2026-04-05
When planning this trip, we carefully off-set the travel days from the most obvious Easter Weekend travel days to avoid the bulk of the traffic, and as it happened that worked quite nicely (even with the added "bonus" of ridiculous fuel prices putting a damper on regular traffic). As such, we were up at around 5am on Sunday morning in order to hit the road fairly early. A quick pack, and loading of the car, and we were away no later than 6:30am (I didn't note the exact time of departure). Traffic within Sydney was lighter than usual, and we had an excellent run along Pennant Hills Rd, etc out to the motorway. As usual we avoided toll roads, because having done that once, we found the cost to be astronomical and definitely not worth it unless you can avoid some major incident on your usual route.
There was a little more traffic on the Newcastle motorway than there was on Wednesday when we came down, but it was still very light compared to our usual trips. I put the extra traffic down to the fact that the fuel excise was halved Wed night/Thur morning, so I guess more poeple felt they could afford to drive somewhere. Our first charge stop was Raymond Terrace. The usual BP we pull in to has one charger only and was occupied by someone who'd only plugged in fairly recently. It was also charging at a rate of 28kw which is way too slow to be sitting around waiting for, so we diverted to the Raymond Terrace Tesla chargers. We usually try not to use Tesla chargers because the older superchargers have cables that barely reach our charge point, and we try to limit how many services we pay that cretin Elon Musk for, but sometimes there isn't a lot of choice. As it turns out, these chargers are of the newer type and there was enough length of cable to plug in, even if we did use the charger for the spot next to ours (the cable length isn't enough to go around to the opposite side of the car). Being early, this wasn't really a problem though. We went for a walk around the block to stretch our legs and investigate the local bakery scene. One bakery was found, but wasn't open (Easter Sunday after all), and a second appeeared to be inside the local shopping centre, but we didn't venture inside to ascertain its state of opening. When the charge was done, it was driver change time, so Lea took the wheel and we set off again.
Not too far out on the motorway, we were sitting exactly on the posted limit (thanks to very accurate cruise control, and speed sign recognition - the BMW software in this car is really quite excellent), when I noticed we were being overtaken by a mobile speed camera vehicle, with the slogan "Thank you for not speeding" painted on the side. Very much a case of "do as I say, not as I do". Not exactly setting the best example.
Our next charge stop/driver change was at Taree South. Here we saw a Jaecoo J5 in the wild. These are one of the cheapest electric SUVs in Australia at the moment. A fairly reasonable looking car. Had a good chat with the owners who seemed to be fairly new to the EV world, and very new to roadtripping in EVs. I saw this because they were filling to 100% which in roadtrip ettiquite is usually a no-no if there are people waiting (fine if there's no-one about and you're willing to spend the extra time charging though). I hinted (fairly heavily) that 80% charge on roadtrips was usually sufficient, but they weren't picking up the hints, so it was about a 15 min wait for them to put the last 2% in their battery. Technically there are four charge cables here, one Chademo, and three CCS2, over two charge units, and sensibly they'd have four car spots to cater for that, but for whatever reason, there's just two carparks. We could have parked "illegally" and used the other charger (that had an MG ZS charging off one of the CCS2 ports), but that would have semi-blocked the driveway access and the Jaecoo was almost done anyway, so we waited. Once plugged in, it was a nice fast charge (about 20mins) finishing about the same time as the MG.
Our next planned stop was the BP on the highway near Nambucca Heads. There's a single charger there, but I've used it before and it's fairly reliable. However, when we got there, someone was charging and another waitring, so this was going to be a long wait. We had 107km of range, so we pushed on. There's a Chargefox just south of Coffs Harbour we've used before, and when we got there, there was no-one charging so I pulled in and attempted to charge. Alas, this charger had taken a dislike for our car. I tried both outlets multiple times. The charger would ramp up, and then error. While there, a Hyundai Kona EV turned up and she managed to charge straight away, so it was deinitely an incompatibility issue between the charger and our car. We now had 30km of range left, but the Telsa chargers in Coffs were only 8km away, so we went there. These are of course, older model superchargers, with extremely short cables. Once again, we had to use the charger for the bay next to us, and the cable only just reached, but it worked, and equally importantly the cafés in the shopping centre were open. We lunched, and got back to the car just as it hit 80% and finished. A Tesla was just pulling in to the spot next to us. I choose to believe no-one else tried to use that spot while we were eating (they'd have been out of luck if they did).
Lea drove the next leg to Ballina where we stopped at the Services there. There's a dual port CCS2 charger there, so two spots, but this particular charger has developed an interesting fault whereby if someone plugs in and starts charging, the other port immediately goes Out of Order. There was no-one else there when we arrived, so we charged ok (although despite the BP app saying they're 75kw charges, they're actually only 50kw). While we were charging, the little red MG ZS from this morning pulled in. He was aware of the charger issue from his trip down, so opted to head to the Tesla chargers down the road rather than wait for us to finish. We once again went to 80% (the car's nav guidance wanted to go to 89% in order to arrive home with 30% left in the battery, but I didn't see the need as we can charge cheaper at home).
The last leg was mine, so we set off again and as expected the traffic got progressively heavier the closer we got the Brisbane. Still wasn't terrible, no stop-start sections, even Springwood was clear. We arrived home at around 19:30ish, meaning a total trip time of approximately 13 hours. Not too bad, and due to the longer breaks and easier driving (lane-assist/radar cruise makes ALL the difference), we weren't exhausted.
Total cost in public charging for the whole trip (including the toodling around western Sydney while there) was $196.47
If we'd taken the Prado, I'd have estimated approximately $700 in fuel.