivers power rapidly, usually through DC fast chargers. | | Fossil Fuel Vehicle | Traditional petrol or diesel-powered cars. | | Frunk | A front trunk, often found in EVs due to the absence of an engine. | | HEV (Hybrid Electric Vehicle) | A vehicle that combines a petrol engine with a small electric motor but cannot be plugged in. | | Home Charging | Charging an EV at home using either a standard power outlet or a Level 2 charger. | | Incentives | Government-provided financial benefits like rebates or tax discounts for EV buyers. | | Kilowatt (kW) | A unit of power, often used to measure charging speed. | | Kilowatt-Hour (kWh) | A unit of energy storage capacity for EV batteries. | | Level 1 Charging | Charging via a standard household outlet; slowest charging option. | | Level 2 Charging | Faster home or public charging requiring dedicated equipment. | | Lithium-Ion Battery | The most common battery type used in modern EVs. | | Maintenance Schedule | Regular service plan for EVs, focusing on tires, brakes, fluids, and software. | | North American Charging Standard (NACS) | Tesla's proprietary electric vehicle (EV) charging connector, charge port and protocol, opened up for use by other EV manufacturers and EV charging network operators in the US. | | OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) | A global standard that enables EV chargers to communicate with networks. | | Over-the-Air Updates (OTA) | Wireless software updates delivered directly to EVs, improving features and performance. | | Peak Charging | Charging during periods of highest electricity demand, often more expensive. | | PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) | An EV that combines electric driving with petrol backup and can be plugged in. | | PlugShare | A popular global app for locating EV charging stations. See [EV Essential Mobile Apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/). | | Public Charging | Charging at shared locations like parking lots, highways, or shopping centres. | | Range | The distance an EV can travel on a full battery charge. | | Range Anxiety | The fear of running out of battery before reaching a charger. | | Regenerative Braking | A system that recovers energy during braking to recharge the battery. | | Road Trip Planning | Strategically mapping charging stops for long-distance EV journeys. | | SAE J1772 | A common connector standard for Level 1 and Level 2 AC chargers in many countries. | | Smart Charging | Technology that manages charging speed and time for cost or grid efficiency. | | Solid-State Battery | Next-generation EV battery promising faster charging, longer life, and improved safety. | | State of Charge (SoC) | The current battery level, usually displayed as a percentage. | | Tesla Supercharger | Tesla’s proprietary ultra-fast charging network. See the [Tesla section in EV Essential Mobile Apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/). | | Thermal Management | Systems that regulate battery temperature for safety and performance. | | Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) | The complete financial impact of owning a vehicle, including purchase, fuel, and maintenance. | | Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) | Technology that allows EVs to return energy back to the power grid. | | Wallbox | A Level 2 home charging station installed on a garage wall or outdoor post. | | Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) | A vehicle that produces no tailpipe emissions during operation. | --- [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: May 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-05-may/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-05-may/) [POST DATE]: 2024-05-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The story of La Jamais Contente [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-story-of-la-jamais-contente/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/the-story-of-la-jamais-contente/) [POST DATE]: 2024-04-30 [START OF CONTENT] # The story of *La Jamais Contente* La Jamais Contente (“The Never Satisfied”) was an electric car built and driven by Belgian engineer Camille Jenatzy, known as “Le Diable Rouge” (The Red Devil)[19]. On April 29, 1899, he reached 105.88 km/h (65.79 mph), becoming the first driver to exceed 100 km/h[1][2][3] — a milestone in the broader [early history of EVs](/posts/ev-early-history/). The car's torpedo-shaped body and early use of lightweight alloys highlighted what electric propulsion could do during a period when combustion engines were gaining ground[4][5]. Competition within the emerging automotive industry shaped the car's development. Jenatzy and the Jeantaud Company traded speed records, pushing each other toward new technical ideas[6][7]. La Jamais Contente used partinium for its body and relied on two electric motors, showing a design approach centered on weight reduction and direct power delivery[8][9]. Jenatzy died in 1913 after an accident unrelated to racing, but his work remained influential. La Jamais Contente survives in museums and is often referenced when discussing the early stages of electric mobility[10][11]. Its story reflects shifting attitudes toward speed and efficiency at the end of the 19th century[12]. The vehicle's history also illustrates early interest in electric propulsion during a time of rapid mechanical experimentation[13][14]. * * * ## Background ### Camille Jenatzy: pioneer of electric racing Camille Jenatzy, born in 1868 in Brussels, was trained as a civil engineer and became known for record attempts in electric cars. On April 29, 1899, he surpassed the 100 km/h mark in La Jamais Contente, reaching 105.88 km/h[1][2][3]. ### The innovation of La Jamais Contente The car's body used *partinium*, an aluminum-based alloy. Two Postel‑Vinay electric motors produced 50 kW (about 68 horsepower). Heavy Fulmen lead‑acid batteries weighing roughly 750 kg raised the total vehicle mass to about 1450 kg[2][20]. The streamlined form was unusual for the era and influenced later automotive shapes. ### The racing context Jenatzy set his record during an event held by La France Automobile in Achères near Paris. The uneven course required careful handling. Managing weight transfer and torque helped Jenatzy control the car at high speed[4][3]. ### Legacy and cultural impact Jenatzy died in 1913 after a hunting‑related accident[4]. La Jamais Contente is displayed at the Automobile Museum in Compiègne[2][3]. Its design and performance mark an early stage of engineering thought that later shaped electric‑vehicle development. --- ## Record‑breaking event On April 29, 1899, Jenatzy reached 105.9 km/h (65.79 mph) in Achères, becoming the first driver to pass 100 km/h in an electric car[7][8]. His rivalry with Chasseloup‑Laubat produced a series of increasing records during the months before the attempt[8][9]. Jeantaud set 63.13 km/h in December 1898. Jenatzy then continued to raise the mark, reaching 105.878 km/h in April 1899 after repeated attempts[8]. The competition encouraged rapid mechanical refinement[9]. La Jamais Contente used two motors delivering 50 kW directly to the front wheels[10]. The car showed that electric propulsion could produce high performance, a point that resonates with ongoing work in sustainable vehicle design[11]. Jenatzy's result became a reference point for later record attempts and for the development of high‑speed automotive engineering[9][11]. --- ## Cultural and historical context La Jamais Contente's achievement occurred during years of fast mechanical experimentation. Electric vehicles competed directly with gasoline cars for performance and reliability[2][1]. The partinium body and high‑output motors highlighted material and design choices that were new to the public[13][2]. Record attempts by competing manufacturers shaped public perception. Jeantaud set 63.15 km/h in December 1898, followed by Jenatzy's successive increases during early 1899[9][8]. The rivalry encouraged investment in new techniques and materials. ### A shift in cultural values Speed was becoming associated with modern life. The push for faster transportation reflected growing urban movement and interest in long‑distance travel[11]. New vehicle designs shaped how people imagined mobility. La Jamais Contente continues to be cited in discussions about electric‑vehicle design[13][2]. Its record introduced ideas that later influenced aerodynamics and powertrain engineering. --- ## Psychological aspects of speed Record attempts often involve a personal search for challenge and achievement. High‑speed driving produces intense physical sensations. Jenatzy said the car felt as if it were “leaving the ground and hurling itself forward like a projectile”[14]. Recognition played a role in Jenatzy's efforts. His rivalry with Chasseloup‑Laubat shows how competition could motivate engineering changes and repeated attempts at improvement[13]. Driving at such speeds created physical strain. Jenatzy described muscle rigidity and heightened alertness while controlling the car[15]. Public interest in speed affected the psychological environment of racing. Early cars symbolized progress, and spectators followed record attempts closely[9]. --- ## Legacy La Jamais Contente, the first car to exceed 100 km/h in 1899, remains a notable example of early electric‑vehicle performance[16][13]. For a later chapter in EV history, see [The story of General Motors' EV1](/posts/the-story-of-gm-ev1/). Modern interest in electric mobility often references early experiments like Jenatzy's. The record demonstrated that electric motors could support high‑performance driving[17][13]. Work on integrating electric powertrains with new control systems continues this line of development[17]. During the 1920s and 1930s, aerodynamic experiments grew in scope. La Jamais Contente anticipated some of these ideas through its streamlined form[5]. The car is held at the National Car and Tourism Museum in Compiègne[13]. Discussions about sustainable transportation often refer back to early electric vehicles when tracing the development of modern mobility[10][18]. # References [1]: [Foley Motorsports](https://www.foleymotorsports.com/blogdetails?id=42744) [2]: [MIP](https://www.museumsinthepark.be/en/anecdotes/camille-jenatzy-and-la-jamais-contente-a-technological-marvel-ahead-of-its-time/) [3]: [Moba](https://get-moba.com/en/the-electric-car-in-history-la-jamais-contente/) [4]: [Vanderbilt Cup Races](https://www.vanderbiltcupraces.com/drivers/bio/camile_jenatzy) [5]: [V&A](https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/streamlined-design-speed-becomes-style) [6]: [Escuderia](https://en.escuderia.com/el-primero-a-mas-de-100-kms-h-fue-electrico-la-jamais-contente-de-1899/) [7]: [FIA Formula E](https://www.fiaformulae.com/en/news/10302) [8]: [New Atlas](https://newatlas.com/le-jamais-contente-first-land-speed-record/23094/) [9]: [Discovery UK](https://www.discoveryuk.com/motoring/land-speed-records-a-chronicle-of-speed-and-innovation/) [10]: [Prestige Electric Car](https://www.prestigeelectriccar.com/en/history/1919/Electric_Car_Exceeds_100_kmh_in_1899) [11]: [Bosch](https://www.bosch.com/stories/more-incentive-less-coercion/) [12]: [Design You Trust](https://designyoutrust.com/2023/06/the-never-contented-the-pioneering-speed-of-la-jamais-contente/) [13]: [Classic Car Maintenance](https://classiccarmaintenance.com/celebrating-125-years-of-speed-the-legacy-of-la-jamais-contente/) [14]: [MotorTrend](https://www.motortrend.com/news/la-jamais-contente) [15]: [Jenatzy Story](https://www.jenatzy.com/index.php?The+Jenatzy+Story) [16]: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCiFYmnWEMg) [17]: [Contrary Research](https://research.contrary.com/foundations-and-frontiers/electric-vehicles) [18]: [RCA Research](https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/1164/2/Artur_Mausbach_PhD_Thesis_Vehicle_Design.pdf) [19]: [Motorsport Memorial](http://www.motorsportmemorial.org/LWFWIW/focusLWFWIW.php?db=LWF&db2=ms&n=81) [20]: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jamais_Contente) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: April 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-04-april/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-04-april/) [POST DATE]: 2024-04-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: 101 essential tasks for Life with an Electric Vehicle (EV) [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/101-essential-tasks-for-ev-life/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/101-essential-tasks-for-ev-life/) [POST DATE]: 2024-04-13 [START OF CONTENT] Here's a structured list of **101 essential tasks for Life with an Electric Vehicle (EV)**, each paired with a **ChatGPT prompt[(*)](#disclaimer)** written in the **first person**, grouped into practical categories to support real-world EV ownership. For terminology, see the [Glossary of Key EV Terms](/posts/ev-life-glossary/). --- # 🚗 101 Essential EV Tasks & ChatGPT Prompts[(*)](#disclaimer) --- ## 🔍 EV Selection & Research (Tasks 1-15) 1. **Compare EV models by range and price.** *Prompt:* "Help me compare the top 3 electric vehicles within my budget and driving range requirements. Summarize key differences in a table." 2. **Find an EV that suits my daily driving distance.** *Prompt:* "I drive approximately 40 km per day. Recommend EV models that comfortably meet this requirement with minimal charging anxiety." 3. **Understand the differences between BEV, PHEV, and HEV.** *Prompt:* "Explain the key differences between BEVs, PHEVs, and HEVs, and help me decide which one fits my lifestyle." 4. **Research EV warranty terms.** *Prompt:* "Summarize typical EV battery and vehicle warranty terms across different manufacturers." 5. **Compare EVs by charging compatibility.** *Prompt:* "List EVs compatible with CCS2 fast charging in Australia and rank them by maximum charging speed." 6. **Find EVs with the best resale value.** *Prompt:* "Based on current market trends, which EVs retain the highest resale value after five years?" 7. **Identify compact EVs for city driving.** *Prompt:* "Suggest compact EV models ideal for city driving and limited parking spaces." 8. **Compare safety ratings for EVs.** *Prompt:* "Provide safety ratings and key crash-test results for the top five EVs under \$70,000." 9. **Assess interior space for families.