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EV road trips in WA: how far can you really go?
EV ownership is booming in WA but as drivers venture out on holiday road trips, how far can they confidently go?
by Toby Hagon
Published
9 min read
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4 min readDrive
EV ownership is booming in WA but as drivers venture out on holiday road trips, how far can they confidently go?
by Toby Hagon
Published
9 min read
Text size
by Toby Hagon
Published
Text size
West Australians have well and truly caught the electric car bug – this year, WA surpassed 48,000 EVs on the road.
But it raises an inevitable question in a population of road trippers: how viable is long-distance travel in Australia’s largest state?
With more than 2.5 million square kilometres, much of it regional and remote, there are obvious challenges when travelling in a car with a battery rather than a tank of fuel.
And given the boom in EV sales, there are concerns about how the charging network will cope – especially over the holiday season.
In 2025, EVs made up 8.3 per cent of new vehicle sales across the country. By August this year, EV sales had skyrocketed to almost one in four new cars.
While the charging network is growing, Anita McCracken, the RAC’s Senior Manager Public Policy, says there is “a lot of work to do” to ensure it keeps up with EV ownership.
“We're still very far behind in terms of availability of public charging infrastructure per EV,” McCracken says.
“It's not just a matter of where there's a charger on a map. It should be: where's the need in terms of where people are actually travelling and in what volumes? And where are the gaps?”
EV owners agree. An RAC survey in September found more than half rarely or never take their EV beyond the city limits.
And for those who do head further out, less than half said they felt very or extremely confident doing so, citing concerns about insufficient chargers and the reliability of existing ones.
The WA government invested heavily in the WA EV Network, completed last year, which spreads 110 fast-charging points approximately every 200km, covering 49 locations. It stretches 7,000km between Mundrabilla in the south and Kununurra in the north and is touted as one of the world’s longest.
EV data platform carloop tracks charging infrastructure and founder Riz Akhtar says between public and privately-operated chargers, WA has 161 sites with 430 plugs providing higher powered DC charging.
Of those, around half have chargers capable of providing 150kW or more, which can add about 140km of driving range in 10 minutes.
Ultra-rapid chargers – typically providing upwards of 350kW – are what makes a road trip a lot easier, potentially adding 300km-plus range in as little as 10 minutes (how much depends not only on the charger, but the car).
But these are rare. At the time of writing, the most powerful chargers in regional WA were four 400kW plugs in Dunsborough, around 250km south of Perth.
They’re perfectly positioned for anyone planning a Margaret River adventure. But they also expose holes elsewhere in the network.
For most of the year, finding a charger in regional WA is unlikely to be a problem. Many sites sit idle for much of the day.
The strain comes on those handful of days when everyone hits the road at once, including Easter, Christmas, school holidays and long weekends.
WA is yet to see queues on the scale of the east coast, but that's not to say EV drivers aren't sometimes having to wait. Respondents to the RAC survey reported long waits at chargers including Williams, Kojonup, Dunsborough, Bunbury and Katanning during busy periods.
Given there are now around 111 EVs for every public DC charging plug, McCracken says holiday queues this summer are “pretty likely in some locations”.
“When people start going on road trips during holiday season, where we've got limited numbers of public chargers operating at different speeds, popular regional towns may particularly be an issue,” she said.
The maths of a charging queue is revealing.
Take a 150kW charger with two plugs. One car charging from 10 to 80 per cent might take 25 minutes, but plug in a second and both slow down, so each might now take 40 minutes or more. If four cars arrive together, the last one in line could be waiting more than an hour before it can start charging.
The good news is that a bit of planning goes a long way.
Timing your trip so you arrive at a charger outside peak times – especially in the middle of the day – can make all the difference.
And always have a plan b: know where the next charger is and whether you can reach it, before you arrive at your planned stop.
By far the easiest place to venture in an EV from Perth is south.
Stick Margaret River or the Great Southern on the destination list and for much of the journey, you can get away with minimal planning. The South West Edge group’s Explore EVerywhere campaign covers popular road trips and charging points along the way.
In an RAC survey of EV owners, Busselton, Margaret River and Bunbury were by far the most popular regional destinations, followed by Albany, Lancelin and Denmark.
