Senior Product Manager at Chargefox, Tanya Timmers recently jumped in an EV for the weekend.

I borrowed an EV for the weekend to gain more experience driving and charging.

Picking it up on Friday evening without any firm dinner plans, I was eager to drive it somewhere to charge it up right away. I decided to head to The Glen, where I’d have plenty of restaurant options and the ability to do a fast charge.

In the end, the car was still almost full, so I didn’t need to top it up just yet. I would have plenty of kilometers to drive tomorrow before needing to charge. Nevertheless, I stole a glimpse of Engie’s charging station that was in use by one other car.

Saturday

The next morning, my partner and I headed out to get some kilometres in. We drove from Melbourne’s east to west to see the lion cubs at Werribee Zoo. Afterwards, we stopped at Grazeland to sample food

s from various street food vendors. While listening to live music in the sunshine, I opened the Chargefox app to plan our charging stop on the way home.

I decided to stop at the fast charger located next to the Town Hall in the City of Stonnington, which was about 15 minutes away from home.

Upon arrival, it was time for some quick user research. I handed my partner my phone with the Chargefox app as we stood in front of the charger and said: “You charge it!”

He looked at the charger screen and app, and promptly plugged in and started the charge. Easy! It was great to see how quickly the charger got up to speed and the vehicle showed us how long it would take to get to 80% charge.

We didn’t charge all the way up. As my partner and I are renters considering getting an EV in the near future, we wanted to try charging at home, too. In the evening, we plugged into our regular wall socket from the garage and set the maximum charging state in the car. It predicted it would finish charging at 5:30AM.

Sunday

It’s morning, and the car is charged! My home’s energy monitoring app tells me the car did, in fact, stop charging around 5:30AM, and that it consumed about 1.7kW per hour overnight.

I’m good to go for another day trip and spend the day at the cherry blossom festival. Afterwards, I top up at the City of Stonnington again for about 10 minutes.

The Cherry Blossom Festival

Final thoughts

Admittedly, I’ve charged much more frequently than I really would have needed to this weekend, mainly to test things out. As I would rarely do this many kilometres in a weekend or even a week (I clocked about 400km in the end), range anxiety was not something that particularly bothered me.

After this weekend, I feel even more positive knowing I can both charge at home and have plenty of good public charging options near me when I need them. When we own an EV one day, I imagine we’ll also make use of AC chargers nearby while getting groceries – something I didn’t even get to try this weekend.

One of the best things from this experience is that it’s helped me convince my partner to be solidly in Camp EV. So here’s to more electric trips in our future!

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