Travels – blog.nya.nz

Shaking like a Leaf (II): Cities, big and small

This blog post is part of a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Day 2: Newcastle to Sydney

Even after the long day yesterday, I was already up at 6, with the warm sun beaming through the windows.

I had already charged the car to 90% overnight, but because there’s free charging I thought I might as well get the car charged to 100% before heading out to Sydney – saves me a bit of cash and also helps get my car further with the hilly terrain expected along the way. Two of the four spots were already occupied at the charging station near the wharf by 7:30am – all chargers were occupied soon after, which wasn’t surprising considering it didn’t cost anything to charge here.

Shaking like a Leaf (I): From dawn till dusk

This blog post is part of a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Day 1: Brisbane to Newcastle via Pacific Highway

The first day involved travelling from Brisbane to Newcastle, which is around 780km. This was going to be longest I would be driving in a single day – partly because I had planned the road trip a little late and needed to fit around some schedules to catch up with people along the way. I probably would have stopped to stay in places like Coffs Harbour along the way if I hadn’t stuffed up the timing of the initial part of the trip.

A screenshot of the A Better Route Planner app, with a route marked between Brisbane and Newcastle, with multiple pins indicating locations for electric vehicle charging. — ABRP in action.

For general planning I used the “A Better Route Planner” app (ABRP) which suggested that it would take around 12 hours or so all up to cover the distance with some of the stopovers included. This app automatically routes travel to include charging stations, adds charge time to the total trip time, and you can even customise things like the remaining level of charge you want when arriving, and so on. I’ll pop comments about ABRP throughout this series, but overall I have found it pretty good and mostly lined up with my manual planning before I discovered the app, though its UI has quite a few quirks which can be frustrating at times.

For this leg I gave myself another 2 hours above the estimate, and planned for 14 hours in total with around 9 hours on the road. That would mean I would start at 3am AEST and arrive around 6pm AEDT.¹ An early start, but not something I haven’t done before in previous travels.

Shaking like a Leaf: the EV road trip from hell?

This blog post is the first in a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Not many people know that I had acquired a Nissan Leaf as a second-hand Japanese import into Australia during COVID. It’s a battery electric vehicle, that until 2020 was the most popular consumer electric car in the world, and I decided to make it my first car after years of solely using public transport in various cities and needing a little bit more flexibility.