Power vacuum: how a lack of charging stations is holding back Australia’s EV revolution

Surging sales of electric vehicles show the automotive revolution is coming, but its arrival is being held up by a fundamental problem: a lack of charging stations. This was apparent over the Australian summer when long queues formed at public chargers on holiday travel routes.

There are about 3,700 public chargers, at just over 2,100 locations, across Australia, according to an Electric Vehicle Council report published in October - a fraction of the number in many comparable countries. In Canada, drivers have access to more than 16,000 public chargers at about 7,000 locations.

But despite government and business pledges to fix the problem, those best placed to do so - charger manufacturers - are stuck in their own queues waiting for microchips, the same in-demand component causing production delays of new vehicles.

The Electric Vehicle Council chief executive, Behyad Jafari, says the holdup has its roots in a "lost decade" when EVs were treated as a political football and there was no overarching policy to spur investment in supporting infrastructure.

"We had 10 years of the previous federal government just refusing to act on this issue," he says, noting that conservative governments in Europe designed EV-supportive policies during that same period.

"The result is that we could have had more investment. Now we need to catch up."

Despite taking similar electric vehicle policies to the 2019 election, the then prime minister Scott Morrison said an EV could not "tow your trailer" or a boat and could not "get you out to your favourite camping spot".