Just when I thought the culture war over battery electric vehicles had finally cooled off, another recycled, fact-free myth pops up to prove me wrong. I can forgive the accidental stuff—the kind of mistake that happens when someone jumps into an EV for the first time without realizing that it’s not a petrol car with a socket instead of a fuel cap. That was the case with an ABC reporter who tried to use a DC fast charger without downloading or setting up the charging app beforehand, then waited all the way to 100 percent instead of moving on once the car’s charging speed slowed down after 80 percent. Anyone who’s made the switch knows that moment: you forget to plan ahead, you stare at the plug, and you blame the car for not behaving like the old reliable petrol station experience. The real culprit wasn’t the car; it was a petrol-tank mindset. Charging an EV isn’t harder, it’s just different, and it rewards a little bit of curiosity and flexibility. You don’t have to stand around waiting if you don’t want to—you plug in, grab a coffee, stretch your legs, and by the time you’re ready, the car is too. But lazily blaming the technology for your own lack of homework isn’t just inaccurate; it feeds a bigger narrative that simply isn’t true anymore.
The more frustrating kind of misinformation is the deliberate, recycled article from what people trust as a reliable source. A recent piece on the Drive website titled “The wrong Australians are buying EVs” trotted out every tired cliché you can imagine, long after real-world owners had debunked them with miles, dashboards, and lived experience. The author claimed that EVs have such limited range that they “only make sense when used in urban environments and inner-city conditions.” Honestly, that is so 2012 it’s almost nostalgic. Battery technology has moved on in ways that would make those early skeptics’ heads spin. Yes, there are still a few budget EVs with modest ranges—the BYD Atto 1, Australia’s current cheapest new car, manages around 220 kilometers—but the vast majority of new battery-electric vehicles offer well over 400 kilometers of real-world driving range. The longest-range models now push into 600 to 800 kilometers, which is more than enough for a full day of driving and then some. I say this from experience: my 2019 Kona Electric, which has a real-world range in the high 400s, has done everything I’ve thrown at it. I’ve driven it from Melbourne to Sydney, up to Coffs Harbour, and back through the inland route via the New England and Newell highways. That kind of trip used to feel like a logistical challenge. Now it’s just a drive—a comfortable, quiet, enjoyable drive—with a few planned stops that don’t feel like chores. So when someone confidently tells you that EVs only work in the city, they’re not reporting; they’re recycling a script that badly needs retiring.
The article then pivoted to parking and charging, claiming that if you live in the inner city, you probably don’t have off-street parking, so EVs are impractical. There’s a sliver of truth there, but it’s used in a way that’s genuinely disingenuous. Lots of apartment and flat dwellers do have off-street parking, and plenty of newer buildings are starting to include EV chargers or at least the infrastructure to add them later. For the apartments that weren’t built with charging in mind, solutions are emerging all the time. New guidance, like the Victorian Guide to installing charging in apartments, is specifically designed to help body corporates and owners navigate the process. The problem up until now wasn’t that these solutions didn’t exist; it was that so few apartment residents actually owned EVs that the rest of the building didn’t feel any pressure to think about charging. That’s changing fast. And for the smaller number of people who genuinely don’t have off-street parking, the article’s claim that public charging is “less than stellar” doesn’t hold up in practice. In my own 3,400-kilometer road trip, I barely had to think about charging at all. I didn’t need to plug in at my overnight stops—something I absolutely had to do on the same trip back in 2019. The public network has grown so much that the only wait I experienced was five minutes at a single charger across the whole journey. Add to that the ongoing roll-out of public AC chargers, which are still in their early days but expanding steadily alongside local DC fast chargers, and you’ve got a growing web of options for people parking on the street. With modern EV ranges, inner-city dwellers usually only need to charge once every couple of weeks anyway, and that can easily be done while doing the weekly shopping or catching a movie. No waiting, no inconvenience, no drama.
