Melbourne to Sydney in an EV. Here's what we learned

“You have so much information fed to you upfront and along the drive. All those vehicle smarts help allay any fears you may have about running out of charge. The EV can even tell you if you’ll have to wait to use the supercharger at your next stop,” Shiv adds. 

Shiv did mention that using public charging network and third-party provider payment options associated with driving another brand of EV would’ve required a bit more planning, but on this particular route you’d have no problem completing the journey if you weren’t driving a Tesla.

The A Better Routeplanner app can help you plan your trip in advance, showing you where chargers are located along the route, if they’re standard or superchargers, and what membership you’ll need to use them. PlugShare is another useful app to try. It uses community sourced data to map out EV charging stations and provides real-time information on their availability and pricing.

Going the distance

When it comes to EV adoption, one of the main barriers is range anxiety – and when you’re driving in regional locations, it’s important to know you won’t be stranded. But just as you’d want to know where the next station is when driving a petrol car, you simply need to be aware of the location of your next recharge point.

While the range on the Tesla Y is around 500km, the distance from Melbourne to Sydney is around 880km, so recharging along the way was a crucial part of the journey. Different conditions such as the external temperature, how fast you’re driving and if you’re using air conditioning, affect your range. But the vehicle keeps the driver aware of these factors, so you can adjust accordingly if you need to conserve energy.

Andy and Shiv stopped four times between Melbourne and Sydney, for a total charging time of 1 hour and 10 minutes – two 10-minute stops, one 20-minute stop and one 30-minute stop when they had lunch. The total cost for all these charges was $71. Both Andy and Shiv agreed that the relative cost when comparing to doing the same trip in a petrol car is very appealing, and the regular stops made the drive more pleasant.

“Having four planned stops on a nine-hour drive was actually quite pleasant and kept us fresh in my opinion. When you’re in a petrol car, you see the service station coming up and you're like, ‘Oh, I'll wait for the next one.’ And then you end up overextending yourself because the next one is 50km down the road,” Shiv says.

"The location and environment of the charging stations were also a great experience,” he added. “Our stop at Euroa was surprisingly picturesque and not at all what I was expecting.”

“Not listening to the drone of an engine or tyres on the road for nine hours is pleasant – having the cabin nice and quiet is definitely a plus.”

Shiv is a Tesla owner himself and says that the huge infotainment screen is particularly useful on long family drives.

“When I go on road trips with my family, we'll use the screen as a big whiteboard, put on a Spotify trivia playlist and the front seat passenger will keep score. It seems like such a simple thing and you could do it on paper, but having it in the middle of the car keeps everybody that much more competitive and engaged – and avoids spending time on individual screens and not making the most of the time together,” he says.

But all the perks in the world wouldn’t mean much if they were stranded in the middle of nowhere with a dead battery. And that’s the big question – were Andy and Shiv ever close to running out of charge?

Absolutely not.

So would they recommend driving from Melbourne to Sydney in an EV?

Absolutely.

“When I think about doing a drive like this in my EV compared to my old petrol car, I can comfortably say my preference is an EV,” Shiv said.