To the Electric Vehicle Council

I am an electric vehicle owner and have had my BYD Atto 3 since March 2023. I live in Central Tilba on the South Coast of NSW and have made several trips to Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

On a recent trip to Melbourne, the unreliability of the charging infrastructure made the journey difficult. On this trip, it is essential to charge in Cann River, where a 50kW tritium charger is installed by East Gippsland Shire Council and maintained through a contract with RACV Solar.

Although this charger showed as available in the Chargefox app, which manages payments, it activated but would not start charging. PlugShare did show it was having issues and I contacted Chargefox, who were unable to get it to start.

Please note that the BYD Atto 3 cannot be charged at V3 Tesla Super chargers, of which there are three in Cann River. As the Orbost Tritium charger has been offline for months, I had to trickle charge everywhere I could – it took 6 hours to get to Orbost, then charge overnight at the Marlo Hotel where there was a free wall charger.

From Bruthen, where there is a new Evie charger, the journey to Melbourne is easy and offers many options.

When we returned home a few days later and tried to charge in Bega, we found that this NRMA tritium charger was not working either, necessitating an overnight stay in Bega, even though we were only 60 km from home.

There are no DC chargers at Pambula, Merimbula and Eden. With the tritium chargers from Bega, Cann River and Orbost there is a real problem between Batemans Bay and Bruthen.

This is unacceptable on the major coastal highway between Sydney and Melbourne and potentially represents a barrier to the transition to electric vehicles. There could also be negative knock-on effects for tourism and small businesses in these regions.

It seems that the current policies of installing individual chargers, coupled with the known unreliability of the older Tritium chargers, are not the best way to go. I hope that with this real-world example, your organization can lobby more effectively and advocate for the current inadequacy of the charging infrastructure.

Please also note that this has not put me off – having an electric vehicle is the best thing I could have done and I will continue to travel and make sure I have a plan B and C!

Stuart Absalom

Central Tilbra

(If you have a letter or opinion, please send it to (email protected)).