But it’s the article’s turn toward hybrids that really made me do a double take. The author said that for people in outer suburbs, “vast distances need to be covered; a hybrid might make more sense—even if most EVs can comfortably cover this distance and back.” Wait, what? That sentence contradicts everything they’d just argued. If most EVs can comfortably cover the distance and back, then why on earth would a hybrid make more sense? Let’s think about the actual economics. Most plug-in hybrids have an electric-only range of around 50 to 60 kilometers, so for a long commute you’ll be burning petrol for most of the trip. With fuel prices where they are, that’s expensive. A battery-electric vehicle charged at home on off-peak electricity costs something like 90 percent less to run than a petrol car. A PHEV might get you a third closer to that if you religiously plug it in every single night, but studies show plenty of PHEV owners don’t bother recharging regularly. Why? Because charging every night becomes a chore, especially compared to charging a full BEV once or twice a week and then forgetting about it. So the whole argument collapses under basic math. If a BEV can handle the commute, including the return trip, and you can charge it at home overnight, you’re cutting your fuel costs to almost nothing. Why would you choose a car that still needs petrol for a huge chunk of your miles, and then has the extra complexity of a combustion engine and a battery to maintain? At that point, choosing a hybrid over a BEV isn’t practicality; it’s ideology, or just a serious misunderstanding of how the two technologies compare.
The article also took aim at the Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) exemption for electric vehicles, arguing that it only helps wealthy people buy new EVs. Well, no sh*t, Sherlock—that’s how new car incentives work. Generally speaking, the better-off are the ones buying brand-new cars, while the rest of us wait until they depreciate and pick them up second-hand. The FBT exemption was never designed to put a new EV in every driveway overnight. It was designed to flood the second-hand market with EVs faster, because leased cars are normally returned and replaced at the end of a lease cycle. That means more EVs become available to ordinary buyers a few years down the road. It also encourages fleet buyers to choose EVs over dual-cab utes, which is especially important given the ridiculous loophole that already allowed commercial vehicles over one tonne to enjoy a form of FBT exemption. That loophole was thoroughly abused—you only have to look at the number of oversized utes being used as commuter cars instead of carrying tradie loads to see exactly how. The article then claimed the FBT exemption was just one of many EV incentives in place, but couldn’t name any others. That’s because they’ve all but disappeared. There are a few registration discounts left in a couple of states, but that’s about it. The author even tried to paint the solar battery rebate as some kind of EV incentive. That’s laughable. The only thing a home battery and an EV battery have in common is that they both store electricity. A home battery is typically a quarter to half the size of an EV battery, and if you drained it to charge your car, you’d have nothing left to run your house overnight or through a rainy stretch of winter. The last thing you want to do is charge your car from a home battery. You’re much better off charging on a super off-peak tariff or taking advantage of those windowed free-power periods that some electricity plans offer.
So when the article wraps up by declaring that “the people buying an EV—whether to take advantage of the various schemes on offer—are probably the ones that need an EV the least,” and that “long-distance commuting, country roads, and escaping the urban sprawl are arguably best left to other powertrains for now,” I have to say: do your bloody homework before writing tripe like that. I’ve made multiple completely unsubsidised EV purchases, including a brand-new one, back when there were no incentives worth speaking of. I’ve driven long distances, remote regional routes, and everything in between, using the ever-growing public charging network, and it works. It works better every single year. EVs are not perfect, and they do ask you to think a little differently about fueling up. But the tired, recycled arguments that they only suit wealthy inner-city dwellers with garages and short commutes are not just lazy—they’re dangerous. They discourage ordinary people from considering a technology that could save them thousands of dollars and fundamentally change the way they think about driving. If you’re genuinely curious about EVs, don’t listen to people who haven’t spent real time in one. Talk to actual owners. Read real-world trip reports. Ask questions from a place of curiosity, not confirmation. I’ve been working in the EV sector since 2008, training electricians and advising businesses and governments on the transition, and I can tell you this: the future isn’t coming. It’s already here, quietly pulling into driveways, charging overnight, and heading out on long road trips without a single orange juice bottle or petrol station detour. The culture war may never fully end, but the facts are no longer up for debate.