Long queues of cars have caused chaos over the busy holiday period at Cassegrain Winery in Port Macquarie on the NSW Mid North Coast.
The line-up during the week between Christmas and New Year was not for wine tastings, but to access the winery's electric vehicle chargers.
"We've had the Tesla superchargers here now for, I think, six years; this year they just got hammered," director John Cassegrain said.
"It was cars queuing up to get charged during the peak time … there were people [waiting] for a few hours to get charge."
Mr Cassegrain said a lack of charging stations along the Pacific Highway between Sydney and the Queensland border meant a heavy holiday load for the winery's six charging stations.
"The issue with changing from fuel emission to electric cars is having the infrastructure to be able to cater for it," he said.
Further north in Coffs Harbour, similar queues were experienced at the Tesla charging centre at a local shopping centre.
Are there enough charging stations?
There are currently 22 superchargers — capable of fast charging — between Sydney and the Queensland border, and 12 between Sydney and the Victorian border.
An EV owner on the state's South Coast said she had to give up her car because there were not enough charging stations.
Shoalhaven Mayor and NSW Greens candidate for South Coast, Amanda Findley, said the lack of public charging infrastructure around holiday spots was problematic at the best of times, but particularly during busy periods.
Ms Findley, who has recently switched from a full electric to a plug-in hybrid car, said having an EV was impractical because she lived off the grid in a location with no fast charging points.
"I have experienced it where I've turned up at Berry and I haven't used the app to book a spot [at the charging station] and there's been a queue of two or three cars in front of me," she said.
"It's basically like 'OK, give up on that and hopefully I've got enough charge to get home'."
There are just two public charging points between Shellharbour and Batemans Bay, a stretch of almost 200 kilometres.
Ms Findley said all levels of government needed to work together to install more charging stations if the goal was getting more people to use electric vehicles.
Solutions to take time
Electric Vehicle Council energy and infrastructure head Ross De Rango said it would take time to solve the problem.
"We can't have a transition to electric vehicles without having adequate public recharging infrastructure," he said.
"We are going to need to build a massive amount of new infrastructure in the public environment to enable people to charge their cars where they need to."
Mr De Rango said government efforts to accelerate the transition had ramped up in recent years.
"Some state governments are not doing as much as they could, but in NSW, the state government is part of the solution, not the problem — it's more a matter of it takes time to build these new things," he said.
Mr De Rango said the NSW government awarded tens of millions of dollars to deploy the equipment that would address the problem.
"It only starts to get thin on the ground when you head out past Cobar … in terms of there being a public EV charger available," he said.
"It's not a new problem. It's exactly the same problem applied to a new kind of vehicle that takes a new kind of fuel, and the answer is to build more infrastructure to serve those peak periods."