** *Prompt:* "Recommend EVs with large cargo space and comfortable seating for a family of four." 10. **Evaluate software update capabilities.** *Prompt:* "Which EV brands offer the most frequent and feature-rich over-the-air software updates?" 11. **List EVs with solar panel options.** *Prompt:* "Are there any EVs with integrated solar panels, and how much range do they realistically add?" 12. **Compare all-wheel drive EVs.** *Prompt:* "Help me compare the best all-wheel drive EVs available in my region." 13. **Find used EV buying guides.** *Prompt:* "Provide a checklist and best practices for buying a used EV, including battery health assessment." 14. **Research EVs with towing capacity.** *Prompt:* "List EVs capable of towing at least 1,000 kg and summarize their range impact while towing." 15. **Identify budget EVs under \$50,000.** *Prompt:* "List affordable EVs under \$50,000 in Australia and rank them by range and features." --- ## ⚡ Home Charging Setup (Tasks 16-30) 16. **Evaluate home charging options.** *Prompt:* "Explain the pros and cons of Level 1 vs. Level 2 home charging for my daily driving needs." 17. **Estimate home charger installation costs.** *Prompt:* "Provide a cost breakdown for installing a Level 2 home charger in a suburban garage in Australia." 18. **Calculate home charging time.** *Prompt:* "Calculate how long it would take to fully charge a 60 kWh battery using Level 1 and Level 2 charging at home." 19. **Identify electrical requirements.** *Prompt:* "What electrical capacity and circuit upgrades might I need for Level 2 charging at home?" 20. **Find local home charger installers.** *Prompt:* "List reputable home EV charger installers near Sydney, Australia, and compare pricing." 21. **Explore smart home charging options.** *Prompt:* "Recommend smart EV chargers that can integrate with home energy management systems." 22. **Compare wall-mounted chargers.** *Prompt:* "Compare three wall-mounted EV chargers in terms of price, smart features, and reliability." 23. **Evaluate solar EV charging feasibility.** *Prompt:* "Help me determine whether solar-powered home EV charging is cost-effective based on my energy usage." 24. **Plan overnight charging schedules.** *Prompt:* "Create an optimized overnight charging schedule based on off-peak electricity rates." 25. **Learn home charging etiquette in shared spaces.** *Prompt:* "What are the best practices for EV charging in apartment complexes with shared power outlets?" 26. **Understand portable EV chargers.** *Prompt:* "Explain the advantages and limitations of using portable EV chargers for road trips." 27. **Determine cable length requirements.** *Prompt:* "How do I choose the right cable length for my home EV charger based on garage layout?" 28. **Explore dynamic load management.** *Prompt:* "Explain dynamic load management for home EV charging and whether I need it for a multi-car household." 29. **Find rebates for home charger installation.** *Prompt:* "List available rebates or grants in Australia for home EV charger installations." 30. **Calculate solar charging payback period.** *Prompt:* "Estimate the payback period for installing solar panels and using them to charge my EV." --- ## 🔌 Public Charging & Road Trips (Tasks 31-50) 31. **Map local public chargers.** *Prompt:* "Help me map the nearest public charging stations to my home and work in Sydney." 32. **Plan a 300 km road trip with charging stops.** *Prompt:* "Plan a detailed EV road trip from Sydney to Canberra, including fast charging stops and estimated charging times." 33. **Compare public charging networks.** (see [EV Essential Mobile Apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/)) *Prompt:* "Compare Chargefox, Evie Networks, and NRMA charging networks in terms of coverage and pricing." 34. **Calculate fast charging costs.** *Prompt:* "Estimate the cost to add 100 km of range at a DC fast charger using Australian electricity rates." 35. **Learn public charging etiquette.** *Prompt:* "Summarize key public charging etiquette to avoid frustration and promote fair use." 36. **Find membership benefits for charging networks.** *Prompt:* "Compare subscription and pay-as-you-go pricing models for Australian charging networks." 37. **Understand charging connector types.** *Prompt:* "List and explain the different EV charging connectors used in Australia." 38. **Plan a long-range trip across states.** *Prompt:* "Help me plan a Sydney to Melbourne EV trip with charging stops, time estimates, and charging speeds." 39. **Locate free public chargers.** *Prompt:* "Where can I find free public EV chargers in New South Wales?" 40. **Create a charging contingency plan.** *Prompt:* "Help me build a backup charging plan in case my preferred fast chargers are in use or offline." 41. **Check charging station reliability.** *Prompt:* "How can I check the real-time status and reliability of public chargers on my route?" 42. **Estimate range impact of high speeds.** *Prompt:* "Calculate how driving at 120 km/h affects range compared to driving at 100 km/h in a typical EV." 43. **Plan overnight charging at destinations.** *Prompt:* "List hotels along the Pacific Highway that offer overnight EV charging for guests." 44. **Understand Tesla Supercharger access.** *Prompt:* "Can non-Tesla EVs access Tesla Superchargers in Australia, and what is the payment process?" 45. **Calculate energy needed for a road trip.** *Prompt:* "Estimate the total energy required for a 500 km EV trip and the number of charging stops needed." 46. **Understand [idle fees at public chargers](/posts/how-idle-and-congestion-fees-are-shaping-ev-charging-etiquette/).** *Prompt:* "What are idle fees at EV charging stations, and how can I avoid them?" 47. **Plan efficient charging stops during meals.** *Prompt:* "Help me time EV charging stops to coincide with meal breaks on a long trip." 48. **Find EV-friendly attractions.** *Prompt:* "List EV-friendly tourist destinations in New South Wales that offer charging on-site." 49. **Learn to use [charging apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/).** *Prompt:* "Guide me through setting up and using the PlugShare and Chargefox apps effectively." 50. **Estimate real-world charging times.** *Prompt:* "Provide real-world DC fast charging speed estimates for a 2024 Tesla Model 3 from 20% to 80%." --- ## 💰 Costs, Incentives & Financial Planning (Tasks 51-70) 51. **Build a TCO calculator.** *Prompt:* "Help me build a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator comparing an EV to my current petrol car." 52. **Find EV purchase incentives.** *Prompt:* "List all current EV purchase incentives available in New South Wales." 53. **Calculate annual fuel savings.** *Prompt:* "Estimate my annual savings by switching from petrol to electric based on my 15,000 km yearly driving distance." 54. **Compare EV insurance options.** *Prompt:* "Compare EV insurance policies and common differences compared to petrol car coverage." 55. **Evaluate [salary packaging for EVs](/posts/how-fbt-exemption-is-driving-ev-adoption-in-australia/).** *Prompt:* "Explain how EV salary packaging works in Australia and whether it's beneficial for me." 56. **Estimate battery replacement cost.** *Prompt:* "What is the current estimated cost of replacing a 60 kWh EV battery in Australia?" 57. **Explore workplace charging incentives.** *Prompt:* "List potential tax benefits or programs supporting workplace EV charging in Australia." 58. **Estimate charger installation ROI.** *Prompt:* "Help me calculate the return on investment for installing a home charger compared to using public chargers exclusively." 59. **Track electricity rate fluctuations.** *Prompt:* "Guide me in tracking and comparing electricity rates from major Australian providers for EV charging." 60. **Understand depreciation trends.** *Prompt:* "Summarize EV depreciation trends over the last five years in Australia." 61. **Find second-hand EV incentives.** *Prompt:* "List any available rebates or tax benefits for purchasing used EVs in my state." 62. **Compare cost per km: EV vs. petrol.** *Prompt:* "Calculate my cost per kilometre driving an EV compared to my current petrol vehicle." 63. **Assess battery leasing options.** *Prompt:* "Explain how battery leasing works and whether it's available in Australia." 64. **Find loan options for EVs.** *Prompt:* "Compare green loan products available for EV purchases in Australia." 65. **Track EV maintenance costs.** *Prompt:* "Summarize typical EV maintenance costs over a five-year ownership period." 66. **Estimate energy savings with solar.** *Prompt:* "Estimate my annual energy savings if I charge my EV using rooftop solar panels." 67. **Compare leasing vs. buying an EV.** *Prompt:* "Help me compare the long-term costs of leasing vs. buying an electric vehicle." 68. **Assess fast charging network pricing.** *Prompt:* "Compare the cost per kWh across major fast charging networks in New South Wales." 69. **Evaluate fleet purchase incentives.** *Prompt:* "List government incentives available for businesses purchasing EV fleets in Australia." 70. **Calculate annual charging costs.** *Prompt:* "Estimate my annual home charging costs based on my electricity plan and driving habits." --- ## 🚗 Driving Habits & Maintenance (Tasks 71-85) 71. **Track weekly driving distance.** *Prompt:* "Help me build a weekly driving log template to track distances and charging needs." 72. **Understand EV driving modes.** *Prompt:* "Explain how Eco, Normal, and Sport modes in EVs affect range and performance." 73. **Learn regenerative braking settings.** *Prompt:* "Guide me on how to adjust regenerative braking settings for maximum energy recovery." 74. **Plan daily charging routines.** *Prompt:* "Help me schedule daily charging times based on my driving patterns and off-peak rates." 75. **Monitor real-time energy use.** *Prompt:* "Explain how to use my EV's energy dashboard to monitor efficiency in city and highway driving." 76. **Optimize tire care for EVs.** *Prompt:* "List best practices for tire maintenance and rotation schedules specific to electric vehicles." 77. **Set maintenance reminders.** *Prompt:* "Help me build a digital EV maintenance calendar with reminders for key service intervals." 78. **Track seasonal range changes.** *Prompt:* "Guide me in tracking how my EV's range changes across different weather conditions." 79. **Learn winter driving tips for EVs.** *Prompt:* "Explain how to drive and charge an EV efficiently in cold weather." 80. **Evaluate regenerative braking impact.** *Prompt:* "Help me analyze how much energy I recover through regenerative braking on daily commutes." 81. **Prepare an EV emergency kit.** *Prompt:* "What should I pack in a roadside emergency kit for electric vehicle drivers?" 82. **Understand brake system longevity.** *Prompt:* "Explain why EV brake systems typically last longer and how to maintain them properly." 83. **Log fast charging sessions.** *Prompt:* "Help me create a log to track my public fast charging sessions, costs, and charging speeds." 84. **Monitor battery health over time.** *Prompt:* "Explain how I can track and interpret battery health reports from my EV." 85. **Practice efficient driving techniques.** *Prompt:* "List practical EV driving habits that maximize range without compromising safety or comfort." --- ## 🌱 Sustainability & Community Engagement (Tasks 86-101) 86. **Calculate EV carbon savings.** *Prompt:* "Help me estimate my annual carbon footprint reduction by switching to an EV based on my driving habits." 87. **Track home charging energy sources.** *Prompt:* "How can I track whether my EV charging comes from renewable or fossil fuel energy in my region?" 88. **Explore local battery recycling options.** *Prompt:* "List battery recycling programs or facilities available in New South Wales for EV owners." 89. **Research solar charging integration.** *Prompt:* "Explain how to integrate rooftop solar with home EV charging and estimate my potential savings." 90. **Join local EV communities.** *Prompt:* "Recommend online forums, Facebook groups, or local EV clubs I can join to connect with other drivers." 91. **Participate in EV advocacy.** *Prompt:* "How can I get involved in EV advocacy groups or policy discussions in Australia?" 92. **Share EV knowledge with peers.** *Prompt:* "Help me create a checklist or simple guide to help friends and family considering EV ownership." 93. **Stay updated on EV policies.** *Prompt:* "Provide a list of reliable websites or newsletters to follow EV policy and charging infrastructure updates in Australia." 94. **Attend EV expos and events.** (see [Everything Electric Sydney 2025](/posts/everything-electric-sydney-2025/), [NRMA EV Drive Days](/posts/nrma-ev-drive-day-st-ives-2024/)) *Prompt:* "List upcoming EV expos, shows, or test drive events in Australia where I can learn and network." 95. **Explore future EV technologies.** *Prompt:* "Summarize emerging EV technologies like solid-state batteries and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) in simple terms." 96. **Track personal EV milestones.** *Prompt:* "Help me build a personal EV journal to log milestones like first road trip, first year of ownership, and total CO₂ saved." 97. **Learn about circular economy in EVs.** *Prompt:* "Explain how the circular economy applies to EVs, particularly battery reuse and recycling." 98. **Encourage workplace EV adoption.** *Prompt:* "Guide me on how to propose EV charging stations or EV fleet options at my workplace." 99. **Understand second-life battery use.** *Prompt:* "Explain how EV batteries are repurposed for second-life applications like home storage after vehicle use." 100. **Promote EV education in schools.** *Prompt:* "Help me design a basic presentation or activity to introduce school students to electric vehicles and clean transport." 101. **Reflect on my EV impact.** *Prompt:* "Help me write a personal reflection on how switching to an EV has changed my habits, costs, and environmental footprint." --- Hope any or all of these tasks and prompts help you get started with your EV journey! Happy driving! 🚗⚡
(*) ChatGPT prompts are designed to be used with the AI model to generate personalized responses and insights, but they are not intended to replace professional advice or guidance. AI models can hallucinate facts or provide incorrect information. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional before making any decisions or actions related to EV ownership.
