Charging is cheaper than buying petrol or diesel , but you can bet your bottom dollar that states or feds will add a tax, excise, surcharge, stamp duty or whatever they want to call it, so that they can "maintain the roads". The electricity is not free at home either, unless you have solar panels.
Secondly, no one has yet come up with the practical solution to the scalability of electric vehicles.
Everything's fine when there is a small percentage of vehicles that are EV's and want to charge, but there is a certain critical percentage where it all falls apart.
A 2021 tesla model S with the 82KWh motor has a range of around 530 Kms according to tesla.
To charge this Tesla from say half charge to 82 KWH, would take around 17 hours at a continuous 10 amp supply, which is what most household power points are rated at.
If you wanted a fast charge, say 2 or 3 hours, you are going to need 60 to 90 amps of current. Very few houses have a supply that is rated to take that sort of current. The other issue is that OZ network has set up so that a single transformer supplies 4 to six houses, and none of them are designed for one or more houses to extract that sort of current from the network. An average daily use for a house is 19 KW/h per day, but of course in summer when aircons, the pool pump, etc are running, it can shoot up to 40+ kwh, which is about half the 82kw/h that our Tesla needs. Energex has a standard that says 42kVa per household in new developments, so that is what people get, unless they pay for "prestige home access " of 7.0 kva. Most older housing developments would have planning designed much less usage than that. It will be difficult to see how large scale EV charging is going to take place under these limitations.
Mick
I have owned a Tesla Since 2019 so understand the ins and outs of charging better than most, and have already had marathon debates in this thread explaining the exact points you raised so I don’t want to go over everything in depth again, but here a a few points where you are mistaken.
1, there is more than enough capacity on the grid to charge EV vehicles provided most of it is done during off peak times such as at night, during the middle of the day, or weekends.
2, If you install the Tesla wall charger that comes with the car rather than plug into a wall socket, you can easily charge over night, if you can charge at up to 22kwh depending on how you get your electrician to set it up, but 6kwh charging is standard when it’s on its own circuit. But if you really drive a lot you can pay to get up to 22 kWh, it’s more expensive to set up, but if you drive enough that you need it, the fuel savings more than cover the cost.
3, most people only go to the petrol station once a week, so even using the slow power point charger they could easily maintain charge.
4, The fast chargers will go from 0% to 80% in about 15 mins if you need to top up out on the road, not 2-3 hrs.
5, again very few people would be using the full 82kwh every day, think about it, if you aren’t going to the petrol station every day now, then you won’t be using a full battery every day.
6, smart chargers could easily be used to balance out charging loads if needed, my Tesla can accept any charge from 1kwh up to 22kwh through the home Tesla charger, and over 200kwh at a fast charger, these speeds could be controlled by the grid to balance demand as needed.
7, the underlying cost of electricity is far cheaper than the underlying cost of petrol once you remove the petrol tax, so even with an added tax electricity would be cheaper, for example currently it costs me about 25cents to charge with the equivalent of 1 litre of petrol, adding a 30cent tax to that only brings it up to 55cents, and it would be cheaper when I use solar which I do 95% of the time, or if I connected my charger to the off peak circuit.