How far do Australians actually drive?
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Distribution is stylised against BITRE and state HTS summaries; the point is the shape, not a specific year.
Pick a car
Each preset uses real-world range (10-20% below WLTP) and a typical 10-80% DC time at a 150 kW+ site.
Trip assumptions
Cruise speed and arrival SoC set how aggressive the stop plan is.
Sydney to Melbourne, 880 km via the Hume
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Fast charging: Australia and east-coast road trips
The Hume planner above answers one route. This map answers the geography question: where are the public 50+ kW DC sites? Dense coverage exists across the populated corridors; the remaining planning work is queues, reliability, towing and remote detours, not basic route existence.
Charger locations by Open Charge Map, used as a modified static snapshot.
Current charger data is a modified snapshot from Open Charge Map in charging-infra.geojson; user-contributed data is licensed under CC BY 4.0, and third-party provider data retains provider licensing. This is not a live availability feed. Use charger apps for navigation, pricing, access and plug availability.
Methodology
- Trip distribution. Stylised against BITRE IS-78 and state Household Travel Survey aggregates. The tail is where road trips sit; the median is around 8-10 km. The markers show that even a 250 km real-world EV covers over 99% of recorded trips on a single charge.
- Range budget. Depart at 100% SoC. Drive segments at the selected cruise speed. Consumption scales mildly with speed - not explicitly modelled here; the real-world range figure already bakes in 100 km/h cruising.
- Stop planner. Walk the charger list forwards. At each charger ahead, ask whether skipping it would land below the arrival buffer at the next one (or Melbourne). If yes, stop now. Charge from arrival SoC up to the target SoC using the car's 10-80% minutes figure, scaled linearly for partial windows. This is a planning heuristic, not ABRP.
- What the planner ignores. Queues at popular sites (Gundagai on a long weekend), 350 kW stations de-rating to 150 kW on older cars, detours off the Hume, towing, cold-start preconditioning time. Real trips are within about 10 minutes of the planner under decent conditions; plan-for-the-worst trips should add a 15 min buffer per stop.
- Petrol reference. Drive time at the same cruise speed plus one 12-minute fuel stop. A 55 L tank at 9 L/100km covers the 880 km with one top-up.
- Infrastructure map. Current locations are generated from an Open Charge Map snapshot filtered to public 50+ kW DC fast charging. "Upcoming" covers a small curated overlay of announced or under-construction sites; it is not a promise of opening date. Truck-focused sites are labelled separately because they may not be useful passenger-car stops. Coordinates are approximate and are only for this overview map.