[END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: March 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-03-march/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-03-march/) [POST DATE]: 2024-03-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: February 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-02-february/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-02-february/) [POST DATE]: 2024-02-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Everything Electric Sydney 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/everything-electric-australia/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/everything-electric-australia/) [POST DATE]: 2024-02-09 [START OF CONTENT] # 3-day Everything Electric weekend ![](/images/posts/Everything_Electric_01.jpg) "Everything Electric Australia" in Sydney Olympic Park is an evolution of last year's [Fully Charged Live](/posts/fully-charged-live-sydney/) Darling Harbour show, continued its focus on battery electric vehicles (BEVs) as well as home energy technologies, now on a larger scale. The event, sponsored by companies like Polestar, NRMA, Origin Energy, the NSW Government and many others, featured about 80 exhibitors and aimed to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies as well address psychological barriers to BEV adoption. Visitors could test-drive a variety of BEVs, including models from Polestar, Audi, Hyundai, BMW, and many others. It's a unique opportunity for Australians to compare and test-drive different models in one place. Beyond mainstream automakers, the exhibition showcased BEV conversions of classic vehicles and light commercial vehicles. E-motorcycles were represented by local manufacturers like Savic Motorcycles and Zero Motorcycles, with a notable presence of e-bikes as well. Charging infrastructure companies, solar race car displays, and electric (induction) cooking were also featured. The event included on-stage presentations (of varying quality) by industry experts, and YouTube personalities, covering various BEV-related topics, along with 50 live sessions discussing subjects like BEV myth-busting and reducing carbon emissions. I went Friday (only) though had planned to maybe go for two of the three days, but to be honest, the panel disccussions were not that interesting (having a YT channel doesn't turn you into a battery chemistry scientist). It would be better to have two people on your panel discussion who actually know what they are talking about, than having another two present who waffle about and suck up all oxygen in the room. I had seen most of the cars before. Except the electric Lotus (a Volvo cousin), and electric Polaris. I test drove a BMW i4, just to compare against my [Volvo](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/), and that interior is just not for me. Also way too many buttons. Like, a P button and a P lever? A stop/start button? And then those screen graphics. Meh. What I did love was Peugeot's e-3008 instrument cluster layered graphics, that looked really neat and modern and not like a 90s video game on the BMW. ![](/images/posts/Everything_Electric_02.jpg) --- ![](/images/posts/Everything_Electric_03.jpg) --- ![](/images/posts/Everything_Electric_04.jpg) Check out the full [**Flickr album**](https://www.flickr.com/photos/halans/albums/72177720314695458). See also [Everything Electric Sydney 2025](/posts/everything-electric-sydney-2025/) for the next year's show. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: January 2024 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-01-january/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2024/2024-01-january/) [POST DATE]: 2024-01-25 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: December 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-12-december/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-12-december/) [POST DATE]: 2023-12-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/) [POST DATE]: 2023-12-15 [START OF CONTENT] Decided to replace my [Tesla Model 3 SR+](/posts/adjo-tesla/) (and the [10,000 km milestone](/posts/tesla-10k/) along the way) and upgrade to a Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin Ultimate (aka EX40 for MY25). This is a post where I collect my first impressions of the XC40 Recharge, and compare it to my previous [Tesla M3](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/). # That new car smell Traded in my MY21 Tesla Model 3 SR+ for a Volvo MY24 XC40 Recharge Twin Ultimate (ex-demo). The Tesla trade-in value was on the lower end of what I had hoped for though, I could have gotten more if I had gone private. But it’s just convenient to do a dealer trade-in. ## History The Volvo XC40 model was introduced at the end of 2017 (the original Tesla Model 3 was also from 2017), and had a number of minor refreshes over the years. It has petrol, diesel and (plug-in) hybrid models, and since 2019, a battery electric model, both in front-wheel and all-wheel drive. The diesel engine got discontinued, as was the petrol AWD I believe. As you can see, the XC40 [started out as Volvo Concept 40.1](https://www.volvocars.com/au/v/cars/concept-models/concept-40) is not a purpose build BEV vehicle, but rather a transition vehicle. This same Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) platform though is also used for the C40 model (which is only available as EV) and by Polestar for its Polestar 2 model, which in fact started as the [Volvo Concept 40.2](https://www.volvocars.com/au/v/cars/concept-models/concept-40). Hence why the XC40 Recharge, C40 and Polestar 2 have a transmission tunnel, which is used to house batteries, missing out on a flat floor in the back. ([More about the design philosophy](https://autodesignmagazine.com/en/2018/01/volvo-xc40-personalita-inedita/)) 2023 saw a refresh of the MY24 XC40 Recharge version with an updated front, a new, slightly larger NMC battery and faster charging, and a new motor layout, in single rear-wheel drive or Twin all-wheel drive with Asynchronous Induction motor (110kW) in the front (which is disengaged most of the time, improving efficiency), and Synchronous Permanent Magnet (190kW) in the back. The same changes were introduced in the C40 and Polestar 2. This may well be the last refresh for the XC40 model, as Volvo is phasing out ICE cars, and they introduced a new EV-only EX line of models with the EX90 and EX30 (deliveries starting second half of 2024). These are designed from the ground up to be electric only, with the added efficiency that comes with that (efficiency, interior space). The 2019 XC40 Recharge is by many considered their first EV, but Volvo had a limited run of the [C30 battery electric vehicle](https://www.autoblog.com/2011/04/05/first-drive-volvo-c30-electric-lovely-except-sky-high-price/) in 2011, which I assume they learned a lot from. For reference, up to then, Tesla had only been manufacturing the Roadster, and debuted the Model S mid 2012. By the way, XC stands for “Cross Country”, applying to their SUV and wagon models, having a higher stance (than their sedans). I like the XC40’s blocky, muscular stance, broad shoulders, and its two-tone colour combo. I think the Bright Dusk and black roof is just a classy, fine looking car. Even after 6 years, with the slight tweaks on the headlights, the Thor’s hammer daylights and indicators, it still looks modern and sophisticated (I think). Most people wouldn’t notice this being an EV. The lack of grille at the front is the only giveaway. Lots of EVs, like Kias and Hyundais, BYDs, the MG4, they look too “futuristic” and they will look dated very soon. I drove a C40 once on a [NRMA EV day](/posts/nrma-ev-drive-day-st-ives-2024/) (for 10-15 minutes), as well as did a test drive of a 2022 Polestar 2 Performance (for 30 minutes). I rented a 2022 Single motor Polestar 2 for week (doing 761km) and a Cupra Born (as a replacement for Polestar 2) for a week (doing 2312km) while on holiday in Europe — see [Electrifying Europe](/posts/ev-europe-trip/). The Polestar was a fine car, build like a tank (just like Volvo) and smooth, but the Cupra Born was a more enjoyable, fun drive. The software on the Polestar was far better than that on the Cupra Born though. And I’m not a fan of the Cupra’s looks, it’s not my thing. ## Pricing The Volvo XC40 Recharge Single motor (Plus package) starts at about AU$85.000 driveaway (significantly more than a base Tesla M3/MY RWD), while the Twin motor (incl Ultimate package) is AU$94.500 driveaway. For comparison, a Tesla MY single motor is AU$70.800 driveaway, but twin motor Performance is AU$99.300 driveaway, with optional paint options, and Advanced AutoPilot and Full Self Drive options (which you can pay for, but can’t actually use in Australia at the time of writing…). The MYP is a lot faster (top speed) than the XC40 Twin, but you get the same Tesla (interior) finish as the base model, which at this pricepoint is staggering. The pricing of a Polestar 2 is very similar to the Volvo pricing, but with a bunch of optional packs to choose from. The disadvantage for me of Polestar is the fact they don’t do trade-ins, and you can’t service a Polestar at all Volvo dealers (only ones that are licensed), so It meant that I had to get it serviced in Sydney or Newcastle, which is an inconvenience (like having the Tesla serviced in Chatswood only) being on the Central Coast. Not that EVs need much servicing, but I did get two Tesla (warranty) services in the 2+ years I had mine. Talking about Servicing, the Volvo comes with 5 years or 150.000km of servicing included (new windscreen wipers, break fluid, safety checks…), 8 years or 150.000km on the high-voltage battery, 5 years roadside assistance, 5 year unlimited km warranty, 4 years Digital Services data subscription, and 8 years of Volvo On Call service (with Automatic Crash Notification, Stolen Vehicle Tracking,…) (Tesla comes with 4 years warranty, and a limited roadside assistance, 8 years for the battery. You also pay AU$10 a month for Premium Connectivity data plan after the first year) ## Build The car is build like a tank, just like any other Volvo. The doors give you a very satisfying thunk sound when closing. The dashboard is solid. The seats are comfortable, giving lots of support. The tailgate comes down reassuringly. You’re not skimping on anything just because it’s an EV. It is day and night difference to my Tesla M3. Tesla’s efficiency comes at the cost of a solid, quality build. It is 500kg lighter, which means you get lighter, simpler seats, a frameless door, a very light A-pillar cover (which you can simply press in) for example, a single power strut which struggles to close the booth, a light paint job,… The XC40 on the other hand oozes quality. People tend to compare Tesla to other luxury brands like BMW, Audi, Volvo,…, but really they shouldn’t, you can’t. ## Drive The drive is how you’d expect a Volvo to drive, I suppose. It’s lovely, relaxed, refined. Even more so as an EV. I missed the higher seating position of an SUV in the M3. Having a better view of traffic around you, makes you feel more relaxed. I didn’t know that was such a big deal (for me), until I got back into an SUV, vs a sedan driving position. It’s also easier, effortless to get in/out. One pedal driving is as good as on the Tesla. Although during my testdrive, I didn’t think so. But maybe I didn’t set it up correctly then, or an OTA update changed that. Once you’re used to one pedal driving, you can’t go back. Regen is indicated on the right hand side of the instrument cluster. The XC40 eats up any bumps and potholes it encounters. You glide across speedbumps. The M3 would pass on any bump straight up your spine. But the M3 is more fun cornering for sure, doing Old Pacific Highway, or Kangaroo Valley. I’ll be doing that slower in the XC40. But I’d also open up the sunroof and let in the sound of birds and cicadas. (Opening a window is not quite the same). Cornering is not the XC40’s forte, as you’d expect of a heavy SUV, but as you get out of the corner, and put the pedal down, it goes… Just like at traffic lights. Efficiency though is far lower than the M3. The XC40 is a bit of a brick (Cx 0.32), vs the slick and slippery M3 (Cx 0.23). It’s also far heavier (nearly 500kg). My average after 2+ years was 13.4kWh/100km (or 7.4km/kWh) on the M3. After 5000km on the XC40, I’m at 18.0kWh/100km (or 5.55km/kWh). My fortnightly office trip from Central Coast to Darling Harbour is about 100km, and that’s 17.4kWh/100km (5.7km/kWh) at an 81km/h average (about half the trip is at 110km/h highway speed). This would give me 410km - 445km on the 78kWh XC40 battery. The bigger XC40 battery also means I can only trickle charge 20% overnight, vs 30% on the M3 54kWh battery. Not a big deal for me. But yes, a smaller battery and more efficiency made the M3 cheaper to run than the XC40. If only I had solar panels, it wouldn’t matter. Ground clearance of the Recharge is 175mm, compared to 211mm of the XC40 petrol versions, or 140mm for the Tesla M3. The XC40 Recharge has an official wading depth of 45cm, as documented by Volvo. Tesla M3 doesn’t have an official wading depth which didn’t stop people driving through water 60cm deep or more, probably voiding their warranty if anything went wrong. There is no eco or sport mode. There is an offroad mode though, providing enhanced all-wheel drive, and hill descent control, available at up to 40km/h. Here’s a great [overview of it’s offroad capabilities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ADjqzkK9uY). Side mirrors have boomerang blind spot indicators, and are auto-dimming. The XC40 has all the expected tech safety features, including Pilot Assist, and a 360 bird-eye view using four of its cameras. It’s not immune to ghost-breaking, just like on the M3, although it doesn’t break as hard as on the M3. ## Interior I love the interior. It’s understated. They call it Swedish minimalism. Compared to Tesla’s minimalism, it isn’t. But compared to other European or Asian brands, sure is. I drove a BMW i4 recently, and compared to that, the XC40 is an oasis of calm and elegance . Seats are comfortable, supportive, superior to the Tesla M3 seats. Plastics used are decent, solid. The steering wheel is chunky, with the right buttons at your fingertips. It has classic stalks, which feel solid to use (in contrast to both the Tesla M3's and even BMW i4's). I say classic, as it has all possible headlights and wiper settings right there on the stalks. No need to go through a menu to change the wiper speed. The 9” center screen is responsive, and has a good resolution. The wireless charging pad is a bit finicky (though it could be my iPhone case). The glove box has, what the British call, a curry hook, to hang up your takeaway food bag. You can remotely fold down the backseats' headrests to get a better view out the back. The Ultimate edition has topography inspired, translucent back-lit inlays that create a soothing glow in the cabin, when the lights turn on. Love that, so different to anything else out there. The car has these anchor points in the roof, which allows it to attach accessories, like a divider net, between the booth and backseat, or between the front seats and the back when backseats are folded down. Handy when taking the dog in the back. ## Software The Volvo uses Android Automotive OS (AAOS), a variation of Google's Android operating system, tailored for its use in vehicle dashboards. Introduced in March 2017, the platform was developed by Google and Intel, together with car manufacturers such as Volvo and Audi. It comes with Google Maps for navigation, both on the 9” center screen and the instrument cluster. Google Maps will also tell you your expected SOC (state of charge) at the destination, just like with Tesla. And it is very accurate And a dedicated charging shortcut to show nearby chargers. The instrument cluster shows speedometer on the left, and energy use/regen dial on the right, with a maps display in the middle. The instrument cluster graphics are elegant and minimal, in a calm blue colour palette. You have access to the Google Play store where you can add AAOS designated apps, like Audible, or Prime Video to watch movies or TV series (when parked), just like in the Tesla, though on a smaller screen. The selection isn’t big for AAOS apps, but there’s Waze, YouTube, Spotify, PlugShare, games, and a full browser, where you can load ABC iView or SBSonDemand. Come to think of it, more apps than you can get on Tesla. Currently, Volvo uses Singtel as their mobile provider. Not Optus, but its parent company, Singtel. So yes, it looks like your connected from Singapore, for example in the Prime app (“You on holiday?”, but it still streams). I was told by the dealer Volvo was looking into getting an actual local partner for their mobile connection. If you want to use Disney+ from the browser, you will need to hotspot from your phone as Disney+ blocks roaming. On the center console, there’s a physical, backlit, homescreen button (where a 3 seconds press gives you cleaning mode, and 20 seconds restarts the system), that brings you to a focused home screen with four sections, with each section showing its last used app. There’s also a separate app overview screen like on a tablet. Then there’s also the car functions screen which seems separate from AAOS. This is where you change audio settings, preferences etc. It has a dedicated range app/screen, showing a maximum (hypermiling, turning everything off) and minimum (flooring it) expected range and current expected range. It’s good to know the absolute minimum range you still have. It also has an outdoor air quality app. One of the AAOS 4 homescreen options is (wired) Apple CarPlay. You hook up your phone to the CarPlay designated USB-C port, the other port is for power only. I love the convenience of CarPlay, the familiarity. But only certain iOS apps work on CarPlay. It is perfect for a 9” screen though. Overal, the software works well, it’s simple and familiar. To be honest, Polestar’s integration of AAOS is neater and more modern looking, true. I believe I've had three OTA updates so far over the last three months, which is nice. What is missing though is Android Auto support, pretty strange considering the AAOS basis this runs on. I’m sure there are more Android Auto apps available than AAOS apps. ## App The car also has an app, for iOS and I assume for Android. It allows you to remotely unlock/lock your car, turn on or schedule the air conditioning, and schedule charging. It shows the location of your car, SOC, temperature (outdoor only), the odometer and average energy consumption, car details (VIN) and car software version. It has shortcuts to get assistance, and shows your current subscriptions (connected services). I wish it allowed for battery preconditioning, would show lifetime charging stats, differentiated between home and public chargers. Tesla's app in far superior in comparison. ## Sunroof I actually hated the M3 sunroof. As driver, you don’t get to enjoy the view. Sure it makes the interior lighter. It also burns the top of your skull in the Sydney sun. Even with the (optional) shade attached, you could still feel the sun on top of your head. The car parked at home would get 56C. The interior overheating protection is supposed to kick in at 40C, but if the M3 was in a deep sleep (not sure, but when parked for 24h?), that wouldn’t kick in. The XC40 has a traditional moonroof (I didn’t know there was such a thing as moonroof vs sunroof), with a build in shade. It can vent, or it can open up the front half. Not something you’d use in Sydney summer time (except to quickly vent hot air), but when Sydney winter time comes, I expect to open it up for sure. The operation is with capacitive swiping and tapping, and needs a bit of getting used to. C40 and Polestar 2’s roofs don’t open (as such, they’re sunroofs). So far, the hottest it got inside parked at home was 42C. # Conclusion I love my XC40. It's practical, it's fast, it's comfortable, it's safe, it's efficient enough. It's a Volvo. It's a keeper. EDIT: I’ve been told that a moonroof is a sunroof with a glass panel, and a sunroof is a metal panel (which slide open)? EDIT: Start of 2024, Volvo announced a namechange of the XC40 Recharge to just EX40, in line with the EX90 and EX30 EV only models, which lack the Recharge monniker. The petrol versions remain XC40. EDIT: I called my Tesla, Thelma. My Volvo is called Greta. