Springwood is a commuter town, and that is the single most important thing about its EVs. A large share of the electric cars here do the run down the Great Western Highway and the M4 into Parramatta or the city and back, five days a week, most weeks of the year.
That is among the harder use patterns for an electric car, for reasons that have nothing to do with the distance itself.
Sustained highway speed is where an EV is least efficient — aerodynamic drag rises sharply above about 80 km/h, and there is very little regenerative braking to recover on a free-flowing motorway. So a commute that looks like 120 km round trip consumes more than 120 km of suburban driving would. More importantly, it typically means a deep discharge and a full recharge most working days, and it is complete charge cycles, far more than kilometres, that age a lithium pack.
A four-year-old Springwood commuter car with 120,000 km on it has done real work. That is not a reason to avoid it — a well-treated pack handles this perfectly well — but it does mean the odometer understates the effort, and it means measuring is worth more here than in a suburb full of school-run cars.
The garaging advantage
Springwood is almost entirely detached housing, and most of it has a garage or a carport. Combined with a climate that is meaningfully cooler than the plains below, that gives lower mountains cars a genuinely kind thermal environment. Springwood does not do 43°C the way St Marys does, and the overnight cool-down is faster.
So the picture here is mixed in an interesting way: hard cycling, easy temperatures. Which of those dominates on a particular car is exactly the sort of question a measurement answers and a guess does not.
Where we come to
Springwood, Winmalee, Faulconbridge, Hazelbrook, Lawson, Woodford, Valley Heights and Warrimoo. Home driveways, workplace car parks, a seller's address if you are the buyer.
The car does not move and nothing is written to it.
Booking
Online booking is open for all lower mountains postcodes. $249, no travel surcharge. Phone 02 7252 1390 to arrange it by voice.
EV battery testing across the Blue Mountains · Blaxland · Katoomba · Book a test — $249