I was deliberately testing the real-life range of the vehicle.  I drove at 95 kmh on the freeways, avoided tollways and didn’t use the air conditioning.

On the return trip, I had to coax the car along to make sure I got home.  It was tight, but I made it.  There was a bit drizzle throughout the trip with no wind, so pretty benign.  I’d understood that the stated range of EVs, in this case 480 km, was never gonna happen.  So 420km was still OK at around 12.5% less than the published range.

When my spouse and I set off for the same trip on Friday, picking up and dropping off our grand-daughter in Mortdale, Sydney, I knew that I’d have to top up somewhere along the route. 

We thought we had enough charge

Thankfully, there is a new Jolt fast charger in Mortdale.  If needed, I could top up again at the NRMA charger at the Mittagong RSL.  No worries, luv.  Well, I was soon to be proven very wrong!!  

On the return journey, we arrived at Mortdale with 22% left in the battery.  This is where things started to go awry.  Based on my previous experience, I figured we needed about 33% charge to get home so I took advantage of Jolt’s free first 7 kWh daily offer, putting in 6.5 kWh into the battery.  That gave us 140 km for the 129 km trip home – plenty of headroom, or so I thought.  

Mistake #1: I failed to take 12.5% off the 140 kms.  I really only had 123 kms in the battery!

Mistake #2: I failed to check PlugShare before leaving Mortdale.  If I had, I would have seen that we couldn’t top up there and made an alternative ‘Plan B’.

Very soon, I noticed the percentage charge quickly reduce in relation to the km left to travel.  I realised that a top up in Mittagong was the only way we’d get home. 

So, I asked my spouse to check the newly downloaded PlugShare app for how far it was to the Mittagong charger and if it was in operation.  Well, blow me down but that fateful spanner symbol appeared on the location icon.  Too late, mate!  What are we gonna do now?

The perils of busted chargers

So I phoned the NRMA who confirmed that their RSL charger was indeed defunct.  They informed me that there was one in the Woolworths car park and another at the Mittagong Tourist Information Centre. 

Great! With just 4% charge left I nursed the vehicle to Woolies to find the that charger was in the undercover car park and there was no entry to it @10:30 PM.  Then, off to the Tourist Centre we went to discover that the charger there was an old one with a plug that didn’t fit!  Wow, now we are in a pickle.

A tow home was the only option, so I called the NRMA again and booked it in but there could be a three hour delay.  So we were looking at a long wait in the middle of the night in a secluded car park behind the Tourist Information Centre. 

Thankfully, the very kind NRMA lady waived the extra km charge for the tow (actually it was a tilt-tray truck rather than a tow) because I’d been a member for a long time. 

Frankly, I think that was because the NRMA charger at the Club was non-functional.  We had tossed around staying overnight but all the places were closed, so we just waited.  I got a text about 30 minutes later saying that we’d be rescued in 90 minutes.

Andre and his diesel tilt truck to the rescue

Thankfully, Andre and his magnificent tilt-tray truck trundled up early and, in a jiff, he had the silent, almost exhausted battery-on-wheels loaded and us buckled up in the cab. 

While enjoying the bumpiest ride ever, with the roads in such a state of disrepair after months of rain, I began debriefing myself about what had just happened.  How could I have got the calculations so badly wrong?

Mistake #3: I didn’t account for strong headwinds.  Andre suggested that the strong winds would have drastically reduced the range.

Mistake #4: I didn’t account for the incline.  I realised while sitting in the truck that we were climbing on the way south, albeit gradually, and that would also have had a negative effect.  Andre agreed.  He had noticed that the incline because his truck to use a lot more fuel from Picton onwards.

Mistake #5: I had an extra passenger on board.  I was also using the A/C a little for her comfort.

It all began to make sense.  I simply hadn’t realised how important driving conditions were in calculating an EVs real-world range.  Strong winds, a moderate climb, an extra passenger and A/C use had, in our case, reduced the range by 20% in addition to the 12.5% I’d already calculated! 

As it was, I only had about 95 km in the battery, not 140 km as the range predictor showed.  It should have been about 210 km to be sure to get home, achieved by charging up to 44%, just another 18 minutes at the Jolt charger in Mortdale.  That would have cost only $2.94!

Of course, and this is the major point here, if adequate charging infrastructure had been in place and working, I wouldn’t have needed to make those calculations in the first place!!  Grrrrrr!!!  Sadly, until such times as there are EV charging stations everywhere, we’ll just have to do the maths.

And so it passed that we only managed to get to Mittagong as a result of my naive methodology.  However, with no chargers in sight, we had to rely on a diesel powered tilt-truck and the driving skills of Andre, to get us home at 12:30 AM, a bit grumpy but much the wiser.