The way to have really launched the car in Australia would have been to give it to Wheels or some magazine and have them do the Sydney-Melbourne drive. Nevermind.
Until there are superchargers Sydney-Melb then I wouldn't expect a huge push to let journos loose with the car. Over the weekend I drove Sydney-Holbrook & back and was thinking about how the trip would pan out if I was using a Model S. I'd anticipate that the real range at 110 would be just on 400km. If I left home with a normal charge showing about 360km (90% of 400) then I'd pull into Goulburn with just on 200km showing. A 45 minute supercharge in range mode ( we had breakfast there for about an hour anyway) and I could cruise to Holbrook with about 100km left. IF there were a supercharger there, then all would be rosy, 30 mins would see it back to near or at a normal charge. Dropping into the supercharger for a top up for 30 mins or so and range charge would give me ample to get back to Goulburn again with around 100km to spare for lunch. SC to normal charge (45 mins or so while eating ) and arrive home with about 160km remaining.
However, without a SC in Holbrook or somewhere close by - preferably on the Sydney side - then the trip would have been impossible over the weekend. We arrived in Holbrook at 2pm Sat and left 12pm Sun. Even with the car plugged into a 10A for those 20 hours I'd only have put 2x2kw@20h = 40kWh into the car. Thats about 160km, so the car would have had about 260km range with a 300km trip ahead of us to Goulburn. Id always allow at least a 60km buffer, so would have to put another 120km or 24hWh into the car. In effect I'd be leaving at midnight and getting home this morning about 6am.
Of course, if the motel at Holbrook had a 32A socket available then its once again easy. 7Kw should be about 35km/h so a 10 hour overnight charge would range charge again before heading back. Chargepoint and Plugshare show no available power around the area.
The utility of the car is dramatically affected by the combination of supercharging, destination charging and UMC connectivity.
I do understand though that the longer term plan is to have superchargers about every 180-200km. If thats the case, then things will be rosy, but I don't think that we will see much in the way of superchargers until 2015, and then on a priority basis - i.e. where people really want to take their cars.
