Tackling EV misinformation at Everything Electric

Despite the growing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) — notwithstanding the current decline in Tesla sales — many Australians are still unsure about this mode of transport, citing concerns surrounding cost, safety and range anxiety. At Everything Electric, which was held at Sydney Showground from 7–9 March 2025, attendees had the chance to learn more about EVs and other energy efficiency technologies, in the form of panels, seminars and, perhaps most importantly, test drives.

It’s important to note that EVs have quite literally come a long way in the past 15+ years, and few people know this better than Robert Llewellyn — founder of the Fully Charged web series and podcast, which hosts Everything Electric shows around the world (you may also be familiar with him as Kryten the mechanoid in comedy series Red Dwarf). Llewellyn first came across the concept of electric cars when presenting the series Junkyard Wars back in the early 2000s, though his first direct experience came when he was lent an EV called a Mitsubishi i-MiEV in 2009, which had a range of 60–70 miles (around 100 km).

“And there was nowhere to charge it, there was no charging infrastructure in the UK, so it was literally you’d go to someone’s house and you’d plug a wire through their kitchen window and charge it while you’re there,” Llewellyn said.

Despite these hurdles, Llewellyn liked the EV experience enough that he ended up buying himself a Nissan Leaf, which he once drove 80 miles to a friend’s house charged solely from his own solar panels. The friend, who was an architect, happened to have an old watermill that he’d converted into a generator, enabling Llewellyn to charge the car again.

“So I did a 160-mile journey with no imported fuel, no transmission lines, no paying for electricity — it was electricity that came from the environment directly, plugged into his generator at his end and my solar panels,” Llewellyn said. “And I just thought, ‘This is a real big change in the way we do things.’”

Image credit: Henry Yau

These days, Llewellyn said, charging infrastructure is ubiquitous in the UK, to the extent you can pick and choose where to charge based on price or convenience. “And there’s a motorway servicing area in the southern UK, outside Exeter, with nearly 100 rapid chargers in the one place. So when you get there, you’re not thinking ‘Oh, will it work? Will there be room?’. You don’t worry about it — you just drive in and plug in, ‘cause there is room, and they all work.”

This rise in charging points has gone hand in hand with the introduction of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ), which was introduced in 2019 and extended in 2023 to cover over 1500 km². Vehicles with high emissions are required to pay a daily charge of £12.50 to drive within the zone, while EVs can get in for free. The result, Llewellyn said, is that the air quality in London is now cleaner than Sydney.

“All our buses, all our taxis, all our delivery vans are all electric now,” he said. Asian countries such as China and India are now also adopting electric scooters and mopeds, he claimed, resulting in city streets that are cleaner, quieter and safer.

So why haven’t EVs taken off as fast in Australia? After all, we have a significant amount of rooftop solar that we can use to charge them, with Llewellyn claiming that Australia is already “producing much more electricity than the whole country can possibly consume, just from rooftops” (the UK, in comparison, has 10% of our solar panels). One concern is safety, with stories of EV batteries being prone to catching fire. But Llewellyn debunked this, claiming that fires are less common in electric vehicles — besides, a lot of EVs nowadays have lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which are safer than traditional lithium-ion.

“There’s battery trucks here that … are pulling 90 tonnes of concrete around Australia every day,” he said. “The drivers refuse to go back into diesel trucks — they’re so noisy, and hot, and unpleasant, and difficult, and always break down, and are dangerous, and catch fire! Diesel trucks catch fire a lot — one electric truck’s caught fire once.”

Another concern is range anxiety, which may seem understandable in a country our size — but Llewellyn disagrees, having journeyed to Everything Electric by EV directly from Brisbane.

“It was boring,” he confessed of the drive. “It wasn’t challenging and frightening and ‘oh my God, will I make it?’ — it was a long drive and it’s quite boring. And I got tired of listening to podcasts and audiobooks. So it was exactly the same as driving a petrol car.”

While Llewellyn admitted that such a drive could be more difficult in more remote parts of Australia, he said it’s quite easy to maintain a charge “if you stop thinking about an electric car like a petrol car, where you’re on a journey and you have to stop at a specific point where you fill the tank and you can’t do anything else”.

“With an electric car, you can plug it in at your mum’s house when you’re visiting,” he said. “You can plug it in at your Auntie Hilda’s house. You can plug it in at work, you can plug it in in a carpark. And that’s my aim, always, when I’m out and about in an electric car, is not to wait a second. I drive to a carpark, I plug it in, I’m doing something else, I’m not waiting for it. When I come back, it might have only added 100 km, 50 km — it’s added 50 km while I was doing something else. It’s added a couple of litres of petrol, if you like, for either nothing or very little money.”

With a typical charge range these days close to 300–500 km and growing all the time, Llewellyn explained that the research and development surrounding battery technology has been key to advancing EVs — and this has been accompanied by a significant decrease in battery prices, which has in turn brought down the cost of EVs.

“The price to manufacture 1 kWh of battery storage in 2012 was $1300; it’s now $60 for 1 kWh,” he said. “So that’s the cheapest; the batteries that we use here are between $90 and $110 per kWh. So the cost of a battery has dropped really dramatically.”

He continued to say that there are batteries now, that exist in laboratory conditions, that have 10 times the energy density of anything on show at Everything Electric. “Which would mean you could have a battery 10 times smaller and lighter than we use now, and it would have the same range,” he said. “That could mean you have a vehicle with 10 times the range, so on one charge it could do 2000 km of non-stop driving.

“The next generation of batteries … will last so long that when you buy a third-hand car, you won’t think about the battery, you’ll worry about the car. The car needs replacing — I need a new car to put this battery in. ‘Cause the battery’s going to be several million miles of reliability, it’s a completely new paradigm — and using far less of the more contentious materials that have been in batteries up till now.”

Everything Electric event at Sydney Showground. Image courtesy of Everything Electric.

Clearly, Australians are starting to come around to EVs, with a whopping 31,000 people having attended Everything Electric over the course of the three-day event — up from 17,000 last year. Llewellyn therefore believes it is just a matter of time before EVs are considered the norm — not just for the elite, not just for the environmentalists, but for those who actively want to save money.

“We’re seeing the first cars with very usable range that are much cheaper, and in about two years’ time they’ll be cheaper than buying a petrol car,” he said. “So if you want to make the expensive choice, you’re buying a petrol car, and if you want the sensible, cheap, cleaner, longer-lasting choice, you’ll get an electric one.”

Everything Electric is expanding its Australian footprint with a Melbourne event to be held from 14–16 November 2025, before returning to Sydney in March 2026. For more information, visit https://au.everythingelectric.show/.

*Lauren Davis is editor of the industry publications Critical Comms and Lab+Life Scientist.

Top image credit: Henry Yau