A quick stop in Carmila
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We stopped in the small town of Carmila. Not much here. The last petrol station showed “No petrol for 99 kilometres”. Other road signs include “It’s still a long way to go, kids”. The roads are long and mostly straight. The scenery is beautiful, very green and often with sugar cane fields up to the road.
Charging
At this point in time, the last (furthest north) Tesla supercharger was in Gympie (Sunshine Coast). From here to Cape Tribulation we’ll be using only third party chargers (such as ChargeFox/RACQ and Evie Networks fast chargers, destination chargers at accommodation, RV plugs etc). But we haven’t needed to use a Tesla supercharger for a long time anyway.
The car’s built in navigation only knows about the Tesla superchargers, so it has a little panic attack alert on screen. We just laughed and dismissed it.
Carmila has a charger, so we planned to stop here. We’re now on the “QESH” - the Queensland Electric Superhighway, which goes from Brisbane to Port Douglas. However, I think “superhighway” is a bit of marketing spin. There’s just one DC fast charger at each location along the route. The charger in two of the stops is dead (and has been dead for days) according to the Chargefox and PlugShare app. I’m glad we checked, so we knew to have enough charge to not rely on the dead charger in Marlborough.
RACQ you need to prioritise fixing these chargers, which are hundreds of kilometres apart. It’s not really an “electric superhighway” if we can’t rely on the chargers.
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