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Adjö, sayōnara, adiós, goodbye [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/adjo-tesla/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/adjo-tesla/) [POST DATE]: 2023-12-14 [START OF CONTENT] # Bye Bye Tesla In late December 2023, I traded-in my 2021 [Tesla Model 3 Standard Range+](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/), which I had driven for nearly 28,000 km (see also my [10k milestone post](/posts/tesla-10k/)). Introduced in 2017, it was the most affordable option at the time (2021), priced just below $60,000 AUD. The car, featuring an LFP battery and manufactured in China, boasted a sleek design. Although the color options were limited, I chose a dark grey. Its performance was impressive, offering a smooth ride, minimalist interior, and it was the quickest vehicle I had ever owned, a result of its electric vehicle (EV) nature, not a specific aim. The car was also quite efficient, with an estimated range of about 420km, though I suspect the actual range was closer to 350km. It featured a spacious trunk with ample under-floor storage and a large 'frunk' (front trunk). ## Charging Network The **[Tesla Supercharging](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/)** network was a significant perk of owning the car, including some complimentary charging sessions, as was access to numerous Tesla destination chargers, often free of charge. The charging process was seamlessly integrated with the car's system; the vehicle's identification number was automatically recognized upon plugging in, and the cost of charging displayed on the center console. This seamless integration is a hallmark of the Tesla experience. It's puzzling why established car manufacturers haven't adopted this approach, considering their extensive network of dealerships could serve as potential charging hubs. I started out at 426km of range, and ended at 402km, having used 3.732 kWh total energy. This resulted in an average consumption of 135 kWh/km (or 7.4 km/kWh), which is impressive considering I wasn't specifically trying to maximize efficiency. My vehicle was equipped with an LFP battery, allowing me to regularly charge it to 100% without concern. At home, I could conveniently slow charge overnight, adding about 40% (20 kWh) to the battery between 10 pm and 8 am, taking advantage of lower electricity rates. This practice ensured I always had access to the full driving range. This contrasts with other types of lithium-ion batteries, like NMC batteries used in the Long Range and Performance models, which prefer not to be fully charged to 100% to maintain battery health; typically, they are charged only up to 90%. The Model 3 is a sedan with a low profile, which presents some challenges in getting in and out. Its low clearance became a notable issue for me, as I frequently scraped the bottom of the car on my driveway due to the angle of departure, a problem I hadn't foreseen when purchasing the car. Consequently, I had to adopt a specific angle when reversing out of the driveway. The Performance model of the car has an even lower clearance. ## Screen & software I didn't encounter any issues with the **screen-based instrumentation and controls** in the car. Adapting to glancing sideways to check speed was easy, though a Heads-Up Display (HUD) would be a significant improvement for many users. Additionally, the interface could benefit from more vibrant colors as it felt a bit plain. The **3D car display**, which shows nearby pedestrians and objects like traffic cones, initially seemed impressive. However, its practical value while driving is limited and it often occupies valuable screen space. Its animations can be erratic, especially at traffic lights. Over time, the charm of this feature fades, and it seems unnecessary since attention should be focused on the road, not the display. The car's software includes some useful features like Valet mode for speed limitation, PIN code for driving, and speed restrictions for lending the car, especially to younger drivers. While I may have overlooked other minor features, there are also some less practical ones, like a whoopee cushion app or a fireplace display. The inclusion of streaming apps like Netflix and Disney+ is appealing for their use on the large screen, but they require separate subscriptions. Additionally, charging stops are typically too short to fully enjoy a show or movie, leading to a preference for home viewing instead. The car has an internet browser, but it doesn't support playing videos with sound, so streaming from third-party platforms like ABC iView isn't possible. During my two years of use, I found the Netflix app, and to some extent the Disney+ app, became increasingly difficult to navigate due to an Intel Atom-based entertainment system and insufficient memory. This issue seemed to worsen with the growing size and number of images in their catalogs. ## Cameras The **dashcam and Sentry Mode** features in the car are invaluable, though you might not realize their importance until you need them. It's surprising that other car manufacturers, despite having 360-degree cameras, haven't implemented similar features, particularly the dashcam aspect. However, it's important to note that Sentry Mode can consume up to 3% of the battery daily. Regarding the **auto-wipers**, they are the most problematic I've ever experienced. The lack of control over the wiping frequency is a significant drawback. The system is either on auto-mode or not, often wiping too frequently or too quickly. In other vehicles, there are typically up to five auto settings available through a physical control, so the inability to adjust the wiping interval in the Tesla's software is puzzling. This issue is also linked to the vision system, where even a couple of raindrops can trigger the wipers, leading to a frustrating driving experience. Although there have been updates over the years to how and when the wiper selector appears on the screen, and the 2023 Holiday update reportedly made some changes in this area, I haven't been able to find specific details about these changes online. The addition of the blind spot camera view in 2021 was a step in the right direction, seemingly inspired by features in vehicles like the Ioniq 5, which displayed it on the driver's instrument cluster—a more logical location. In contrast, Tesla's placement of this display on the center console is less than ideal, as it often requires drivers to look away from their intended direction. However, the 2023 Holiday update improved this by introducing an orange light indicator for objects in the blind spot, a feature that would have been beneficial from the start. ## Auto Pilot The **Auto Pilot** feature, encompassing adaptive cruise control and lane assist, was a standout feature, particularly for highway driving, and has become a must-have for me in any future car. While I don't have a basis for comparison with other systems, its performance on highways is commendable. However, its use on secondary roads is less reliable, often resulting in unexpected braking for stationary objects or oncoming traffic, which can be hazardous for following vehicles. Many drivers are unaware that Auto Pilot is primarily designed for multi-lane highways, leading to frequent misunderstandings and potentially dangerous situations. Therefore, when driving behind a Tesla, it's wise to maintain extra distance to anticipate any sudden braking. The design of the A-pillars in the vehicle also poses some visibility challenges due to their width, angle, and length. Extra caution is required when turning and checking for pedestrians or other cars. In my initial days of driving the Tesla, I experienced a near miss attributed to these obstructive pillars, though it's unclear if it was the car's automatic braking or my own reaction that averted a collision. ## Glass Roof The **glass roof** in the car is an impressive feature at first glance, but as a driver, there's little opportunity to appreciate it. Moreover, its tendency to heat up significantly is a drawback, especially considering that Tesla designs its cars in sunny California. I've recorded interior temperatures reaching 56°C. The Cabin Overheating Protection feature is meant to activate at 40°C, but it fails to do so if the car is in "sleep" mode. Consequently, I often found myself manually turning on the air conditioning to cool the interior once the car was awake and monitoring the temperature. I purchased the Tesla roof shade, which provides some relief, but the sensation of the sun's heat on my head was still noticeable. Overall, I am not a fan of the full glass roof, especially since it doesn’t open. ## Mobile App On the other hand, the Tesla mobile app is outstanding. It offers extensive car information and remote functionality, and it operates smoothly. The app effectively serves as the car key, enabling you to drive without needing anything else. It's a highlight of the Tesla experience, offering remarkable seamlessness. Regarding the car's locking mechanism, the Model 3 locks itself quite rapidly, seemingly within about five seconds, though I haven't timed it precisely. It's responsive enough to unlock when I touch the door handle, indicating it knows I'm nearby, but the quick locking can be a minor annoyance. However, this feature does provide the assurance that the car is secure when walking away. ## Service During my ownership, I submitted three **warranty service** requests. The first was for a squeaking sound in the driver's seat, which was quite bothersome. The second involved replacing the charging port following a warning message that prevented me from fast charging. The third was for replacing an o-ring in the trunk's power strut, which always seemed underpowered and struggled to function properly. The service experience was satisfactory, and I received a $60 Uber voucher (as far as I recall) for transportation to and from work (from Chatswood to CBD). However, I was disappointed not to be invited for a scheduled service after 24 months, especially since I hadn't reached the 30,000 km mark yet. Additionally, there were persistent **squeaking noises** inside the car, particularly noticeable on highways with rough surfaces. These sounds were near my head on the passenger side and somewhere in the back, which was unexpected for a car just two years old. It was also challenging to describe these issues in a service request, especially when they didn't occur during city driving. In summary, while the car had its merits, it wasn't exceptional. It's an influential vehicle, but not quite a luxury car (unlike perhaps the Model S). The overall build felt somewhat cheap and light, which is arguably efficient given its 1.7-ton weight. The interior finish, especially the A-pillar cover, felt inexpensive and misaligned, easily depressible with a finger. The seats were mediocre, lacking sufficient support during cornering or comfort for long journeys. The backseat had a cardboard-like feel. All these minor issues collectively detracted from the overall experience. And then there are That Man's shenanigans, which I simply do not want to be associated with. Bye bye Tesla. Hello [Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/). (_sure, I will be using the Tesla Supercharger network on long drives, when I need to and can't avoid it_) EDIT Feb 2024: I've since been able to have a look at the new 2024 Model 3 (Highland), and yes, the interior is slightly better quality, the A-pillar feel is more robust, and it now has a second trunk power strut which makes it sound more confident closing the trunk. But then that new interior mood lighting just ugly/tacky, and the removal of the stalks is, argh, no words,... [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: November 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-11-november/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-11-november/) [POST DATE]: 2023-11-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: October 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-10-october/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-10-october/) [POST DATE]: 2023-10-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Electrifying Europe - 3 Week trip [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-europe-trip/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-europe-trip/) [POST DATE]: 2023-09-29 [START OF CONTENT] # Electrifying Europe: Three Weeks, Two EVs, One ICE ## European trip with EV rentals Recently, I wrapped up a three-week journey across Europe, during which electric vehicles (EVs) were my primary mode of transport for two out of the three weeks. ## Polestar 2 ![](https://halans.com/orig-content/uploads/2023/ev-europe-polestar.jpg) During the initial week, I opted for a Polestar 2 rental via Europcar. They graciously included a ShellRecharge card, designed for hassle-free EV charging. It was a disappointment, however, to discover that credit card payments via this card were exclusive to the UK. For other parts of Europe, including Belgium, they catered only to bank debits. Luckily, the many DC rapid charging networks across Europe do accommodate tap-to-pay credit card transactions. Still ShellRecharge might want to expand its CC horizons. ![CC tap-to-pay](https://halans.com/orig-content/uploads/2023/ev-europe-cc.jpg) The majority of my charging in that first week took place in a quaint Flemish town, conveniently close to my family’s residence. I utilized a Smoov-Allego AC charger, which was credit card-friendly through its app. A snag I hit was that the app wasn't accessible from the Australian iOS AppStore, but thankfully, I had a backup Belgian AppStore account. ![](https://halans.com/orig-content/uploads/2023/ev-europe-parking.jpg) It's noteworthy to mention the impressive spread of AC and DC fast chargers in Belgium. They're omnipresent – from small towns to motorways. Although operated by different entities, these networks harmoniously interconnect. Having an account with one often means accessibility to all, although "roaming" fees do apply. I invested in a Plugsurfing tag for €10, which boasted access to the expansive European charging network (550K charging points). But like several apps, the Plugsurfing application remains elusive on the Australian AppStore. As a tourist, this limitation perplexes me, as it necessitates having a European address to set up an account. On the subject of the base Polestar's range performance, it catered perfectly to my shorter rides. Its embedded Google Auto software and the compatibility with Apple CarPlay made for a smooth experience. ## Back to ICE Transitioning to week two in Crete, I changed gears and went for an internal combustion engine car (well, there was no EV option). I had set my sights on a Volvo XC60 via Avis but was handed the keys to a Mercedes GLB 200 instead. While both are luxury brands, the latter didn't seem to match up to the Volvo's class. Crete's winding and often narrow pathways presented a driving challenge, compounded by the unique driving habits of locals, including some audacious overtaking maneuvers. The Mercedes, though sturdy, was marred by its temperamental Apple CarPlay integration. It often left me directionless due to inconsistent connectivity. ## Cupra