If you own an electric car, one of your biggest road trip challenges is finding a charging station. This week Google made that process a bit easier when it added EV charging station information to Google Maps.

Electric cars have yet to become widely adopted in Australia but as more options become available and charging stations become more accessible, it's worth taking a look. Here's what you need to know about electric cars.

There is no denying the 2018 Tesla Model 3's importance. It is intended to be Tesla’s volume-seller, the car that will hopefully make luxury electric cars more accessible to more people, especially when the long-promised $US35,000 version hits the market. It is the key to Tesla’s future, the source of many of its struggles this year, and an EV—hell, a car, period—truly unlike any other.

Equipped as you see here with distance driving in mind, the Model 3 Long Range further normalizes electric cars by offering a truly capable machine with a mix of power, performance, price, range and convenience no other electric cars currently match. For right now, anyway.

Until now, Tesla owners wanting a rapid refill had only two options - the six bays at Tesla's St Leonard's store to the north, and eight bays at Broadway Sydney that opened up in March. This is where the company's unique mobile technician service comes in.

Bloomberg is out this morning with a a well-reported, well-sourced deep-dive into Tesla’s ongoing Model 3 production hell, which is worth reading in full. I will highlight a few passages here, though, one revealing an episode of absurdist horror and the other, well, the other is just very, very bleak.

As Tesla's have become increasingly popular in Australia over the last few years, the need for more chargers and superchargers around the country has increased. But you may not know they're there unless you know where to look. We can help with that.

Here is every Tesla charger currently up and running in Australia, broken down by state.

I've always wanted to drive a Tesla. Silent electric motors, instant torque and autonomous driving capabilities? Sign me up. As luck would have it, during my Christmas vacation spent at my partner's parent's home, I was able to drive their Tesla Model S for a week. The experience was, in a word, magical -- primarily because of the differences between a Tesla and a traditional automobile.

In the race to adopt electric vehicles, Australia is sputtering along in the slow lane. Rather than growing, Australian sales of electric cars are actually in decline. In 2016 they represented just 0.02 per cent of new car sales – even lower than in 2013.

Contrast that with Norway, the country with the highest levels of electric car adoption. Almost 30 per cent of new cars sold there in 2016 were electric.

Electric motors are coming whether we want them or not. So let's not pout, but instead celebrate the ways in which electric vehicles actually outperform their conventional internal combustion engine-driven counterparts.

Australia is taking the electric car revolution one step further by announcing a $4 million super-long electric highway, or a series of fast charging electric vehicle stations.

A key question amid the consternation over the current state of Australia’s east coast energy market has been how much renewable energy capacity to build, and how fast. But help could be at hand from a surprising source: electric vehicles.

By electrifying our motoring, we would boost demand for renewable energy from the grid, while smoothing out some of the destabilising effects that the recent boom in household solar has had on our energy networks.