On a 1000-kilometer all-electric road trip along Tasmania’s wonderfully winding tarmac, Taryn Stenvei seeks to prove that range anxiety is so last year.
There are certain places that feel tailor-made for road trips. Tasmania is one of them.
The island at the bottom of Australia, known as Lutruwita to the Indigenous Palawa people, is generous with its scenery and stingy with its straight roads.
Here you’ll find have the cleanest air in the world, some of the most pristine wilderness areas anywhere on earth, globally significant kelp forests, and tree and plant species that can be traced back to the Gondwana supercontinent (dating back some 180 million years). Tasmania is a place where even nature goes to get back to nature—which makes it the perfect location for a low-emissions jaunt of the four-wheeled variety.
Despite our urgent need to slash global emissions to stay within 1.5 degrees of warming, a whopping one third of Australian drivers (and nearly three-quarters of Americans) still cite range anxiety as one of the issues preventing them from making the switch to an EV.
But I reckon range anxiety is old news. And to prove it, I took Jeep’s brand-new all electric car, the Avenger, on a 1000-kilometer road trip around Tasmania.
There’s something poetic about exploring one of Australia’s wildest, most pristine places in a vehicle that leaves almost no trace. It feels like one small way to honor the natural world—to pass through it quietly, with no exhaust fumes clogging up the airways.
Over the course of my trip, I didn’t run out of (or come close to running out of) battery once. And I was pleasantly surprised by the abundance of good charging infrastructure in Tasmania. On mainland Australia, most of our iconic road trip routes are pretty well covered too—not to mention our towns and cities.
It’s true that you need to be a little more mindful when you’re traveling in an EV—despite huge leaps in infrastructure, battery sizes and charging times, there’s still a way to go until it’s as convenient as topping up with petrol. But if you’ve made it this far, then I’m going to hazard a guess that traveling mindfully is your cup of tea.