EV public charger shortage? The data shows drivers rarely queue to charge

For many years it's been claimed Australia has a severe shortage of public chargers for passenger electric vehicles (EVs).

This gloomy evaluation can be found in the search summaries of AI chatbots, in media articles and parliamentary submissions, and even in public reports from regulators.

But analysis of exclusive data obtained by the ABC broadly suggests the opposite: EV drivers rarely queue to charge for fast charging stations.

While some regional and remote parts of the country don't have enough chargers to handle peak holiday traffic, for almost every hour of the year most of the hundreds of public fast charger sites around the country have an empty bay.

The data paints a picture of the rollout that's both more complicated than the popular narrative, and more encouraging.

Fast charger network is growing exponentially

Over the past eight years, a network of public EV fast chargers has spread around the country, clustering in cities and peppering the length of the highway that circumnavigates the continent.

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There are broadly two kinds of EV chargers: AC and DC, also known as slow and fast chargers.

Slow (AC) chargers include everything from a standard power socket (maybe about 2 kilowatts of power output) to dedicated charger units (up to about 22kW of output).

The fastest slow chargers will take many hours to charge an EV, while fast (DC) chargers can do the same job in about half an hour.

The fastest publicly available DC chargers in Australia (400kW) are hundreds of times more powerful than a standard power socket.

Although different speeds of chargers serve important roles, the evidence from Australia and overseas shows EV uptake correlates most strongly with access to public fast chargers.

Put simply, EV drivers want to know they won't be stranded with an empty battery.

Thanks to the rollout, an EV can now travel the 5,000-kilometre crescent of seaboard from Ceduna in South Australia to Port Douglas in Queensland while never being more than 50km from a public fast charger.

In 2018, there were 55 fast charger sites nationwide.

Now, there's more than 1,500.

It's estimated more fast charger bays will be added in 2026 than had been installed in the decade to 2024. The network is growing exponentially.

But is it growing fast enough? Australia may need 40,000 more fast charger plugs in less than a decade to serve a national fleet of 5 million EVs.

Build the network too slowly and sites will become too congested.

But build it too fast and chargers will degrade as they sit idle, while their operators lose money.

Timing the rollout is sometimes called "riding the edge of utilisation".

How often are EV drivers queuing for fast chargers?

One way to track whether the charger network has kept pace with EV uptake is to analyse utilisation data to see how often EV drivers must queue to use a fast charger.

That is, for how many minutes of the day are almost all of the plugs at individual charger sites being used?

This data isn't publicly available, so the ABC turned to Carloop, a company that manages utilisation data for the vast majority of the fast charger network.

Let's focus on fast chargers in major cities first.

The data shows most EV drivers almost never have to queue for a fast charger. The average time across all fast chargers sites in major cities when 90 per cent of bays at a site are in use amounts to a bit over half an hour a day.

"It's not terrible congestion," Richard Laxton, a data expert at Carloop said.

"If you rocked up, there's a reasonably good chance you're going to get a station immediately."

But in regional and remote areas, it's a different story.

For most of the year, sites are almost never congested.

By this measure, some regional areas have better EV charging infrastructure than the major cities.

"Pick a random day, I can guarantee you would not see congestion at any charging station along the route from Melbourne to Sydney," Mr Laxton said.

But on some public holidays, when EV drivers exit the cities, the regional network can suddenly come under severe strain.

The congestion spike during Easter saw long queues for chargers in crossroads towns and beside major highways.

The four-day Easter long weekend had the highest annual traffic between capital cities, Mr Laxton said.

"It was a situation where the volume of traffic — particularly on the Hume Highway — overloaded the chargers," he said.

The worst day of the year for public charging

The small town of Coolac has one of the few ultra-fast charger sites along the Hume, which is Australia's busiest highway.

A 350km drive from Sydney, it's a handy spot to charge and rest.

The site has a dozen chargers that can each charge most of a standard EV battery in under 30 minutes when operating at full power.

But when all the bays are in use, power is shared between each charger and charge times may lengthen.

For most of the year, EV drivers don't have to queue.

