" Spend $150 million on fast charging infrastructure, ensuring you can get where you need with an EV"

That's interesting, particularly if your battery goes flat whilst fencing in the back paddock on a big station and it's ten miles to the homestead; of course, you could ring the boss and get a charged up vehicle to come and tow you home, that is if the phone works.

Well Is Mise in China if you own a EV and you run out of energy you just call the NIO road side assist service. And they come out with a van (an NIO EV van no less) with a great big battery on it that they recharge your car with-

http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-nio-mobile-charging-services-china

thinkabit,

Very interesting but not much use down in the back paddock.

Take Rawlinda Station,

"The more than one million hectare property, which includes a portion of the Nullarbor Plain, is part of the Jumbuck Pastoral company and...It can be up to 100 kilometres to get them [sheep] to the shearing shed and there’s always a few stragglers.”

That's a big place I don't see the Greens putting charging stations around there.

Rawlinna Station, being the largest sheep station in the world, is hardly typical example is it? But besides that for many (most?) remote stations the greens don't need to install recharge facilities because they would already have them-- it's called solar power.

Indeed, once the upcoming 4wd ute/truck models (eg: Tesla Cybertruck) become common and cheaper I can see managers of remote stations, if they do lots of kms/yr, giving them a very keen eye. Because fuel in the outback is extremely expensive but if you generate your own electricity by wind/solar already then it costs nothing (fuel wise) to run an electric vehicle. In addition EV's motor/drive-trains are far simpler than an ICE's - there is way less maintenance and greater reliability.

Also, another way your example is a bit of misdirection is because it is going to take about the same amount of time and bother to get help whether your run out of petrol/diesel or charge 10miles from home- because you still need to walk back 10miles which will take you 3+ hours which is significantly longer than it takes to tow a car 10 miles.

But side all this and more importantly: anyone who runs out of fuel in a place like that should immediately be removed and sent to the city for their own safety. Running out fuel (same with water) is a cardinal sin in the outback. In general you should ALWAYS have enough fuel to get to the next refueling spot AND the next place of supplies after that in case the first doesn't have any.

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-- from above --

I've actually seen this happen where people have provisioned only to get to the next supply and not the one after:
A few years ago I drove up from Perth to Port Headland via the Great Northern Highway and one of the roadhouses didn't have any diesel fuel due to an equipment failure. At the roadhouse there was some idiot on a family holiday in his brand new monster 4wd asking people stopping by if they have any spare fuel because he didn't have enough to get to the next stop. I was driving a petrol car so I was of no use to him. But I couldn't but help wonder about the sorts of trouble a moron like that could get into if they ever ventured to take their shiny new car off the bitumen.

[PS: I should remark that I'm not interested in EV's due to environmental concerns. The greens don't endear themselves to me at all. Rather I'm a rather well-off investor, and I'm always following technology and trends. It is obvious to anyone who bothers to look that we are about to undergo a massive change from ICE to EV over the next decade. And it has little to do with environmental drivers but everything to do the fact that new EV's are very soon (ie: 2-4years) going to be cheaper over the lifetime of the car than ICE cars for most people in developed countries.]

Interesting thread Is Mise- To me this is just another indicator that there are "too many" people in the world- relying on "too few" scarce resources- and creating "too much" damage. Plato's Republic talks about this- and we still haven't learned.

One way of addressing the issue is by finding alternatives to these scarce resources but this doesn't address the core problem.

We have made a business deal with The Congo I suppose and we need to be aware of their sovereignty. We should be careful about punishing a nation for their internal policies- this is perhaps another paradox of the human condition. This is especially difficult in the context of the affected children in this case and our views of how children should be treated within our society. Sometimes we might need to deny ourselves these resources. Lobbying other nations to boycott The Congo is perhaps crossing a line of sorts. Perhaps soft power is better.