Description

EVolve is a plain-language review of the claims made about electric vehicles in Australia. It is written for people who are sceptical and for people who are tired of being shouted at by both sides.Jean-Claude Cesario is an information technology auditor of almost four decades. In 2017 he bought a 6.4 litre V8 and loved it without reservation. What followed was three years of checking and over a dozen self-funded trips to China and the factories that build these cars. The book reports what he found against electric vehicles as carefully as what he found for them.It is written with the Australian grid, distances and conditions in mind. It explains how to tell a healthy battery from a tired one, why the charging speed on the brochure is not the speed you get, what 40 degree air does to a fast charge and what an electric car costs to run. Twelve Under the Bonnet chapters plainly explain how the motor and battery work, battery chemistries, thermal management, regeneration, charging standards, hydrogen and more. Forty diagrams and photographs, two appendices, a glossary and sources support it.It also prints what went against electric cars. Batteries degrade. The public charging network is thinnest where the distances are longest. The petrol car still wins on towing and on the four minute fuel stop in the middle of a long drive.It is just as plain about what went in their favour. If you can charge at home the electric car's running costs are lower. The cars are quieter, quicker and less trouble to own, because there is less in them to go wrong. The distances Australians actually drive are covered comfortably by the middle of the market. And every objection the book checked turned out to have an answer.There is nothing for sale here. No manufacturer, dealer, charging network or energy retailer had any part in it.For a reader who is choosing a car, it sets out the questions in the order that matters. For a reader who is not, it explains how an electric car works.

Back Cover

About the Author

Jean-Claude Cesario is an information technology auditor and the founder of Alpha 8 Pty Ltd, an Australian audit and consulting practice. He has spent almost four decades being shown systems that other people were proud of and asking, politely, what happens if they are not true.He holds a Bachelor of Business and is a Certified Information Systems Auditor and a Certified Information Security Manager. He is a Platinum member of ISACA, a prominent, global non-profit professional association focused on IT governance, information security, risk management and IT auditing. Before founding Alpha 8 he spent some twenty-five years as a partner at Moore Stephens in Melbourne.This is his second book. The first, Y2K Demystified, was published in the late nineteen nineties and argued that Australian business should be prepared but not get carried away about the Year 2000 problem. EVolve applies the same method to a different subject.He has made more than a dozen trips to China since 2019, three of them as part of Smart Energy Council delegations, visiting more than thirty cities and the factories that build batteries, solar panels, inverters, electrolysers, electric trucks, electric cranes and cars. He paid his own way on all of it. No manufacturer has ever had sight of a word of this book.He lives in Mount Gambier, in the south-east corner of South Australia, about 450 kilometres from Adelaide and 430 kilometres from Melbourne. It is a working town of forestry, dairy and diesel. It is also a useful place from which to test claims about range.He bought a 6.4 litre Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT in 2017 and enjoyed every minute of it. He put solar panels in the paddock beside his house and took the local ribbing for it. He and his wife have been driving electric vehicles since 2022.He also maintains the EV Model Registry at evmodel-registry.com, a free public record of the electric vehicles available in Australia.