Aidan Chen bought his electric hatchback in June, partly for the running costs and partly, he admits, because the merge lane on the West Gate Freeway had started to feel like a referendum on his character. Three weeks later, there's a laminated card on his fridge in Newport headed "Charger Window," colour-coded in three highlighter shades, cross-referenced against the opening hours of the only fast charger within walking distance, outside a servo on Melbourne Road.
The charger has two bays. On a Tuesday it tends to be free after 7:40pm. On a Thursday, Chen has learned through trial, error and one memorably tense stand-off with a plumber's van, it is best approached before 6pm or not at all. His partner now refers to their evening plans, without irony, as being "charger permitting."
The household had budgeted, loosely, for cheaper fuel. What they had not budgeted for was a new kind of waiting, one with no set price and no fixed queue, governed instead by the movements of strangers also queuing for the same thirty minutes of 150kW. Chen has started a shared note with two other Newport residents he has never met in person, tracking live charger availability via a group chat they call, after the first week, "the roster." There are now rules. Nobody charges to 100 per cent during peak window. Nobody "camps" past eighty.
Chen maintains he is saving money, and on paper he is, by a figure he can produce instantly and does, unprompted, several times a week. What he has not worked out how to calculate is the week he drove forty minutes out of his way, on a near-empty battery, to reach a charger he knew would be free, past two others he suspected, correctly, would not be.
He is, he says, looking into a home charger. He has been looking into a home charger for six weeks. The quote keeps arriving slightly higher than the one before it, for reasons nobody at the company has fully explained, and which he has, so far, not had the evening free to ask about.