Born ![](https://halans.com/orig-content/uploads/2023/ev-europe-trip.jpg) Upon returning to Belgium for the third week, a surprise awaited: instead of the expected Polestar 2, I found myself behind the wheel of a Cupra Born. This switch was bittersweet. I wouldn't have picked the Born myself, but it proved more exhilarating to drive than the base Polestar 2, though its software interface lacked intuitive flair. Armed with my Plugsurfing RFID tag, I effortlessly hopped between various charging networks in France. ![](https://halans.com/orig-content/uploads/2023/ev-europe-cupra.jpg) A notable lowpoint was Deauville, where I had my first charging problem. Some of their DC charging points where offline. One was showing a communication error (which I assume applied to the others too). ![](https://halans.com/orig-content/uploads/2023/ev-europe-ami.jpg) Deauville was also home to a unique Citroen Ami rental service at €29/day, with a collection of Amis parked on the street. ## Conclusion Throughout my road escapade, my DC fast-charging expenses tallied up to €142 for 226 kWh, translating to an average of €0.65 per kWh. More rural AC charging stations set me back €107 for 231 kWh, coming out to €0.46 per kWh. In retrospection, while the Cupra Born offered a delightful ride, my heart still leans towards my 2021 [Tesla Model 3 SR+](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/) for its unparalleled efficiency and streamlined software. Yet, when it comes to sheer comfort and craftsmanship, both the Polestar 2 and Cupra Born stand a cut above. It's just that the Tesla brand starts to have a bad smell about it, and I'm not sure I want to be associated with it anymore. _Postscript: I traded the Tesla in shortly after — see [Bye Bye Tesla](/posts/adjo-tesla/) and the [Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/) writeup. For a later EV road trip, see [Canberra Winter Trip 2025](/posts/canberra-winter-trip-2025/)._ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: September 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-09-september/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-09-september/) [POST DATE]: 2023-09-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: August 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-08-august/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-08-august/) [POST DATE]: 2023-08-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Central Coast New Chargers [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/) [POST DATE]: 2023-08-09 [START OF CONTENT] # Planned new chargers on the NSW lower [Central Coast](/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/) Surprised/excited to see new chargers showing up on Plugshare. On closer inspection though, they are marked as "Coming Soon" though... They are part of the [NSW ELECTRIC VEHICLE FAST CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE MASTER PLAN](https://nswmaps.evenergi.com). - New [Tesla Superchargers](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) at 5 Charlton St, Woy Woy NSW 2256. This would be the second Supercharger on the Central Coast, between Sydney and Newcastle. But while the Tuggerah one may be limited to Tesla owners, this one would be open to all as it received NSW subsidies. "_Each charging bay will have a rated output of at least 250kW, with 2+ bays having a rated output of 350kW._" - [bp pulse](/posts/bp-pulse/) chargers at 481 Pacific Hwy, Wyoming NSW 2250. "_This site will have one 360kW charging unit to service two bays and one 150kW charging unit to service two bays._" - [Ampol](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) chargers at M1 North Bound Freeway, Wyong NSW, 2259. "_One 335kW charger will service every two bays at this station._" - Ampol chargers at Bateau Bay Square, 12 Bay Village Rd, Bateau Bay NSW 2261. "_One 335kW charger will service every two bays at this station._" Additionally, there's an Ampol Foodery charger in West Gosford, ~~under construction since June~~ now. Still need plenty more... ![New chargers](/images/posts/map_newchargers.png) _new chargers in yellow, Tesla SC in red, other existing chargers in blue_ EDIT 2025: Early Q2 of 2025 (!), these planned chargers are now live, and the Woy Woy Supercharger moved to Gosford (makes more sense), open to all EVs, not just Tesla. The Wyoming bp charger is also live, but the Ampol Bateau Bay and M1 ones are still missing in action. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: July 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-07-july/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-07-july/) [POST DATE]: 2023-07-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: June 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-06-june/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-06-june/) [POST DATE]: 2023-06-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Countering LCA FUD in renewable energy and EVs [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/lca-fud/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/lca-fud/) [POST DATE]: 2023-06-23 [START OF CONTENT] # Countering FUD FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt". It is a communication tactic used to spread negative or misleading information about a product, service, or idea with the intention of creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt among consumers or the target audience. The purpose of using FUD is to undermine the credibility or reputation of a competitor or an alternative solution and to sway opinions in favor of the FUD promoter. Key characteristics of FUD include: 1. Fear: FUD aims to instill fear in the minds of consumers by highlighting potential risks or negative consequences associated with a competing product or idea. It may exaggerate or overstate the risks to create a sense of alarm. (Exploding batteries) 2. Uncertainty: FUD exploits uncertainties or lack of clarity around a product's features, capabilities, or performance. By casting doubt on the reliability or effectiveness of the competition, FUD seeks to make consumers hesitant about choosing alternatives. (Range anxiety) 3. Doubt: FUD sows doubt in the minds of consumers by questioning the legitimacy, safety, or value of a competitor's offering. It may raise hypothetical concerns without providing concrete evidence. 4. Misinformation: FUD may involve spreading false or misleading information to create negative perceptions about a rival product or concept. 5. Competitive Strategy: FUD is often used as a competitive strategy by companies or individuals seeking to gain an advantage in the marketplace or promote their own products by undermining the competition. 6. Emotional Manipulation: FUD appeals to emotions and biases to influence decision-making, playing on consumers' anxieties and concerns. 7. Rebuttal Challenges: Responding to FUD can be challenging for the target, as it often involves dispelling misconceptions, providing evidence, and addressing emotional responses. FUD can be encountered in various industries, including technology, politics, finance, and marketing. As consumers, it's essential to critically evaluate information and seek credible sources before making decisions based on fear, uncertainty, or doubt. For (automotive) companies, adopting transparent and evidence-based communication (like [LCA](/posts/life-cycle-assessment/)'s, see also [Car Manufacturing LCA](/posts/car-manufacturing-life-cycle-assessment/)) can help counteract the effects of FUD and build trust with customers. ## Greenwashing The other side if FUD is of course _Greenwashing_, which is a deceptive marketing or communication practice used by companies to portray themselves or their products as environmentally friendly or sustainable when, in reality, they may not be. To avoid falling victim to greenwashing, consumers should look for credible certifications, conduct research, and support companies with transparent and genuine sustainability practices. Being informed and critical about environmental claims can help ensure that consumers contribute to positive environmental change rather than inadvertently supporting misleading practices. [Environmental and sustainability claims](https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Environmental%20and%20sustainability%20claims%20-%20draft%20guidance%20for%20business_web.pdf) under the Australian Consumer Law. ## Greenhushing When a business intentionally hides information about its sustainability practices to evade scrutiny and criticism, that's called _Greenhushing_. Companies may refrain from openly discussing the positive steps they are taking towards sustainability, fearing that any imperfections could be misinterpreted. As a consequence, consumers and stakeholders are left uninformed, uneducated and uninspirated about the actual progress being made. ## Bullshit Asymmetry Principle The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, commonly known as [Brandolini's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law), is a succinct observation regarding the nature of discussions and debates, particularly in the context of information, misinformation, and the effort required to counteract false or misleading claims. The principle was coined by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer and consultant. The principle essentially states: >"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." In other words, false or misleading information can be generated and spread relatively easily, often without rigorous research or evidence. However, debunking or refuting such false claims requires significantly more effort, time, and resources. This principle highlights the inherent asymmetry between creating baseless or misleading content and the resources needed to provide accurate information that corrects or counters these claims. The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is a reminder of the challenges faced by those who aim to counter misinformation and promote accurate understanding in various contexts, including debates, social media, news, and public discourse. It emphasizes the importance of critical thinking, fact-checking, and responsible communication to combat the spread of misinformation and ensure well-informed discussions. ## The Underestimated Potential of Battery Electric Vehicles to Reduce Emissions [The Underestimated Potential of Battery Electric Vehicles to Reduce Emissions](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435119302715) (Hoestra/Eindhoven University of Technology) ([Gruene Bundestag - German](https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/fileadmin/media/gruenebundestag_de/themen_az/mobilitaet/pdf/200831-Studie_EAuto_versus_Verbrenner_CO2.pdf)) [Comparing the lifetime green house gas emissions of electric cars with the emissions of cars using gasoline or diesel](https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/comparing-the-lifetime-green-house-gas-emissions-of-electric-cars) The TU/e researchers identified six methodological weaknesses that unfairly portrayed electric cars in a negative light. Initially, the estimated CO2 emissions from battery production were too high at 175 kg per kWh. However, with more efficient production and improved life cycle assessment, the realistic figure now stands at 75 kg per kWh. Previous studies assumed a battery service life of 150,000 km, but the TU/e accepts 250,000 km, which can be even higher, as this Tesla Model S hit [the 1 million kilometer mark](https://thedriven.io/2019/11/29/tesla-model-s-busts-ev-myths-with-historic-1-million-kilometres-driven/) in 2019, and [the 1 million miles mark](https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/18/1-million-miles-in-a-tesla/) in 2022, on the same battery (but going through multiple motors though). Furthermore, studies mistakenly assumed a constant share of renewable energies in electricity production over the years, not taking into account additional RE coming online. To determine the fuel consumption of combustion engines, the Eindhoven team relied on realworld measurements, as opposed to the WLTP standard. And diesel and gasoline _production emissions_ were underestimated too, contributing to a 24% and 30% increase in CO2 emissions for the ICE cars, respectively. The sixth issue lies in the lack of projection. While all aspects of electric car production and operation are expected to improve, the same progress cannot be expected for combustion engines, which may remain stagnant in terms of efficiency and emissions. ## A global comparison of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of combustion engine and electric passenger cars This study is a life cycle assessment (LCA) of the GHG emissions of passenger cars in China, Europe, India, and the United States, four markets that are home to the majority of global new passenger car sales and reflect much of the variety in the global vehicle market. The study also analyzed the development of the average blend of biofuels and biogas in fossil diesel, gasoline, and natural gas based on current policies and projected supply. [A global comparison of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of combustion engine and electric passenger cars - PDF](https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/electric-cars/2310712d1653112667-things-consider-when-buying-electric-car-global-lca-passenger-cars-jul2021-0.pdf) ([ICCT](https://theicct.org)) ## When, where and how can the electrification of passenger cars reduce greenhouse gas emissions? [Paul Scherrer Institute](https://www.psi.ch/en)'s (part of [Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research](https://sccer-mobility.ch)) _[Carculator](https://www.carculator.psi.ch/start)_ is an open-source, comprehensive and transparent life cycle assessment tool for passenger cars. It allows for an economic and environmental evaluation of different types of cars under several driving and energy supply scenarios. Results partly rely on the background inventory data of ecoinvent v3.6, and the implementation of impact assessment methods therein. https://www.carculator.psi.ch/display_quick_results/AU Based on [this research](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212200380X?via%3Dihub). [EPA - Greenhouse Gases Equivalencies Calculator](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references) [IEA - Comparative life-cycle greenhouse gas emisions of a mid-sized BEV and ICE veicle](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-life-cycle-greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-a-mid-size-bev-and-ice-vehicle) (IEA - Argonne National Laboratory) ## The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions The transition to a clean energy system is expected to significantly raise the demand for minerals, making the energy sector a prominent player in mineral markets. Historically, the energy sector accounted for a small portion of total mineral demand until the mid-2010s. But with the rapid progress of energy transitions, clean energy technologies are now driving the fastest-growing segment of mineral demand. [The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions](https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions) and [executive summary](https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary) (IEA). ## Global carbon intensity of crude oil production Producing, transporting, and refining crude oil into fuels such as petrol and diesel accounts for ~15 to ~40% of the “well-to-wheels” life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of transport fuels. [Global carbon intensity of crude oil production](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327328315_Global_carbon_intensity_of_crude_oil_production) (Stanford University) [Assessing Global Oil production](https://oci.carnegieendowment.org) (Carnegie Endowment) ## CO2 Emisions by Fuel Type (and Capita) A look at the breakdown of CO2 emissions by fuel type, looking at the largest emitters of the past; the largest emitters today; and how these compare when we look at per capita adjustments. [CO2 emissions by fuel](https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel) (Our World in Data) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: May 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-05-may/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-05-may/) [POST DATE]: 2023-05-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Car Manufacturing LCA, passenger road vehicles are a significant source of CO2 emissions [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/car-manufacturing-life-cycle-assessment/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/car-manufacturing-life-cycle-assessment/) [POST DATE]: 2023-05-22 [START OF CONTENT] # Where do CO2 emitions come from? Transportation is a major contributor to global CO2 emissions, accounting for approximately 25% of the total emissions worldwide. Within the transportation sector, passenger road vehicles are a significant source of CO2 emissions, responsible for about 45% of the sector's total emissions. ![Bar chart](/images/posts/Transport-CO2-emissions-by-mode-bar-chart.png) [Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport) [IEA](https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/?country=WORLD&fuel=CO2%20emissions&indicator=TotCO2) # Car Manufacturing Life Cycle Assessment By integrating [LCA](/posts/life-cycle-assessment/) into their practices, big automotive brands aim to enhance the environmental performance of their vehicles, meet regulatory requirements, and respond to consumer demands for more sustainable and eco-friendly transportation options. It also helps them demonstrate their commitment to environmental responsibility and contribute to the broader goal of mitigating climate change and promoting sustainable mobility. (See also [Countering LCA FUD](/posts/lca-fud/).) ## Audi By 2025, production at all Audi locations is to become carbon-neutral, while plants in Brussels and Győr already successfully converted. [Life cycle Analysis](https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/lifecycle-analysis-14683) [Production at Audi's Brussels site has been completely CO₂-neutral since early 2018.](https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/core-topics/value-creation-and-production/brussels.html) [Audi on the road toward CO2-neutral production sites](https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/audi-on-the-road-toward-co2-neutral-production-sites-13356) [Life cycle assessment: the entire life of a car in view](https://www.audi.com/en/company/sustainability/life-cycle-assessment.html) ## Fisker >Fisker starts with the full LCA in mind, seeking methods to onnovate and improve the environmental impact of their vehicles. The LCA works as a microscope, providing clear vision into the details of the production cycle. [Fisker Ocean Has the Lowest Published Carbon Footprint of Any Electric SUV](https://investors.fiskerinc.com/news/news-details/2023/Fisker-Publishes-Life-Cycle-Assessment-Report-LCA-and-Announces-the-Fisker-Ocean-Has-the-Lowest-Published-Carbon-Footprint-of-Any-Electric-SUV/default.aspx) [Fisker Ocean LCA 2023](https://img.fiskerinc.com/image/upload/v1688083640/web%203.0/CMS%20content/PDF/Life_Cycle_Assessment_Report_2023_oyuzvt.pdf) ## Polestar >All the Polestar 2 (2020) variants have a lower cradle-to-grave carbon footprint, compared to Volvo XC40 ICE. [Carbon footprint of Polsetar 2 variants](https://www.polestar.com/global/news/lca-report-polestar-2-versions/)([PDF](https://www.polestar.com/dato-assets/11286/1630409045-polestarlcarapportprintkorr11210831.pdf)) >_Three tonnes in three years. That’s Polestar 2's total carbon weight loss (MY2024). In case you're wondering how we ended up with that number – and why you should care about a brand's sustainability calculations – you're in the right place._ [LCA reports 2023: Like I'm five](https://www.polestar.com/hk/news/lca-reports-like-i-m-five/) [Sustainability Glossary](https://www.polestar.cn/global/sustainability/glossary/) ## Renault: Zoe vs Clio (2012) Renault created an LCA back in 2012 when first introducing the Zoe, with a lifespan of 10 years and 150.000km. [2012 Renault Zoe LCA report](https://gronamobilister.