But this Easter, the site was slammed. On Good Friday, some cars queued for up to five hours.

"Congestion started at 9 in the morning and ran through until 6 in the evening," Mr Laxton said.

"That's obviously a real problem."

And next Easter, the congestion problem could be worse.

There may be about 50 per cent more EVs (about 300,000 extra cars) on the road by Easter 2027, due to record sales following the jump in petrol and diesel prices earlier this year.

"The lead time on building EV charging stations is 12 to 18 months. There is a reasonably good chance things will get worse before they get better," Mr Laxton said.

"During peak travel in 2027 we may actually have bigger problems than this year."

Can the rollout keep pace with record EV sales?

The sudden jump in EV sales also puts pressure on the urban fast charger network.

Congestion had been steady, but recently went up in Sydney and Brisbane.

The EV Council, the peak national body representing the EV industry, says the charger rollout must accelerate at a greater rate.

"I think EV public charging infrastructure has been rolling out at pace with EV take-up up until just a couple of months ago," EV Council head of energy and infrastructure Alina Dini said.

"Policymakers have expected a particular rate of adoption that we have now exceeded," Dr Dini said.

"I expect that while we have enough infrastructure in place for the market as it was planned to be, there will be a need for more and more urgently in the coming months."

Despite the extra use, Australia's fast chargers are still generally not very busy.

The network in Australia's major cities has a time-based utilisation rate of 14 per cent (meaning on average chargers are used for 14 per cent of a 24-hour period), up from 13 per cent in February.

By comparison, California's average utilisation is about 20 per cent.

Is Australia's charger rollout lagging the world?

There's very little publicly available data on the state of the EV charger rollout — infrastructure that will cost billions of dollars, and which most Australians will rely on for basic transport.

Most analyses divide total EVs by total public charger plugs to arrive at an EVs-per-charger ratio.

But the number of slow (AC) charger plugs is hard to determine (as many aren't registered or otherwise networked), meaning the annually reported ratios are often wrong.

The often repeated claim that Australia's charger rollout is among the worst in the world typically relies on a ratio reported in 2023 by the France-based International Energy Agency.

It said at the time Australia's ratio was six times lower than the global average, but later acknowledged it had miscounted charger plugs.

The actual figure was about four times lower than the global average, but the misinformation has cropped up in dozens of subsequent submissions to parliamentary inquiries.

Australia also needs fewer public chargers than many other EV markets, due to a larger share of detached houses with off-street parking. Its ratio is similar to other low-density urbanised countries like Norway, which has the highest EV uptake in the world.

The EVs-per-charger global average is dominated by China, the world's largest EV market, where most EV owners live in apartments and have greater need of public chargers.

"[China] is not really a good benchmark for us," said Andrew Simpson, an expert on the charger rollout and managing director of Verdant Vision energy consultancy.

"It really frustrates me when people talk about the global average."

Data on how much public fast chargers utilisation is arguably a better indicator of the rollout's progress than the EV-per-charger ratio, but it doesn't tell the full story.

There are well-known problems with broken public chargers and time-consuming software and login issues, as well as a general lack of access to public chargers in the majority of regional and remote towns.

Despite these challenges, the public charger network had supported record growth in EV sales, Ross De Rango, a former head of infrastructure at the EV Council, pointed out.

"For a very large number of people, the public charging infrastructure is perfectly adequate," Mr De Rango, who now runs the company EV Charging Solutions, said.

"We're bolting on 25,000 new EV drivers every month at the moment. Those people clearly think the charging infrastructure is adequate or they wouldn't be buying EVs.

In coming months, the Australian Energy Market Commission will decide whether to scrap ring fencing rules preventing electricity networks providers (the companies that own the poles and wires) from entering the EV charging market.

Since 2025, network providers have argued the commercial charger industry has failed to install enough chargers.

But the EV Council, which has EV charger companies and network providers among its members, said the rollout had largely kept pace with EV uptake.

"I wouldn't call it a market failure," Dr Dini said.

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Posted Fri 19 Jun 2026 at 5:00am

Fri 19 Jun 2026 at 5:00am