There may be a lot of acronyms, but caring for an electric vehicle, and getting the most out of it, can be very simple.

You’ve brought home a shiny new treat. It’s got two darling little ears, four rubbery feet, multiple glowing eyes and oh! – no tail at the back. It might look a lot like your old car, but owning an electric vehicle (EV) is a little different. For starters, no exhaust means no on-road emissions, but it also means you won’t be pumping petrol the way you’re used to. So what does a fresh EV owner, or someone considering making the switch, need to know before taking it home? Gabi Lardies caught up with EV superfans around the country to find out.

ABC: Always Be Charging

Usually thought of as the start of the alphabet, ABC is also an EV owner’s acronym – always be charging. “I just plug it in every time I get home,” says Josh Wright. He got his EV about five years ago as his first car. “Whether it’s empty or quite full, I just plug it in anyway, and then it’s always ready to go the next time I need it.”

While public charging stations tend to steal the spotlight in EV conversations, Josh says that most of the time, EV owners charge at home overnight. It takes about five seconds to plug in, and when you wake up the car is fully charged. No special equipment is needed – just the cable that comes with the car and an ordinary domestic plug. For safety, you should only use the supplied cable – no extension leads or socket outlet adaptors.

For many drivers, charging at home is the most convenient way to charge an EV, and it offers significant savings over driving a car that you fill up at the petrol station. It’s been estimated that charging at home during off-peak hours is equivalent to paying $1.60c a litre of petrol, including road user charges. When Grace Smith bought her EV in 2021, “a lot of the sales pitch for EVs was ‘oh, they’re so much cheaper’.” Still, adding your transport to your power bill is no small change – the increase in daily consumption surprised Grace when she got her first post-EV bill, even though “it should have been obvious”. If you’re going to take the ABC approach, it’s important to get a good deal on power. Some power providers offer specialised plans for EV users. Contact Energy’s Good Charge plan*, for example, offers 50% off power from 9pm to 7am, perfect for that easy overnight charge.

It’s common to use a “granny charger” – the slow charge cable that comes with the car and plugs into a regular wall socket (the three prong plug) like any other electrical appliance. If you’re wanting to charge faster at home, a smart charger can be installed by a qualified electrician. They can produce 7-22 kW compared to a granny charger’s output of 2-3 kW and so can reduce charging time by two thirds. 

Initially, Josh was considering installing a smart charger, but once he got into the habit of plugging in his car when he got home, he no longer felt like he needed one. Overnight is plenty of time for the granny charger to fill up his battery.

Let go of range anxiety

“Most people have range anxiety for about the first four or five days, or the first very long trip they do,” says Kathryn Trounson, chair of Better NZ Trust who champions shifting to electric vehicles. With modern batteries and a fairly extensive public charging network, the anxiety is a little misplaced. “99% of people just go, ‘oh, why was I worried about that?’” She says the anxiety is “such a silly thing” because unless you’re deep in the wops, there’s likely to be a charging station nearby.

Long trips are “like anything in life – if you plan ahead, then you don’t run into difficulties.” If all goes wrong and you don’t think you’re going to make it, Kathryn says the best thing to do is to ease off the accelerator and drive “sedately”. This uses less power and “hopefully will get you to where you need to be”. Most of the time, that’s all it takes to reach your destination with charge to spare. And if worst comes to worst? Well, roadside assistance exists for a reason – just like it does for petrol cars that misjudge their range and end up doing the walk of shame with a petrol can.

Charging on the go

If you’re going on a long journey, chances are you’re going to need to use a public charging station. Many are self-service and require a specific app for payment. Most paid public charging stations use rapid DC chargers. These will get you back on the road in about 30 minutes. Free charging stations, the ones you might find at tourist hotspots for example, tend to offer slower AC “granny” chargers.

Sometimes, usually in the holidays in remote areas, you may need to wait for others at charging stations, though this is increasingly rare as the charging network grows. Still, it’s important to never park in a charging spot, and unplug and move your car as soon as it’s done. All the EV owners I chatted with mentioned a sense of camaraderie and pride in the EV driving community, with Kathryn saying “we are always chatting to each other”. So if it’s busy, be prepared to wax lyrical about your lovely car. It’s a community that extends online, with an extremely active, 18,000-strong Facebook group where New Zealand EV drivers trade routes, advice, news and secondhand EVs.

The essential apps and maps

While the plethora of apps you need as an EV driver annoy some people, they can also make your life a lot easier. To plan long journeys, Josh suggests using PlugShare. It allows you to plan a route around charging stations from different companies – “quite helpful if you’re going somewhere new,” he says. A better route planner, or ABRP, is another app for planning routes. You can tell it what type of EV you have and it takes into account that car’s range and figures out where you should stop and charge.

NZTA, meanwhile, has an interactive map of charging stations across the country which lists which type of chargers are available at each station and whether they’re free or paid. And OpenLoop makes it easy to search chargers near you, pay for charging, remotely start or end your session. It also gives you progress updates, so you can gulp down your coffee, or finish whatever you started while your car was charging.

Enjoy it

“I’m a bit of a car person,” says Josh, “I like a sporty car.” He’s among the 94% of EV owners in New Zealand who would buy another EV tomorrow if they had to replace their current EV. He says he can “floor it” and “have a bit of fun” without burning through expensive petrol or emitting nasties. “It’s kind of like the acceleration is guilt free.”

For Kathryn the experience is more peaceful. “They’re so smooth, they’re so quiet – you can talk on the phone, you can listen to the radio, you can just cruise around.” There’s an affection for her car that is much like what dog people feel for their four-legged furry friends. She’s an EV person, working to spread the word about how great they are – though with recent changes from the government, scrapping the Clean Car Discount and the new road user charges, it can feel like “pushing shit uphill”. Still, in April, she will drive to Taupō, and park up at Northcroft Reserve next to a range of other EVs to be part of Electricana, an annual event where EV owners invite people to have a look at their cars and ask questions. It will be a bit like the dog park, except with less “woof, woof” and more “vroom, vroom”.