Australia now has over 1,300 public EV chargers. There is still a 625km hole in the middle of the country.

Australia's public EV charging network has quietly crossed a real milestone. There are now more than 1,300 public charging sites nationally, and most people live within 5km of one of them. That is a genuinely different country to the one EV buyers were being sold five years ago, when range anxiety and charger scarcity were the two biggest objections in every showroom conversation.

The numbers

The 1,300-plus site figure covers everything from suburban shopping centre chargers to highway DC fast chargers, and the coverage is thickest exactly where you would expect: capital cities and the coastal corridors between them. For the majority of Australians, who live in or near a major city, the charging network argument against buying an EV is close to gone.

The gap that is left

The catch is the outback. A stretch of roughly 625km on the Stuart Highway between Katherine in the Northern Territory and Tennant Creek still has no DC fast charger. That is not a short detour, it is most of a day's driving with nowhere to top up quickly if you are in anything other than a long-range EV. It is the kind of gap that does not show up in a national coverage statistic but matters enormously to the people who actually have to drive it.

Cartell Assessment

A national statistic like "88 per cent of people are within 5km of a charger" is true and also not the full picture. Network build-out follows population density, which means the last stretches to get fixed are always the remote ones, and those are exactly the routes where an EV driver has no fallback if the number is wrong. The coastal network is now good enough that charging is no longer the reason to avoid an EV in a capital city. The outback network is not, and pretending otherwise does buyers a disservice.

AU Outlook

Expect the next round of federal and territory charging investment to target exactly this kind of gap, because it is the visible, easily quoted example of where the network still fails. Watch for an announcement on the Katherine to Tennant Creek stretch specifically, since it is now the kind of case study that gets used to justify regional charging grants. Until that charger goes in, the honest advice for anyone doing the big lap through the Territory is the same as it has always been: know your range, know your fallback, and do not assume the coast's charging experience applies once you are past Katherine.