For years, the great objection to electric cars was range.
Will I make it?
Fair question. But with many new EVs now offering substantial real-world range, it's becoming less relevant for everyday driving.
The anxiety hasn't disappeared. It's moved.
Now the question is:
What happens when I get there?
Will the charger be working? Will someone already be using it? Will there be a queue? Will I need another app? Will it deliver anything close to the advertised charging speed? And if it doesn't work, is there another charger close enough to matter?
That's public charging anxiety.
And it's arguably becoming one of the more important issues facing Australian EV adoption.
Because the car is increasingly not the problem.
The infrastructure around it can be.
The strange thing about owning an EV
Most EV owners who can charge at home probably think about charging far less than people who don't own one imagine.
You arrive home. Plug in. Wake up with what you need.
It's when you leave that ecosystem - the road trip, apartment living, interstate travel, an unexpectedly busy weekend - that public charging suddenly matters enormously.
And reliability matters more than the number of dots on a charging map.
A charger that exists but doesn't work isn't infrastructure.
Neither is a four-bay charging station if eight cars arrive at once.
Perhaps we need to stop measuring Australia's charging network primarily by how many chargers we've installed.
The more useful questions might be:
How many are working? How often? How long do people wait? How easy are they to use? And when something goes wrong, how quickly is it fixed?
We want to hear from the industry
Much of this discussion has come from EV drivers themselves. Their experiences, frustrations and feedback about using Australia's public charging network.
Those experiences deserve a hearing. But the loudest voices aren't always the most accurate. Sometimes they are. We need the evidence to tell us.
So WattCar will invite the people building and operating the networks to give us their view, share the data and explain what's improving, and where the problems remain.
Is public charging anxiety real? What's causing it? And what should Australian EV drivers reasonably expect from the network?
We're particularly interested in reliability, uptime, availability, queue times and how quickly faults are fixed.
We'll report what we find and keep you posted.
Range was the first great EV problem. The cars are solving it.
Public charging may be the next one.
And this time, adding another 100 kilometres of battery won't fix it.