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Renault_ZOE_LCA_Report_2012.pdf) [2020 Univarsal Registration Document](https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/2020-Universal-Registration-Document/150/) [Climate Report 2021](https://renaultgroup.publispeak.com/climate-report-2021/article/1/) ## Tesla 2021 Impact report >Tesla’s purpose is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and have a positive impact on the world. [Tesla 2021 Impact report](https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2021-tesla-impact-report.pdf) ## Volvo This report covers the Carbon Footprints of the fully electric [XC40 Recharge](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/) and an XC40 with an internal combustion engine (ICE) for comparison, performed according to ISO 14044:2006 standards. [Battery electric XC40 Recharge and the XC40 ICE](https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/applications/pdpspecificationpage/my24/xc40-electric/pdp/volvo-cars-LCA-report-xc40.pdf) >The C40 Recharge has approximately 5 per cent lower total carbon footprint than XC40 Recharge ... which is mainly because of better aerodynamic properties. [Volvo C40 Recharge](https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/Market-Assets/INTL/Applications/DotCom/PDF/C40/Volvo-C40-Recharge-LCA-report.pdf) >The all-electric Volvo EX30 is designed to have the lowest carbon footprint of any Volvo car to date A car is not just driven, it is also [designed, developed, built and transported](https://www.volvocars.com/mt/news/sustainability/the-all-electric-Volvo-EX30/). ## GreenNCAP >Green NCAP is an independent initiative which promotes the development of cars which are clean, energy efficient and cause as little harm to the environment as possible. Green NCAP is hosted and supported by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), the leading authority on car safety in Europe. Euro NCAP has been testing and rating cars for over 20 years and has helped to save over 78,000 lives. Green NCAP is a natural extension of Euro NCAP’s work and is a logical next step in the development of consumer information. >Green NCAP uses a broad range of tests to address the flaws in approval tests and, through consumer information, rewards those manufacturers whose vehicles go beyond the minimum requirements and offer excellent, robust, real-world performance. Regulatory testing is a good starting point. Green NCAP’s tests are an addition and complementary to these legislative requirements. https://www.greenncap.com ## Life cycle assessment of long life lithium electrode for electric vehicle batteries This report contains a comparative life cycle assessment of several different lithium batteries (only). It is a very detailed report, but it does not include the manufacturing of the car itself. [Leaf, Tesla and Volvo bus batteries - PDF](https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1131667/FULLTEXT01.pdf) ## Life cycle-based sustainability standards and guidelines An overview of the best-known standards and guidelines for the product level, the organization level, or both. > ISO 14040 describes the "principles and framework for LCA", while the ISO 14044 "specifies requirements and provides guidelines" for LCA. ISO 14067 "specifies principles, requirements and guidelines for the quantification and reporting of the carbon footprint of a product" — that is, its impact on climate change [ISO 140XX](https://pre-sustainability.com/articles/lca-standards-and-guidelines) >The Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard can be used to understand the full life cycle emissions of a product and focus efforts on the greatest GHG reduction opportunities. [Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard](https://ghgprotocol.org/product-standard) ## Are electric vehicles definitely better for the climate than gas-powered cars? >It's difficult to find a comparison in which EVs fare worse than internal combustion. [Yes](https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-definitely-better-climate-gas-powered-cars) (MIT) ## How much CO2 is emitted by manufacturing batteries? >When it comes to clean technologies like electric cars and solar power, even the dirtiest batteries emit less CO2 than using no battery at all [15T of CO2 per 1T of mined lithium](https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-co2-emitted-manufacturing-batteries#:~:text=Particularly%20in%20hard%20rock%20mining,are%20emitted%20into%20the%20air.) (MIT) EPA - The greenhouse gas emissions associated with an electric vehicle over its lifetime are typically lower than those from an average petrol-powered vehicle, [even when accounting for manufacturing](https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth2) based of GREET 2 2021 (Argonne National Laboratory). [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: April 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-04-april/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-04-april/) [POST DATE]: 2023-04-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: LCA Life Cycle Assessment to promote sustainable practices and foster eco-friendly decision-making [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/life-cycle-assessment/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/life-cycle-assessment/) [POST DATE]: 2023-04-21 [START OF CONTENT] # Life Cycle Assessment "Life Cycle Assessment" is a comprehensive methodology used to assess the environmental impacts associated with a product, process, or activity throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction, production, and use, to its disposal or recycling. The purpose of conducting an LCA is to quantify and evaluate the environmental burdens and potential sustainability improvements of a particular system, enabling informed decision-making to minimize environmental impacts and optimize resource use. Life Cycle Assessment considers various aspects such as energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, air pollution, waste generation, and resource depletion. It provides valuable insights into the environmental performance of different products or processes, helping businesses and policymakers identify areas for improvement and make more environmentally sustainable choices. LCA is widely used in industries, environmental impact assessments, and sustainability evaluations to promote sustainable practices and foster eco-friendly decision-making. (See also [Countering LCA FUD](/posts/lca-fud/) for how this evidence is sometimes misrepresented.) ## Life Cycle Assessment Methodology Many big automotive brands have integrated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into their sustainability strategies and product development processes (see [Car Manufacturing LCA](/posts/car-manufacturing-life-cycle-assessment/)). The LCA methodology used by these brands typically follows a systematic approach to evaluate the environmental impacts of their vehicles throughout their entire life cycle. Here is an overview of how big automotive brands typically use LCA: 1. Scope Definition: Automotive brands define the scope of the assessment, specifying the vehicle model, its components, and the specific life cycle stages to be considered, from raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal or recycling. 2. Goal and Scope Definition: Clear goals are set for the LCA study, such as assessing the vehicle's carbon footprint, water usage, and other environmental impacts. The scope includes functional units, e.g., distance driven, which serves as a reference for comparing different vehicle models. 3. Data Collection: Data is collected from various sources, including suppliers, manufacturing facilities, and third-party databases. Information on material inputs, energy consumption, emissions, and waste generation is gathered for each life cycle stage. 4. Life Cycle Inventory (LCI): All collected data is organized and compiled into a Life Cycle Inventory, providing a detailed account of the inputs and outputs for each stage of the vehicle's life cycle. 5. Impact Assessment: This stage involves evaluating the potential environmental impacts of the vehicle based on the LCI data. Impact categories may include greenhouse gas emissions, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, and others. 6. Interpretation: The results of the impact assessment are interpreted, providing insights into the hotspots or stages with the most significant environmental impacts. Brands identify areas for improvement and potential strategies to reduce overall environmental burdens. 7. Improvements and Optimization: Based on the LCA findings, automotive brands implement design and process improvements to minimize the environmental impacts of their vehicles. This may include using more sustainable materials, increasing vehicle recyclability, and reducing energy consumption during manufacturing. 8. Communication and Reporting: Transparent communication of LCA results is essential for building consumer trust and showcasing the brand's commitment to sustainability. Brands often publish environmental reports that highlight the LCA findings and progress toward sustainability goals. 9. Continuous Monitoring: Automotive brands may perform regular updates and re-evaluations of the LCA to ensure that their sustainability efforts are on track and to identify new areas for improvement as technology and supply chain evolve. By integrating LCA into their practices, big automotive brands aim to enhance the environmental performance of their vehicles, meet regulatory requirements, and respond to consumer demands for more sustainable and eco-friendly transportation options. It also helps them demonstrate their commitment to environmental responsibility and contribute to the broader goal of mitigating climate change and promoting sustainable mobility. ## LCA Types Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can take various forms, depending on the specific focus and objectives of the assessment. Some of the different types of LCA include: 1. Attributional LCA: This is the most common type of LCA and focuses on assessing the environmental impacts of a product or system as it is currently produced and used. It provides a snapshot of the current situation and is often used for comparison and decision-making. 2. Consequential LCA: Unlike attributional LCA, consequential LCA takes into account the potential changes in the system under study and the associated impacts. It considers the broader effects of decisions and actions, such as changes in consumer behavior or market dynamics. 3. Comparative LCA: This type of LCA involves comparing two or more alternative products, processes, or technologies with the same functional unit. It helps identify the option with the least environmental impact. 4. Cradle-to-Gate LCA: This LCA type focuses on evaluating the environmental impacts of a product or system from raw material extraction (cradle) to the point of leaving the factory gate (gate). It does not consider the product's use and end-of-life phases. 5. Cradle-to-Grave LCA: In contrast to Cradle-to-Gate, Cradle-to-Grave LCA examines the entire life cycle of a product, including its use phase and end-of-life treatment, such as recycling or disposal. 6. Well-to-Wheel LCA: A specialized methodology used to evaluate the total environmental impacts associated with a specific energy source or fuel throughout its entire life cycle, from its production (well) to its end-use in vehicles (wheel). 7. Input-Output LCA (IO-LCA): IO-LCA assesses the environmental impacts of an economy or sector by analyzing the interrelations between different industries and sectors. It evaluates the upstream and downstream impacts of a product or service across the entire economy. 8. Sectoral LCA: This type of LCA focuses on assessing the environmental performance of a specific industrial sector or group of related products. It helps identify areas of improvement within a particular industry. 9. Social LCA (SLCA): SLCA complements environmental LCA by evaluating the social and socioeconomic impacts of a product or system. It considers factors such as human rights, labor conditions, and community well-being. 10 . Hybrid LCA: Hybrid LCA combines elements of both attributional and consequential LCA. It accounts for the existing system's impacts (attributional) while considering potential changes and interventions (consequential). Each type of LCA has its strengths and limitations, and the choice of LCA type depends on the specific objectives, available data, and the context in which the assessment is conducted. By selecting the appropriate LCA type, decision-makers can gain valuable insights to promote more sustainable practices and products. ## Well-to-wheel Well-to-Wheel (WTW) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a specialized methodology used to evaluate the total environmental impacts associated with a specific energy source or fuel throughout its entire life cycle, from its production (well) to its end-use in vehicles (wheel). It is commonly applied to assess the environmental performance of different transportation fuels, including fossil fuels and alternative energy sources, considering all stages of their life cycles. Key aspects of Well-to-Wheel LCA include: 1. Comprehensive Scope: WTW LCA encompasses all stages of the fuel's life cycle, starting from the extraction or production of the primary energy source (e.g., crude oil, natural gas, biomass) to the point of consumption in vehicles. 2. Energy Input and Emissions: The assessment considers energy inputs, greenhouse gas emissions, and other pollutants associated with each stage of the fuel's life cycle, including extraction, refining, transportation, distribution, and combustion. 3. System Boundary: WTW LCA typically defines a clear system boundary that includes all relevant stages from well (production) to wheel (end-use), ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of the fuel's environmental impacts. 4. Specific Vehicle Technologies: The assessment takes into account the specific energy efficiency and emissions characteristics of different vehicle technologies that use the fuel, such as internal combustion engines, hybrid vehicles, and electric vehicles. 5. Comparing Different Fuels: WTW LCA enables the comparison of various transportation fuels, allowing policymakers, researchers, and industry stakeholders to make informed decisions about the most environmentally friendly and sustainable options. 6. Consideration of Regional Differences: WTW LCA acknowledges that the environmental impacts of a fuel can vary based on regional factors, such as energy sources used for electricity generation and transportation infrastructure. 7. Policy Implications: WTW LCA results provide valuable insights for policymakers in shaping regulations, incentives, and strategies to promote cleaner and more sustainable transportation options. 