Self-driving into a port-a-loo

Our stop in Coolac has toilets and ... well, that's about it. There's a hotel, currently being renovated. We pulled in for a brief leg stretch at the Superchargers there, on the Hume Highway, an hour and a half past Goulburn.

Parked next to us was a red Model Y with red rims. Its driver, Jack, said he's the only one who likes them. He's on a road trip from Queensland to Victoria with his son. He mentioned the potholes in Queensland, so I warned him about the potholes in Victoria.

Leaving Goulburn earlier, the Hume Highway runs right through the Cullerin Range Wind Farm, with its 15 turbines on the hills either side of the road. The much bigger Collector Wind Farm, with 54 turbines, is just to the south. Together they have a capacity of 257 MW, but the wind doesn’t always blow, so over a year they average about 70 MW (27% of capacity, typical for wind farms). That’s about 615 GWh a year, enough to power about 96,000 homes, or to drive an EV like ours about 4 billion km. Similar sized petrol cars would need about 340 million litres of petrol for that (around $800 million at today's prices), refined from about 4.6 million barrels of oil.