This is a question I regularly get asked at my (increasingly frequent) public EV talks and information sessions. The answer is both surprisingly simple, but has some surprising complexities hidden within it.

To start with the short answer: if you have access to a power point, you have access to EV charging. Yes, unlike the early days of motoring when petrol (and diesel) reigned supreme due to electricity being unavailable anywhere except the central areas of the world’s biggest cities …. electricity is now available almost everywhere. It’s as simple as that.

The complexity is to do with the time needed to recharge. This is down to EV ‘refuelling’ needing a mind-shift: forget the way you have been trained into thinking about refueling your fossil fuelled car, the key to understanding EV charging is you do it at your destination rather than making the extra time within your trip to find and refill at a fossil fuel station.

With that change, the new paradigm involves EV refuelling speed (and time) being dependent on the time you intend to spend at that stop or destination. (By the way, mind-shifts like this are not uncommon: going back a little to the dawn of the car era, the change then was swapping watering and feeding the horse for refilling the newfangled ‘horseless carriage’ from 2 gallon fuel tins).

So now we get to the longer answer: how long will the car be sitting so it can quietly ‘refill’ whilst you do your thing? If you’re on your way from Melbourne to Canberra, it is probably 15 to 30 minutes for a toilet and coffee break … or perhaps an hour for lunch. For that you need a DC fast-charger – and these are popping up all around the place.

For home charging where the car sits for 10, 12 or more hours overnight – if you do less than 100km a day, a simple power point will suffice to replenish that distance in that time. I do add the caveat that this power point should conform to the following conditions:

If you do more than 100km a day – then you should install a dedicated, wall mounted charger. (In fact, for the best EV charging experience I recommend installing these for all EV charging).

Permanently mounted, dedicated chargers have bigger and more robust connection pins and are designed for years of trouble-free service. They also offer higher charging rates – plus some have built-in functions like timed charging, App control from your phone and demand managing the EV charging rate to only use solar output.

With one of these, a typical single phase house supplying the charger at 32A/7kW gives a 0 to 100% charge time of 8 – 12 hours. (Depending on the size of your EV battery). If you need faster charging – some new EVs are coming out with 11 kW charging capacity, meaning a car that takes 9 hours to fully charge on 7 kW will charge in 6.

Some of the latest EVs even offer the option of 22 kW AC charging: for these, instead of 9 hours at 7 kW, at 22kW it would only take 3 hours! (Mind-you, if the charging is happening while you sleep, there is little to no point investing the money into a 22kW charging option for the car, three phase power to the house and splashing out the extra readies for a three-phase charger …).

If you don’t have access to off-street parking there are still options. I have previously mentioned the personal KerbCharge option for houses without off-street parking being trialled in inner city Melbourne.

Light-pole and pop-up public AC EVSEs are also being trialled around the world (and here). You also have AC chargers being installed all around the place including shopping centres, public libraries, parking lots, etc, etc. If you are out shopping for an hour or two at a shopping centre, then two hours at a 7kW charges will give you around 80km charged. (Or, at 22kW, 240km!)

Again, like DC fast-chargers, Plugshare should be able to tell you the locations and kW rate of the chargers – as well as inform you whether it requires payment – or, like many public AC chargers, free of charge.

Also, as we move into the EV era – our destinations will increasingly sport chargers. These include workplaces who will increasingly see it as a benefit to attract employees by offering EV charging as a benefit, be that free or at a reasonable cost. This also applies to motels, holiday rentals and the like.

Again, the key to charging is it’s done at the destination – the time to charge no longer matters as you are not waiting for it to happen, like you currently do at a fuel pump. This even applies to road-house stops on a long trip: you are doing other things to refresh and ready yourself for the next 2 to 3 hours of driving, the car is ‘doing its thing’ whilst you have that coffee, snack and/or toilet break.

So hopefully I have explained the simplicity … and complexity … behind what you need to charge an EV. The simplicity is plug-in and walk away. The complexity is switching the mind from hanging around to fill it to doing your own thing whilst the refill happens by itself.

Bryce Gaton is an expert on electric vehicles and contributor for The Driven and Renew Economy. He has been working in the EV sector since 2008 and is currently working as EV electrical safety trainer/supervisor for the University of Melbourne. He also provides support for the EV Transition to business, government and the public through his EV Transition consultancy EVchoice.

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