8. Technological Advances: As technologies and energy sources evolve, WTW LCA can be updated to reflect these changes and provide up-to-date information on the environmental performance of different fuels and vehicle technologies. WTW LCA is a crucial tool for understanding the overall environmental impacts of transportation fuels and supporting efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the transportation sector. By providing a comprehensive picture of the entire life cycle, WTW LCA helps drive the development and adoption of more sustainable and efficient transportation systems. ## LCA different tiers of analysis Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) typically involves different tiers of analysis, each with varying levels of detail and data accuracy: ### Tier 1: - Characteristics: Tier 1 is a screening-level assessment that uses simplified and generic data to estimate environmental impacts. It provides a broad overview of a product or system's life cycle. - Data: Generic or average data is used for material inputs, energy consumption, and emissions. - Scope: It covers the entire life cycle, but the level of detail is limited. - Speed: Tier 1 is relatively quick and cost-effective to perform. - Accuracy: The results are less accurate due to the use of generic data and assumptions. - Use: Tier 1 is useful for initial screenings, identifying hotspots, and making quick decisions. ### Tier 2: - Characteristics: Tier 2 is a more detailed assessment than Tier 1, using more specific data and assumptions. - Data: Specific data from various sources, including industry databases and expert knowledge, is utilized. - Scope: It covers the entire life cycle, with more detailed information for each stage. - Speed: Tier 2 requires more time and resources than Tier 1 but is still more efficient than Tier 3. - Accuracy: The results are more accurate than Tier 1 due to better data quality and specificity. - Use: Tier 2 is used to refine results from Tier 1, perform sensitivity analysis, and support decision-making. ### Tier 3: - Characteristics: Tier 3 is a comprehensive and detailed assessment, often considered the most accurate and exhaustive level of analysis in LCA. - Data: Specific, site-specific, and process-specific data is collected, involving extensive data gathering efforts. - Scope: It covers the entire life cycle with highly detailed information for each process and component. - Speed: Tier 3 is time-consuming and resource-intensive, requiring substantial efforts for data collection and analysis. - Accuracy: The results are the most accurate among all tiers due to precise and detailed data inputs. - Use: Tier 3 is used for in-depth analysis, complex decision-making, and to support certification or regulatory compliance. In summary, Tier 1 is a quick and simple screening-level assessment, Tier 2 adds more detail and specificity, and Tier 3 involves the most comprehensive and accurate analysis. Each tier serves a specific purpose in LCA, allowing for a step-by-step approach to understand and evaluate the environmental impacts of products or systems at increasing levels of detail and accuracy. ## Boundary critique within systems thinking The boundary critique is a fundamental concept within systems thinking and is particularly relevant in the context of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It challenges the notion of fixed boundaries in analyzing complex systems and encourages a more holistic and context-specific understanding of the system being studied. In relation to LCA, the boundary critique can be understood as follows: 1. Fixed Boundaries in LCA: Traditional LCA often defines fixed system boundaries that encompass all life cycle stages of a product or process, from cradle to grave (Cradle-to-Grave LCA) or from raw material extraction to the factory gate (Cradle-to-Gate LCA). These boundaries are necessary to limit the scope of analysis and make the assessment feasible. 2. Overlooking Interconnections: The fixed boundaries in LCA might overlook important interconnections and feedback loops between the system being studied and its surrounding environment. This can lead to unintended consequences or missed opportunities for environmental improvements. 3. Incomplete Picture: By having fixed boundaries, LCA may fail to consider all relevant aspects and stakeholders involved in a product's life cycle, leading to an incomplete picture of its true environmental impacts. 4. Context Matters: Different products and systems have unique characteristics and interactions with their surrounding environment. The boundary critique emphasizes that context matters, and the boundaries should be flexible, context-specific, and adapt to the specific goals and requirements of the assessment. 5. Systemic Effects: The boundary critique highlights that the impacts of a product or process extend beyond the defined boundaries and can have systemic effects on other systems, both upstream and downstream in the supply chain. 6. Scalability and Modularity: The boundary critique suggests that LCA can be more effective by adopting a scalable and modular approach, where the boundaries can be expanded or contracted depending on the scope and objectives of the assessment. 7. Stakeholder Involvement: Embracing the boundary critique encourages involving relevant stakeholders in the decision-making process of defining system boundaries. This helps ensure a more inclusive and comprehensive analysis. The boundary critique challenges the traditional fixed boundaries in LCA and emphasizes the importance of adopting a more flexible, context-specific, and holistic approach to systems thinking. By considering a broader and interconnected view, LCA can provide more meaningful insights and support sustainable decision-making that accounts for the complex relationships between products, processes, and their environmental impacts. ## ISO Standards There are several ISO standards related to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Each standard addresses specific aspects of LCA, providing guidelines, requirements, and methodologies to ensure consistency, transparency, and accuracy in LCA studies. Here are some key ISO standards related to LCA: 1. ISO 14040:2006 - Environmental management - Life cycle assessment - Principles and framework: This standard establishes the principles and framework for conducting LCA studies. It outlines the four main phases of LCA: goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory analysis (LCI), life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), and interpretation. ISO 14040 provides general guidance on the application of LCA and emphasizes the importance of transparency, data quality, and critical review. 2. ISO 14044:2006 - Environmental management - Life cycle assessment - Requirements and guidelines: Building on ISO 14040, this standard provides more detailed requirements and guidelines for the technical implementation of LCA studies. It covers data collection, data quality assurance, data allocation, and reporting. ISO 14044 ensures the consistency and reliability of LCA results by specifying best practices for conducting the various phases of LCA. 3. ISO/TS 14048:2002 - Environmental management - Life cycle assessment - Data documentation format: This technical specification addresses the format and content of documentation for data used in LCA studies. It provides guidelines for reporting data in a consistent and standardized manner to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of LCA results. 4. ISO 14046:2014 - Environmental management - Water footprint - Principles, requirements, and guidelines: While not specific to LCA, ISO 14046 complements LCA by providing principles and guidelines for assessing and reporting the water footprint of products, processes, and organizations. It considers the impacts of water use throughout the entire life cycle. 5. ISO 14047:2019 - Environmental management - Life cycle assessment - Illustrative examples on how to apply ISO 14044 to goal and scope definition and inventory analysis: This standard provides illustrative examples of how to apply the principles and requirements of ISO 14044 to specific aspects of LCA, such as goal and scope definition and life cycle inventory analysis. It serves as a practical guide for LCA practitioners. 6. ISO/TR 14049:2012 - Environmental management - Life cycle assessment - Illustrative examples on how to apply ISO 14044 to impact assessment and interpretation: Similar to ISO 14047, this standard offers illustrative examples of applying ISO 14044 to impact assessment and interpretation phases of LCA, helping users better understand and implement these stages. These ISO standards collectively support the application of Life Cycle Assessment in various industries and sectors. They promote transparency, data quality, and consistent methodologies, making LCA a valuable tool for evaluating the environmental impacts of products, processes, and systems and supporting informed decision-making towards sustainability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: March 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-03-march/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-03-march/) [POST DATE]: 2023-03-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Fully Charged Live Sydney [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/fully-charged-live-sydney/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/fully-charged-live-sydney/) [POST DATE]: 2023-03-11 [START OF CONTENT] # Event Photography I contacted the crew and I voluntered for the Fully Charged Live Sydney show, on this weekend. Met Robert and Jack, working along the rest of the crew. They took a chance on me, and I'm grateful for the opportunity. They were pretty happy with the results, which seemed to have exceeded their expectations :-) Check out the [**Flickr album**](https://www.flickr.com/photos/halans/albums/72177720306683388). The Fully Charged Live show was renamed and rebooted in 2024 as [Everything Electric Australia](/posts/everything-electric-australia/), and again in 2025 as [Everything Electric Sydney](/posts/everything-electric-sydney-2025/). {{/* < video library="1" sre="EverythingElectricAU.mp4" controls="yes" > */}} [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: February 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-02-february/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-02-february/) [POST DATE]: 2023-02-28 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: AI EV FAQs [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ai-ev-faqs/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ai-ev-faqs/) [POST DATE]: 2023-02-25 [START OF CONTENT] After updating [Social Recommendator](https://ai.socialrecommendator.com) with the OpenAI API, it was too easy not apply this to some more use cases. Introducing [Ask AI About EVs](https://ai.electricvehicle.life), get quick answers to your EV questions with AI. Things you never knew AI knew, about EVs. With Disclaimer. >Surprises and mistakes are possible. So check the facts, yes? UPDATE NOV 2025: Updated to [EV Chat!](/posts/ev-chat/) [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: The Early History of the EVs [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-early-history/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-early-history/) [POST DATE]: 2023-02-22 [START OF CONTENT] # The Early History of the Electric Vehicle: A Journey from 1832 to 1899 The electric vehicle (EV), often seen as a contemporary innovation, actually boasts a rich history that intertwines with the very roots of automotive engineering. This narrative stretches back to the early 19th century, a period characterized by groundbreaking discoveries and the birth of what would become a major technological force in the modern era. ## The Dawn of the Electric Car Era **1832: Robert Anderson's Crude Electric Carriage** In 1832, Scottish inventor [Robert Anderson](https://web.archive.org/web/20120621030141/https://www.gm.ca/inm/gmcanada/english/about/OverviewHist/hist_auto.html) embarked on a revolutionary project: creating a carriage powered by electricity. Although primitive by today's standards, Anderson's creation represented a significant leap in transportation technology. His electric carriage, which used non-rechargeable power cells, was the first known instance of an electric vehicle. This innovation set the stage for future developments in electric transportation, highlighting the potential of this new form of mobility. **1842: Practical Electric Road Vehicle** A decade after Anderson's attempt, another milestone was achieved in 1842 with the introduction of a more practical electric road vehicle. This design incorporated the era's newly-invented, non-rechargeable electric cells. This development represented a crucial step towards making electric vehicles more practical and user-friendly, showcasing the potential for electrically powered transportation on public roads. **1859: The Lead Acid Battery** The evolution of EVs received a significant boost with the invention of the lead-acid battery in 1859 by French physicist [Gaston Planté](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gaston-Plante). This was the first rechargeable battery, offering a more sustainable and long-lasting power source for electric vehicles. The lead-acid battery's durability and rechargeability solved one of the significant challenges facing early EVs, enabling longer travel distances and more reliable performance. ## Innovation & Commercialization **1884: Thomas Parker's Practical Production Electric Car** In 1884, a significant breakthrough came with [Thomas Parker](https://madeupinbritain.uk/Electric_Car), who constructed the first practical production electric car. [Parker](https://fullcharger.com/thomas-parker/who-is-thomas-parker), motivated by a desire to improve fuel efficiency, utilized the newly developed rechargeable batteries in his design. His electric car was not just a prototype but a practical vehicle that could be used daily. Parker's work demonstrated the commercial feasibility of electric vehicles and opened the door for mass production. **1897: New York City's Commercial EV Fleet of Taxis** The commercial potential of electric vehicles took center stage in 1897 when New York City introduced its first commercial [EV fleet of taxis](https://blog.upsbatterycenter.com/arrival-of-electric-taxis-new-york-1897/). This marked a pivotal moment in the history of electric vehicles, showcasing their utility in an urban environment. The electric taxis offered a quieter, cleaner alternative to the petrol-powered vehicles of the time, gaining popularity among city dwellers and setting a precedent for future urban transportation solutions. **1899: La Jamais Contente's Land Speed Record** The performance capabilities of electric vehicles were dramatically highlighted in 1899 when "[La Jamais Contente](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jamais_Contente)," a Belgian-built electric racing car, broke the land speed record by reaching 106 Km/h. This event was monumental in changing public perceptions of electric vehicles. Far from being slow and cumbersome, "La Jamais Contente" demonstrated that electric vehicles could achieve speeds comparable to, if not surpassing, their gasoline counterparts. Check out [The story of La Jamais Contente](/posts/the-story-of-la-jamais-contente/) for more. ## Foundation The early history of the electric vehicle is a tapestry of innovation, vision, and groundbreaking achievements. From Anderson's pioneering electric carriage to the record-breaking speed of "[La Jamais Contente](/posts/the-story-of-la-jamais-contente/)," these early developments laid a solid foundation for today's EVs. As we advance towards a future dominated by sustainable transportation, it's essential to acknowledge and appreciate these early milestones that shaped the journey of the electric vehicle, steering us towards a cleaner, more efficient future. For a 20th-century chapter of this story, see also [The story of General Motors' EV1](/posts/the-story-of-gm-ev1/). ## Sydney Powerhouse Museum
Anderson Electric Car Co
Detroit Electric car: brougham body, 80 volt, 10 hp, metal, upholstery, glass
Anderson Electric Car Co, Detroit, Michigan, United States of America, 1917
Used by Arthur and Denis Allen, Australia, 1917-47
