I caught up with Alex at two very different moments on his electric car drive from Sydney to Margaret River in Western Australia. The first time, he was pulled up at a fast charger in the middle of South Australia, over 1,300 kilometres already behind him. The Nullarbor was still ahead. He seemed relaxed about it.
The second time, he was in Margaret River. He had made it. 4,242 kilometres in five days, solo behind the wheel the whole way.
What I did not expect was how honest he was about the rough patches. There is a stretch of Western Australia where the charging network is still being sorted out. One charger was offline for maintenance with no spare parts.
Another needed a phone call to ChargeFox just to get it to boot up. At one point, he was using a charger at the back of a roadhouse that was billing at a rate I had not heard of before. Not cheap. He figured it out each time, but it added hours to a day he had already planned carefully.
He also talked about driving strategy in a way I found genuinely interesting. He leaves before dawn to clear city traffic. He avoids every school holiday in every state. Out on remote roads, the chargers are often empty. In the city ones? Full of Uber drivers. The timing makes a real difference.
Then there was the fuel comparison. Petrol stations with nothing in the bowser.
Caravans budgeting thousands of dollars for fuel that may or may not be there.
His total electricity bill for the whole crossing came in just over $400. The cost didn’t change because of the oil shock because the sun and wind power do not care about oil prices.
We also got into what Tesla Autopilot actually does across long straight roads, what happens when the system spots a cyclist at 110km/h, the surprising road quality across the Nullarbor, and the plan for getting home. The return route is already being rethought because of flooding.
There is a lot more in the full video. Some of it is practical. Some of it will change how you think about what is actually possible right now.
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