“Just go electric” they said.

Rural Australia isn’t anti-progress or “stuck in the olden days” - it’s pro-reality. And that reality is that the EV transition was designed by and for people who have never had to drive 300km + on a dirt road to get to a hospital. 

I recently posted a video about the fuel shortage and how hard it is currently hitting regional Australia. It went viral on TikTok. If I had a dollar for every comment suggesting the solution was simple - just switch to an electric vehicle - I could probably afford the $90,000 EV that those same commenters seem to think every farmer has the spare cash for. It would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect example of how the EV conversation has left rural Australia behind. 

The comments came fast, and they came confidently. People from Perth, Melbourne, New Zealand, keyboard hot - explaining to communities currently rationing their last litres of diesel that the real answer was to go electric. Not one of them, I’d wager, has ever driven 300km on a corrugated dirt road to get a sick family member to the hospital. Nor have they tried to find a fast charger in the middle of nowhere. But they had opinions, and they had them loudly. 

Before someone says it, this is not about being anti-environment or anti-progress. Most people in the bush understand country, land, and sustainability at a level that city-based commentators couldn’t touch. This is about the fact that the transition to EVs has been built around the assumptions, infrastructure and income levels of metro Australia, and then handed to rural communities and told to get on with it. 

The current fuel crisis has exposed how catastrophic it is to have a single point of failure in the regional energy supply. This is the conversation we need to have. But the answer is not to simply swap one impossible dependency for another, and right now, for most or rural and regional Australia, EV’s represent exactly that.

“You can’t plug into a charging station that doesn’t exist, and you can’t charge overnight when there is no power in town, and you certainly can’t run a cattle station in a Tesla.” 

The national charging network is concentrated along major highways and in capital cities. Drive 80km off the main road to a remote property and you’re on your own. There is no charger coming, and the distances involved mean that even if you could find a fast charger, the physics of EV range in outback conditions - heat, corrugated roads, heavy loads, air condition running constantly at full blast, means the numbers simply do not stack up the way they do in an urban commute. 

Current EV technology, even at its best, asks rural drivers to plan their entire lives around charge stops that don’t exist, in conditions that the vehicles were not designed for, on roads that will chew through range faster than any manufacturer’s spec sheet will tell you. This isn’t a fear of new technology. It’s an accurate read of the numbers. 

And what about when, inevitably, the power goes out? Because in remote and regional Australia, it does regularly, and for extended periods. Storms, infrastructure failures, extreme heat events that strain the grid, these aren’t once-offs in the bush, they’re part of the calendar. An EV-dependent household that loses grid power doesn’t just lose the lights, they lose their transport entirely. A diesel vehicle with something in the tank can still move when the poles go down. That resilience matters enormously when the nearest help is hours away. 

Think about what rural vehicles are actually needed to do. It’s not often you’ll see a farmer driving a sedan to work. You’re more likely to see a dual-cab loaded with gear, maybe towing a trailer, navigating paddocks, and covering ground that would destroy some urban vehicles in a week. The electric ute market is still in its infancy; towing reduces the already marginal range. And electric farm machinery? There is something there, but it’s largely untested at scale, it’s expensive and it’s a rarity. Telling a farmer to go electric is like asking a surgeon to operate with a Swiss Army Knife; they could probably do it, but the tool is not right for the job. 

What the fuel crisis has proven, though, is something that regional Australia has been shouting about for years - regional energy requires diversification. The answer does not lie in dismantling one fragile system and replacing it with another that is equally fragile. It means treating rural energy security as a national priority rather than a footnote. 

One day, the EV future may very well come for rural Australia, and when the infrastructure, technology and grid reliability are genuinely capable, many in the bush will embrace it. But right now, there is a gap between the city’s EV dream and bush’s lived reality, and closing it requires heavy investment and honesty.