Final run to Adelaide via Keith for breakfast

 The last leg was quite pleasant, after waking up in the Horsham International Hotel, and heading off around 5am. 

Lovely driving in the dawn, arriving for an early breakfast in Keith BP truckstop around 7:30am Monday morning. 

One issue which I had not come across before was a fault which occurred about 30minutes into charging at Keith, which stopped the charge. Luckily I was on my way back from walking into the town, and was able to reset it. But it could be annoying if one came back after an hour to find this!

It was interesting to hear from the conversation in the truckstop among the truckies about a significant truck accident at the bottom of the South-Eastern Freeway into Adelaide, when the day before, in the afternoon, a runaway truck which had lost its brakes, ploughed into around 9 cars. Whilst there were injuries (sent to hospital), amazingly no fatalities. As I was using that freeway to get back, this was of particular interest as to whether that section was open again.

As it turned out, on my arrival at that intersection, I couldn't see any obvious signs of an accident, such was the efficient cleanup they must have done on the Sunday night. I guess there's been several accidents there in past years to give them enough practice! 

Summary:

This trip, whilst quite tiring given the short amount of time allowed owing to work commitments, was a good challenge and adventure into testing the ability of a relatively new electric vehicle to Australia, the Polestar 2. 

Overall, the driving experience was most pleasant, in particular, the superior acceleration over the vast majority of petrol engine vehicles was very handy for overtaking on highways, and negotiating heavy traffic in Melbourne. 

Trip Manual (TM) on the left shows the numbers for the whole trip (including some driving around suburban Melbourne for 1 day)

The PS2's range of around 450km was adequate for the trip, however, in future, to be able to comfortably make the ADL-MEL trip on one charge would be even better (this would require a battery with around 1000km range, which I believe already exists in an EV prototype).

Home by late Monday morning!

In order for mass uptake of this EV road trip (and pretty much any Australian interstate trip), improvements in the number of charging stations, and particularly, charging time required, will need to happen in the next few years. The Federal and State governments do appear to have plans for this. As to how effective the measures will be, time will tell.

Watch this space for rapid developments in the next few years!