Gift of Mr Denis Allen 1947. Powerhouse Object No. B1057-1 --- ## References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car https://edisontechcenter.org/ElectricCars.html https://www.macklinmotors.co.uk/ev-timeline/#:~:text=1832%2D1839,used%20to%20generate%20the%20electricity https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/03/lost-history-electric-car-future-transport [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: January 2023 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-01-january/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2023/2023-01-january/) [POST DATE]: 2023-01-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: December 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-12-december/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-12-december/) [POST DATE]: 2022-12-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Pole EV Charger [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/evx-power-pole-charger/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/evx-power-pole-charger/) [POST DATE]: 2022-12-26 [START OF CONTENT] # Powerpole charging Last week [Ausgrid](https://www.ausgrid.com.au/About-Us/News/Pole-mounted-EV-charger), [EVX](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) and the Newcastle city council opened up their first power pole mounted 11kWh EV charger at Dixon Park beach, with an aim to deliver up to 30.000 pole mounted EV chargers across the Ausgrid network by 2029. (which means Ausgrid would be installing 13 chargers each day for the next 6 years...) > These pole-mounted chargers will help to address EV accessibility by providing > chargers for people without home systems, and those traveling outside of their local areas. > Ausgrid CEO, Richard Gross. Dixon Park beach is a great first location, and I'd love to see each beach side community get some of these (wink wink Bateau Bay, Long Jetty, The Entrance, [Central Coast](/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/)). You do need to download EVX app to activate the charger. Charging costs $0.50 per kWh flat rate. ### Thoughts :zap: Can the community have a say in where we'd like to see these pole mounted chargers? > YES Submit here: https://evx.tech/polecharger-request-form/ Potential trip hazard with cables laying around the ground? $0.50 per kWh is a lot for a slow 11kWh charge. Will there be different tiers, time-of-day pricing with cheaper options? Cheaper overnight charging for locals, premium daytime charging for visitors? Cheaper prepaid plans? No mention of any idle fees. Yet another app. Often these apps forget about your payment details everytime an app update happens. Then you open the app, and you can't charge as you need to provide your CC details again. Let us just pay with contactless, just tap and be done with like at the petrol station. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: bp pulse [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/bp-pulse/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/bp-pulse/) [POST DATE]: 2022-12-19 [START OF CONTENT] ### A single bp pulse charger at the local bp station opened earlier this month Surprised by the bp (British ~~Petroleum~~/Power) email newsletter listing a [bp pulse](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) EV charger at bp Tumbi Umbi on the [Central Coast](/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/). One of three bp pulse chargers in NSW at this time! It has a single CCS2 and a single CHAdeMO plug (75kW), available 24/7. There's a McDonalds and Hungry Jacks across the road, as well as an Oporto at a Shell station. It's good to finally see some non-Tesla options available on the Central Coast. Still need plenty more... ![bppulse](/images/posts/bppulse.jpg) **EDIT 2025**: A new bp pulse charging station at 481 Pacific Hwy, [Wyoming NSW 2250](/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/) (next to Aldi!), with one 300kW charging unit to service two bays and two 150kW charging units to service four more bays." ![bppulse](/images/posts/revolution-0094.jpg) ![bppulse](/images/posts/revolution-0095.jpg) Tap and Pay! [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: November 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-11-november/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-11-november/) [POST DATE]: 2022-11-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: October 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-10-october/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-10-october/) [POST DATE]: 2022-10-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: September 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-09-september/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-09-september/) [POST DATE]: 2022-09-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: August 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-08-august/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-08-august/) [POST DATE]: 2022-08-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Tesla 10k [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/tesla-10k/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/tesla-10k/) [POST DATE]: 2022-07-31 [START OF CONTENT] # First 10k >Did my first 10.000 km in the [Tesla M3 SR+](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/) this weekend, 10 months (and one week) in. That’s 1000km per month, working from home, charging at home using the Tesla Mobile Connector. Trickle charging like that, I can do about 30%-40% overnight, on TOU tariff (0:00-4:00 7.49c/kWh cheapest, else 14.99c/kWh until 7:00), charging the battery eventually up to 100% every week, as required for the LFP battery chemistry. That 1000km a month costs me $17, while having fun driving it. I’m doing 138 Wh/km, or 13.8 kWh/100km, or 7.24 km/kWh. I think that’s quite good? Even though I’m not a slow driver. That’s $1.03 per 100km at 7.49c/kWh at home, or $7.50 per 100km at 55c/kWh at the [Supercharger](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/). One warranty service visit, to fix a squeaky driver’s seat, which had been bothering me since the 700km mark. Not a big fan of the Autopilot as a whole. It’s good doing the basics, but there’s too much ghost breaking happening to my liking, quite jarring. Worst thing about owning a Tesla are probably the annoying Tesla and Musk fans though… (I promise, I’m not one of them) Not a fan of the glass roof either. As the driver, you can’t enjoy it. And it gets too hot, while parked, which turns on the airco to keep car cool, while parked, which is a waste of energy. As well as you can feel your scalp being burned while driving. The glass roof sunshade is a must. _Follow the journey: [picking up the Model 3 SR+](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/) → [farewell to Tesla](/posts/adjo-tesla/) → [Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/)._ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: July 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-07-july/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-07-july/) [POST DATE]: 2022-07-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: June 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-06-june/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-06-june/) [POST DATE]: 2022-06-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: May 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-05-may/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-05-may/) [POST DATE]: 2022-05-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: April 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-04-april/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-04-april/) [POST DATE]: 2022-04-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Apparel [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/apparel-store/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/apparel-store/) [POST DATE]: 2022-04-12 [START OF CONTENT] # Electrifying Apparel Grab an electrifying t-shirt from [Threadless](https://electrify.threadless.com). A small sample of the t-shirts available: ![Apparel](/images/posts/threadless_electrify_tshirts.jpg) Always be charging! [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: March 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-03-march/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-03-march/) [POST DATE]: 2022-03-28 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: February 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-02-february/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-02-february/) [POST DATE]: 2022-02-28 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: NSW Fast Chargers [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/hosting-a-fast-charger-in-nsw/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/hosting-a-fast-charger-in-nsw/) [POST DATE]: 2022-02-02 [START OF CONTENT] # Charge Point Operators NSW Government is currently looking for land owners and lease holders that might be interested in hosting EV charging stations, so that they may provide a list of possible sites to potential developers (Charge Point Operators). Grab the [prospectus](https://www.energysaver.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/GOVP1587_DPIE_NSW_CHARGING_HOST_SITE_PROSPECTUS_FA_ACCESSIBLE_FINAL.pdf). [Expressions of interest](https://www.energysaver.nsw.gov.au/reducing-emissions-nsw/electric-vehicles/hosting-electric-vehicle-fast-charging-sites) for site hosts are open from 10 November 2021 to Friday 25 February 2022. For follow-up rollouts, see [Central Coast new chargers](/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/) and the [300 new NSW fast-charging ports](/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/) announced in 2025. For commercial property owners weighing speed vs. dwell time, see the [strategic planning guide](/posts/planning-guide-for-ev-charging-infrastructure/). [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Apps [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/soo-many-apps/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/soo-many-apps/) [POST DATE]: 2022-01-29 [START OF CONTENT] # Every EV charging service comes with its own charging app. Trying to keep track of all the [EV charging apps](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/), and/or RFID cards: - Chargefox - Everty - Evie - Jolt - eoApp - GET Electric - Exploren - AmpCharge - [bp pulse](/posts/bp-pulse/) - [EVX](/posts/evx-power-pole-charger/) - Tesla Superchargers _(updating whenever I find a new one)_ Often, when these apps update, you're logged out, or sometimes it even loses your account details alltogether (while it really shouldn't), and you need to log in or set up your account again, while all you want to do is just plug in. Frustrating. I'd rather tap-to-pay. I like to grab an RFID card and link it to the account, so next time I don't need to use the app, and can just tap the RFID card to start charging, more quickly. [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Central Coast, NSW [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/opportunities-on-the-central-coast/) [POST DATE]: 2022-01-29 [START OF CONTENT] # Central Coast I live on the Central Coast, and recenlty (4 months ago) took delivery of a [Tesla M3 SR+](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/). I guess I'm lucky that we have a [Tesla Supercharger](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) in Tuggerah, but I do feel there's a serious lack of public chargers on the Central Coast (of NSW). Most are Tesla destination chargers at motels and Airbnbs. There's a Tesla destination charger at Erina Fair which is great for Tesla drivers (like me), but not so much for anyone else. Not sure how Lake Macquarie did it, but they as a council have a bunch of Hyundai Ioniq EVs (the original ones) and a solar covered charging plaza. Swansea Library has an [Everty](/posts/ev-essential-mobile-apps/) public charger that I on occasion use when passing through. The Hunter Valley has a fabulous NRMA double fast charger, which is still free to use. How can we get Central Coast to follow suite? Gosfort as a commercial centre could use a fast charger. The Entrance as a holiday destination could use one. I've send some emails to some shopping centres around here, but mosty don't get any response back. How can we as a community get this [moving forward]? The NSW Government is looking for locations and published this [prospective](https://www.energysaver.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/GOVP1587_DPIE_NSW_CHARGING_HOST_SITE_PROSPECTUS_FA_ACCESSIBLE_FINAL.pdf) (see also [Hosting a fast charger in NSW](/posts/hosting-a-fast-charger-in-nsw/))? That's why I created some sort of a template to use, which you can find [here](https://revolution.guide/#emailTemplate), that you can use as a basis to nudge your local council, shopping centre, library, … to look at installing an EV charger. _Update: see [Central Coast new chargers](/posts/central-coast-new-chargers/) (2023) and [NSW's 300 new planned chargers](/posts/nsw-new-planned-chargers/) (2025) for how this picture has evolved._ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: January 2022 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-01-january/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2022/2022-01-january/) [POST DATE]: 2022-01-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: EV on TV [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-on-tv/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/ev-on-tv/) [POST DATE]: 2022-01-03 [START OF CONTENT] # EV on TV Join me in skeeting movies and TV series which feature, prominently or in passing, EVs! Check out #EVonTV on [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/hashtag/EVonTV). [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: December 2021 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-12-december/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-12-december/) [POST DATE]: 2021-12-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: November 2021 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-11-november/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-11-november/) [POST DATE]: 2021-11-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: October 2021 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-10-october/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-10-october/) [POST DATE]: 2021-10-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: September 2021 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-09-september/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-09-september/) [POST DATE]: 2021-09-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: Tesla Model 3 SR+ [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/) [POST DATE]: 2021-09-21 [START OF CONTENT] # That new car smell Decided to replace my big SUV with the cheapest Model 3. Price had dropped to $59.900 (+ DA), cheapest they had been, plus the NSW incentives. Picking up my Model 3 SR+ today, trading in my LR Discovery 4 (Tesla made that really easy). No test drive, just a leap of faith. Ordering a car online, without ever seeing it in person, is a bit of a gamble. But I’ve read enough reviews, watched enough videos, and talked to enough owners to feel confident in my decision. _Follow the journey: [first 10,000 km](/posts/tesla-10k/) → [farewell to Tesla](/posts/adjo-tesla/) → [Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/)._ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: August 2021 [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-08-august/](https://electricvehicle.life/news/2021/2021-08-august/) [POST DATE]: 2021-08-29 [START OF CONTENT] [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: rEVolution Guide [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/posts/revolution-guide/](https://electricvehicle.life/posts/revolution-guide/) [POST DATE]: 2021-08-08 [START OF CONTENT] # Electric Vehicles We moved to Sydney 15 years ago. First couple of years, living on the lower north shore, we didn’t have a car. Then in 2010 bought a Mini Diesel (which was quite frugal), and upgraded to a Land Rover Discovery (this one though not so frugal) in 2015. Was used to diesel in Belgium, which is what most company cars would be. I love my Discovery, you can take it places (like, err, Ikea :). But we certainly don’t use it to its fullest. It’s quite nimble for such a big car. But if you floor it, you leave behind a big, black, stinking cloud. And you feel bad, it’s just not right. So, yes things need to change. So I’m now looking at an EV. Been looking for nearly two years now, really. When the Jaguar i-Pace came out, I wanted one. But that’s really out of my price range. Started watching Fully Charged, subscribe to a bunch of newsletters, trying to get informed on all things EV. It’s while doing this, I set up a newsletter myself a couple of months ago: [rEVolution Guide](https://revolution.guide). Because it is a revolution, it is a big change. And I hope I can guide others in their journey to personal electrification. And finally, from September onwards, for the first 25000 new EVs, NSW is providing a $3000 rebate and stamp duty waiver, for EVs under $68750. For this I set up some sort of comparison site that lists al relevant Australian car models: [https://nswevrebate.revolution.guide](https://nswevrebate.revolution.guide) _Postscript: I picked up a [Tesla Model 3 SR+](/posts/tesla-m3-srplus/) shortly after, and later moved to a [Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin](/posts/volvo-xc40-recharge-twin/)._ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/projects/timeline/2025/](https://electricvehicle.life/projects/timeline/2025/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT] EV Timeline 2025
[END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/projects/wrapped/2025/](https://electricvehicle.life/projects/wrapped/2025/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT] 2025 EV Life Wrap-Up
2025 EV Unwrapped
Loading the year in EVs...
[END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## [POST TITLE]: About This Blog [POST LINK]: [https://electricvehicle.life/about/](https://electricvehicle.life/about/) [POST DATE]: 0001-01-01 [START OF CONTENT]

🅴🆅 Life ⚡

> Driving an electric car is not just about saving money on fuel and maintenance; > it's about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and combating climate change. I'll be occasionally covering a wide range of topics related to EVs, including the latest technological developments, (NSW/Australian) policy updates, and real-world experiences of EV owners, as I collect a [news articles archive](/news/). From battery-electric cars and trucks and other micro mobility, I'll be exploring the various types of electric vehicles on the market today. I'll also be discussing the various charging options available, as well as the benefits and challenges of going electric. So join me as I dive into the fascinating world of electric vehicles and learn more about this exciting and important technology. Whether you're interested in saving money on fuel, reducing your carbon footprint, or simply want to be at the forefront of the latest developments in transportation, I hope you'll find something of value here. All images on the site are my own (Halans Photography), available under [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) through [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/halans/albums/72157719777707518/). PS: _I started out with a 2021 [Tesla M3 SR+](/posts/adjo-tesla), which at the end of 2023 I traded in for a MY24 Volvo XC40 Recharge Twin. This is a M*sk-free zone_ [END OF CONTENT] ************************************* ## Last updated August 9, 2026