Road trip complete!
After 14 days of driving and visiting people and places, we've finished our 8372km EV road trip.  It included driving from the Gold Coast to Cairns and back to the Gold Coast, and then Brisbane to Melbourne (via Sydney) and back to Brisbane.  We made a series of short YouTube videos documenting the experience and where we also discussed EV charging, batteries, renewable energy and a whole lot more.

Charging
For more than half the time over the entire journey, we used 50kW Tritium (brisbane built) chargers provided by the Qld state government (QESH) and the NRMA.  These take around 40-50 minutes to charge up, adding 200km+, and be ready for the next leg of the journey.  For most of the Brisbane to Melbourne and back leg we used the Tesla superchargers (100kW) which were twice as fast meaning our stops to charge were under half an hour.

"Fuel" Cost
We used around 1223kWh of energy to travel that distance which is less than the energy a 1kW solar PV system would generate in a year in Qld.  If payment for charging was enabled (& if the cost 44c/kWh on all the chargers) it would have cost us $538.12 to travel the 8372km.  As it turns out, we paid just $7.86 in "fuel" for the entire journey when we used a third party Chargefox charging network once for a quick topup.  Our usage of the Tesla superchargers was free (we used a referal code like this one which gave us 1500 km of free supercharing when we bought the car.  Feel free to use this code if you end up orderging a Tesla and at the moment we both get 1500 km of free supercharging.)

8372km is around half the total distance that most people drive in a whole year.  Charging more slowly at normal residential electricity prices (22c/kWh), and traveling that same distance, would cost $269.06.  Charging from a home Solar PV system, versus selling that surplus electricity to the grid would cost $97.84, depending of course on your Solar PV feed in tariff.  Imagine spending $200-$600 for fuel for an entire year!

Video blog
Join us for the trip by watching our videos linked here:

• The whole trip or watch the individual legs below
  
• Gold Coast to Cairns
  
• Cairns to Gold Coast
  
• Brisbane to Melbourne
  
• Melbourne to Brisbane
  

Click on the table to see the full spreadsheet of stats.  We also picked up quite a few bugs on the road trip!

After 7 days we've finished driving 4227km, which is the Gold Coast to Cairns and back to the Gold Coast leg of the road trip.  We didn't use any Tesla superchargers (100kW+) and exclusively used the state government installed QESH chargers (50kW) run by Chargefox.

We used around 626kWh of energy to travel that distance.  If payment was enabled on the state government chargers it would have cost us $281.52.  As it turns out, at least this time around, charging was free.  Charging more slowly at normal residential electricity prices, and traveling that same distance, would cost $137.63.  Charging from a home Solar PV system, versus selling that surplus electricity to the grid would cost $50.05, depending of course on your Solar PV feed in tariff. 

You can read more about Local Power's long interest in EVs here.

Next stop is Sydney on the way to Melbourne.
Click on the table to see the full spreadsheet of stats. The photo of the Model 3 was taken near the 180MW Mt Emerald Windfarm on the Atherton tablelands, south west of Cairns.