NRMA EV show

Recent NRMA Electric Vehicle Field Weekend.

The NRMA is in the forefront of promoting Electric Vehicles (EVs) in NSW. They provide free electric chargers in many country towns and are soon to add a battery feature to their service vans that will provide an extra 40Kms of range for EV owners unfortunate enough to run out of charge.

Recently, on 23-24^th July 2022, my partner and I attended an NRMA sponsored EV demonstration and field weekend held at the St Ives driver training centre. The event was remarkable for the throngs of people that attended. EV demonstration rides were available (all booked out) and there were many EV models on display. My partner fell in love with the Nissan Leaf. I was quite impressed with the Polestar (aka Volvo) model. Hyundai and of course Tesla were well represented as were a number of EV clubs and suppliers of EV chargers.

Also present with a kiosk was the NSW government as well as two northern councils, Ku-ring-gai and Northern Beaches. We were told these two local councils had already installed more than 40 EV charging stations and were aiming for this figure to be in the hundreds. Northern Beaches had their own Hyundai Ionic EV on display, complete with promotional decoration.

The NSW government representatives were enthusiastic to talk about the initiatives available to assist the adoption of EV’s. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that EVs are now able to use the T2 and T3 transit lanes. Over $170 million is being spent by the government to promote the installation of chargers. All this and more can be read on this NSW government website.

We came away from this event exhilarated that progress was being made but we also felt somewhat disappointed that our own council (IWC) appears to be a laggard with EV adoption. For example, the number of charging stations on the Balmain peninsula is precisely zero.