We drove up to Sydney in our EV again1. This time it was to do a bit of ‘babysitting’ for some of the last few days of school holidays. We usually top up after about 220kms at Pheasant’s Nest, so the remaining 125 kms is easily done. However, this time, for the first time during our several EV trips, the phone app ‘Plugshare’ showed that all the charging stations at Pheasant’s Nest were occupied, so we decided to top up some 50 km before Pheasant’s Nest, near Exeter. However, when we got there, all the charging stations were occupied, so we had to wait for ten minutes or so. While we were waiting, we talked to a couple who were charging their large Kia EV. The husband said it was the first time he had used a fast charger as they had not driven out of Canberra in the three months since he bought it, and he usually charges it at home, as we do. We charge ours off-peak over the weekend, so it is cheaper.
When our turn came we drove into the recently vacated slot, plugged the car in and went to the cafe to have lunch. The car app stated that the charge from about 46% to 90% would take about 50 minutes. However, the charging rarely takes as long as the app suggested, and probably took about something like 40 minutes; plenty of time for lunch and a coffee.
The fact we had to wait for a charging station was very much a surprise, as that had never happened to us before. The person to blame for this is, of course, the Mango Paedo, who, in his amazingly stupid attack on Iran in February 2026 caused the Iranians to close the Strait of Hormuz, as his national security advisors had suggested would happen. This caused the price of petrol and diesel to increase dramatically, and concomitantly, the attractiveness of EVs to increase.
While only about 2% of cars on the road in Australia are EVs (BatteryEVs and Plug-in hybrid EVs), the percentage of new car sales which were BEVs alone in the fourth quarter of 2025 was about 9.25%. The feature of this sales data which struck me was that in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) the proportion of new car sales which were BEVs in the same period was about 21%!2
However, since the idiotic Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs) accounted for almost 30 per cent of all new vehicles sold in Australia in May, with BEVs alone more than doubling year-on-year to account for 20.6 per cent of the market. With a total of 21,303 BEVs sold in May, that averages out to 687 battery electric vehicles were sold per day, or the equivalent to about 29 sold every hour or roughly one sold every 2 minutes.
When including PHEVs, Australians purchased 30,618 rechargeable vehicles. And when expanding the data to include all types of hybrids, all electrified vehicles accounted for 46 per cent of all new vehicle sales, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI). In the ACT, for a long time the market leader in EV adoption in Australia, sales hit 36.5 per cent in May, taking the total share of EVs in the existing fleet to 4.7 per cent3.
When we drove a diesel Mazda for a decade and occasionally had to wait in a queue to fill its tank with fuel, nobody seemed to whinge that the infrastructure was not up to par. However, the fact that EV sales have rocketed has shown that while the infrastructure can currently cope, with the rapid increase in EV sales, it won’t be long before the waiting times become too long to be acceptable for the average punter.
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