Australia's First 400kW Charger Is Built for Big Rigs

ABB and Ampol's new 400kW drive-through hub on Sydney's M4 sets a new bar for EV charging in Australia

26 Jan 2026

On Sydney's M4 Motorway, just west of the city, a charging station at Eastern Creek has quietly changed what is possible for drivers of electric vehicles. Since September 2025, the site has offered Australia's first 400-kilowatt chargers, co-developed by Ampol, a fuel retailer, and ABB, a Swiss engineering firm. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen arrived to mark the occasion, four months after the chargers had already switched on.

That gap between technical launch and political ceremony is telling. Australia has been a laggard in EV infrastructure by the standards of comparable markets, and the Eastern Creek site represents an attempt to close two distinct gaps at once: raw charging speed and physical access for large vehicles.

The latter may matter more. Four of the site's ten bays are designed as drive-through lanes, allowing vehicles towing caravans or boat trailers, and, critically, electric trucks, to charge without reversing. It is a simple idea. Yet the absence of such design in earlier charging sites has been a genuine barrier for fleet operators who want to commit to electrified long-haul routes. Where infrastructure does not fit the vehicle, adoption stalls.

The site also features ABB's Energy Management solution, which continuously redistributes available grid capacity across active charging sessions rather than assigning fixed ceilings to each bay. It is the first deployment in Australia to pair 400kW charging with this kind of intelligent load management. As more sites come online at higher power levels, grid constraints, not hardware costs, are increasingly the binding limit.

At 400kW, compatible passenger EVs can charge from 10% to 80% in under 30 minutes. But the commercial case carries the greater strategic weight. Electric truck adoption in Australia has lagged markets where highway charging infrastructure was treated as a prerequisite for fleet electrification, not an afterthought.

Eastern Creek offers a replicable template: high-power charging, smart load distribution, and layouts built around the vehicles that most need them. Whether it becomes a standard or an exception depends less on engineering than on whether regulators and investors treat heavy-vehicle access as essential rather than optional.