Businesses are catching on, too. Juniper Estate in Wilyabrup, in the heart of Margaret River wine country, has had a charger for around five years – and doesn't charge visitors to use it. The state government's now-closed Charge Up program co-funded more than 600 chargers at businesses and other organisations, including hospitality spots and accommodation, although most are in the metro area.
Many accommodation providers, including selected RAC Parks and Resorts, offer EV charging so you can charge overnight (always bring your own Type 2 cable).
But overnight charging isn't a given, so check with the place you are staying.
“The EV highway makes charging for the trip and actual drive easy,” one RAC survey respondent said. “What's hard is getting a charging point at the accommodation near the car parking that you are allowed to use to trickle charge the car.”
For most EV owners, long trips – especially up north – remain rare.
Fewer than one in seven survey respondents who drive regionally have taken their EV more than 450km from Perth, with many citing uncertainty around chargers.
The route from Perth to the Kimberley is an example of where things get more challenging.
On the coastal route, there are more than 20 DC charge locations. But around half of them supply only 50kW, while the faster ones top out at 150kW.
So even in an EV with very fast charging, it may take more than 10 hours of charging to cover the more than-3000km journey.
And while most chargers are relatively well spaced (about 150km apart), some stretch the EV friendship. Between Minilya and Nanutarra is 228km, for example, while Derby to Fitzroy Crossing is 257km.
That may not sound like too far, but aerodynamic drag means that an EV’s claimed range will be lower when travelling at 110kmh: a good rule is to allow for about 20 per cent less distance.
Combine that with the fact you want 50km left when you reach the next charger, and suddenly an EV with a 600km range could be good for a little over 400km when you leave home with a full battery and about 330km after top-ups on the road to 80%.
Reliability of chargers is a major challenge, in part because taking one out of the system shifts the load elsewhere across the network.
In regional areas, it can be especially critical. If the charger at Nanutarra isn’t working – it’s the only fast charger at the remote roadhouse – it’s another 163km to the next one.
Tesla Owners Club of WA (TOCWA) chairman Harald Murphy says travelling north of Northampton or east of Norseman exposed major reliability issues in the network and “sadly, should be considered adventurous”.
Murphy, who has travelled WA extensively in his Tesla, says until those huge gaps in charger dependability are addressed, it is “difficult to convey positivity about remote area road trips”.
Akhtar says chargers being offline is a national issue, and WA has eight fast-charging sites averaging more than 10 per cent of time offline a day.
He points to vandalism and insufficient maintenance, as well as difficulty sourcing spare parts.
For many EV owners, it's not the distance that worries them, as much as knowing whether the charger will work when they get there.
McCracken wants enough rapid DC chargers, close enough together, that EV drivers can travel with the same confidence as someone in a petrol or diesel car.
“Ideally, we want no more than about 100km between each charger, so that you're allowing for redundancy when some chargers are down or not operating at capacity,” she says.
PlugShare and A Better Route Planner (ABRP) are two of the useful tools for a driver to work out where they will top up (the software in many EVs will also suggest where to charge and for how long).
Each shows charger locations and status - PlugShare's information is crowd-sourced, while ABRP has live data from some networks - so drivers can see when one isn't working.
ABRP matches your route to your vehicle, looking at charge speeds and the capacity of the battery, to plan a detailed charging schedule.
TOCWA also maintains a live WA EV Network dashboard (waevn.tocwa.cloud) to give EV motorists constantly updated information, including on charger status (for example, when a charger that is listed as officially available is, in fact, only delivering a trickle of power).
It also gives a reliability score, so EV drivers know which are most dependable.
Check just before you leave to get the most up-to-date information and make sure you have the right apps and accounts to pay when you arrive.
McCracken says the WA EV Network has been “a very good start”, but EV sales have simply outpaced it.
“We are seeing more and more people purchasing electric vehicles,” she says.
“We still have a significant level of infrastructure gaps in the network, and the level of EV charging implementation is just not keeping up. From a sustainability perspective, we need to make sure the availability of public charging does not continue to be a key barrier to the uptake of low and zero emissions vehicles.”
While private operators are building chargers in busier areas, McCracken says regional WA needs public funding to ensure coverage.
“Government really does have a role to play in helping to fill those network gaps,” she says.
“We have a longstanding ask for both levels of government to be scaling up funding for public charging infrastructure, particularly in regional places where private investment is unlikely.”
