When 26-year-old Sam Wright ordered a new electric car, he thought the biggest hurdle to ownership might be the wait time or perhaps the cost.
"We ordered it in December last year, and it took until March to get it," he told 7.30 from his apartment in Melbourne.
But he soon realised getting a charger installed at his apartment would be one of the greatest challenges.
Before Mr Wright placed the order for his new Tesla, he began speaking to the body corporate of the apartment he owns about installing a charger in the underground car park.
Without an EV charger at home, he said he would need to rely on a public charging station several kilometres away and wait there while the car recharged.
"Living in an apartment, I don't have a garage where I can install my own charger," he said.
"And so it's a consideration of whether I need to go to public charges, maybe once a week, were there public charges near us, how expensive were they, was it convenient, if we need to charge for 40 minutes."
Mr Wright proposed a few different options to his body corporate including plugging the car into a power point in the car park and paying for his use of the building's electricity, but there was no simple solution they would agree on.
Several months, $5,000 and lots of bureaucracy later, an agreement was reached to run an electricity cable from his apartment down to the car spot he owns in the basement.
However, because the cable ran along common property in the building between his apartment and the car park, he was required to take out a 99-year lease on the space occupied by the cable, get legal documents drafted and have all 50 apartments in the block vote in favour before it could be installed.
"There were a few times when I thought I should just throw in the towel and give up," Mr Wright told 7.30.
However, he is glad he persisted and hopes a streamlined approval process can be developed for people in apartments or townhouses without garages so they can charge their EVs at home.
"If you've got to go through that whole process of getting a lease agreement drafted and then putting that to a vote, you know, the next person in this building is going to have to do the exact same thing, even though I've already done it. That's pretty onerous," he said.
"So I suspect if there was some kind of legislation or something that enabled you to bypass that process specifically for electric vehicle charging, I think that would be really useful."
Australian EV uptake lagging behind
Mr Wright's case isn't uncommon, and Behyad Jafari from the Electric Vehicle Council said it illustrated the bigger issue that EV owners face where systems and processes across society are struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change.
"The charging in apartment buildings is a great example of the type of complexity that we have in this transition to electric vehicles in Australia, where the technical solutions and the financial solutions already exist — and in quite a lot of states even the legal solutions already exist — in order to allow people to be able to build those chargers," he said.
"The bigger challenge is that information gap."
The council is hoping to plug that gap through its advocacy and is pushing for policy changes to boost EV uptake in Australia, which Mr Jafari says is a "decade behind comparable countries".
In Australia, 3 per cent of new cars sold are electric compared with a global average of 8 per cent.
"We're no longer trying to convince Australians to get excited about electric vehicles — they're excited," he told 7.30.
"We're trying to convince global companies to sell those cars and make them available to Australians to buy."
Mr Jafari is calling for a national EV strategy and policies to increase EV uptake, and support those who already own EV by funding things like improved charging infrastructure.
The government has indicated it supports these initiatives and is working on a national EV strategy.
It also recently passed a tax break this month designed to make electric cars more affordable.
The opposition voted against the legislation, which was passed with the support of crossbenchers including independent senator David Pocock.
The next big policy on the agenda is fuel efficiency standards — rules designed to encourage car makers to sell more electric vehicles in Australia.
"That's certainly something that I'll continue to push the government on, to unlock more models for Australia, to get manufacturers sending more affordable EVs to Australia," Mr Pocock told 7.30.
"We've got to have world-class fuel efficiency standards. There's only two countries in the OECD that don't have them — Australia and Russia, which I think says a lot."
The industry group representing car manufacturers, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, also supports the introduction of fuel efficiency standards, but they say the uptake of EVs in Australia is currently being hindered by global supply factors like a battery shortage.
"The transition to complete EVs is determined by battery availability. That's what drives supply and the supply is not sufficient to meet world demand," the chamber's CEO Tony Weber told 7.30.
"My greatest concern with potential EV policies, its rollout over the next few years, is it doesn't take into account the requirements of Australians and it doesn't take into account the living conditions of Australians.
"What we need are vehicles for both the city and regional and rural Australia. That's the most important thing so that we bring consumers along on this pathway of change."
Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7.30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV
