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

“Through my job I’m pretty well-informed on EVs and was confident we would have no problems, but I didn’t know our vehicle would do this much planning for us. That was a real surprise-and-delight moment and made everything so easy,” Andy says.

Shiv did mention that using the 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 nice and kept us fresh, in my opinion. When you’re in a petrol car, you might 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 may be 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.”

“On a highway trip like this, making micro adjustments over such a long stretch contributes to a fair bit of driver strain, but the appeal of the smart tech in these vehicles is that it can lighten the mental load and make it more comfortable,” Andy says.

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.