Charge network Evie is gearing up for one of its biggest-ever weekends of public electric car charging, as Australians prepare to hit the road over Easter.
The company, which takes on Chargefox in the burgeoning public electric vehicle charging space, says it’s put a “continued focus” into making sure its chargers are up and running ahead of the four-day weekend.
Evie claims the 2022 Christmas holiday was its busiest-ever period, delivering 4.9 million kilometres worth of charge for EV owners across its network.
With drivers expected to pack up their cars and hit the road with family for the upcoming holiday weekend, the nation’s network of public electric car chargers will once again be under pressure from a growing pool of EV owners.
Electric vehicle owners are being urged to research their route and plan their charging stops ahead of time, with stations located roughly around five hours from a major city expected to be the busiest spots over the break.
As the number of electric cars on local roads grows, demand for public fast charging will continue to increase, putting strain on the nation’s burgeoning electric charging network.
Chargefox, like Evie, is constantly working to keep its ultra-rapid chargers online in the face of outages and hardware issues, compounding wait times for owners at busy stations.
According to an Electric Vehicle Council report from 2022, there are more than 83,000 electric vehicles in Australia, almost half of which were delivered in 2022.
The same EV Council report says there were 4943 individual public EV charge plugs in Australia as of December 2022, spread across 2392 charging stations.
One charge station is generally home to multiple plugs, allowing owners to charge side-by-side in the same spot.
The majority of the 2392 public charge locations only have slower 24kW chargers, which take between two and three hours to fully charge a base Tesla Model 3.
Just 99 public charge stations offer 100kW+ ultra-rapid charging in Australia, with a further 365 packing chargers capable of between 24 and 99kW DC charging.
Evie has opened its 111th location in Wangaratta, Victoria, with 50kW DC chargers.
