We’re five days in to a 5000km drive across Australia. It’s scorching hot. The battery on our electric car’s near flat. And we’re being followed.
It was only when I pulled a U-turn on McIvor Street in Norseman that I realised we had been followed for the last hundred kilometres.I hadn’t noticed the car right behind us: a dusty white LandCruiser troop-carrier ute with a green canvas cover and an angry set of eyes staring right at me.
I’d grown up in a car family. My great-grandfather Carlo was a mechanic who’d raced the Targa Florio in Italy before coming to Melbourne to establish Fiat dealerships. It would take seven days to get to Perth, going the long way via Albany and Esperance. We would have to make 21 stops. This is about two days slower than the same route in a petrol-fuelled car.Vaz and I met 20 years ago when I was working late nights in a London jazz club as a waiter.
As we climbed into the car at 5am at the start of our journey, I couldn’t resist asking a question. “Hey Google, navigate to Perth”.So I set course for Hay, about 715 kilometres away and arrived by 4pm, full of the excitement of the first day. “Mildura, we’re charging up to 100 per cent and it’s 290 kilometres. We should be charged in about an hour,” I told Reardon.“Theoretically about 450 kilometres but about 400 kilometres on the highway.”
The car company had told me that charging the battery from 10 to 80 per cent was the quick part of charging while the last 20 per cent, to a 100 per cent battery, could take two more hours. We made a brief stop at Paulett Wines in South Australia’s Clare Valley, where Vaz and Carlo did a tasting and I plugged in for a quick charge, and then we stopped to have lunch at the winery of federal Trade Minister Don Farrell and his wife Nimfa.Until recently, the only accommodation at Farrell Wines was a large tin shed that Don had built by hand, though they now had a small house on his five acres of vineyards.
It was well over thirty degrees after 6pm and we experimented with turning off the air-conditioning. That gave the car about an extra 6 per cent of battery range. At 46 per cent, we had just enough range to drive the 62 kilometres to Streaky Bay and 130 kilometres on to Ceduna. Vaz and I played pool, Dad napped and we checked out the jars of preserved snakes, the airfield out back and the never-ending stream of B-double and B-triple trucks pulling up out front.
It didn’t work. We called Lee from the local council and even after he’d had a tinker with it, it remained unresponsive.“Why is he called Mad Ted?” Vaz asked in his plummy accent.Lee gave up and we walked back to the motel, pondering chainsaws and wedding cakes, rushing our order in before the motel kitchen closed.
It was easily the worst day of the trip thanks to the charging problems in Norseman. I was over EVs. I just wanted to stop for petrol.
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