How long does it take to drive 1000km in an EV? Every electric car ranked for road trips

Want to know how far your EV will take to travel 1000km?

We’ve crunched the numbers to find out.

Range is one of the EV numbers people fixate on, and charging speed is the number that actually decides how your day goes.

Neither is a whole lot of use on its own.

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A car with 600km of range that takes 40 minutes to fast charge can easily lose to one with 500km that takes 18.

Yet the two figures sit in separate rows of the brochure, leaving the buyer to weigh them up unassisted.

So we combined them into a single number that anyone can understand: how long a 1000km run would take, driving and charging included.

Using data supplied by carloop, we have calculated a road trip time for every electric vehicle currently sold in Australia.

carloop’s 10-80 per cent fast-charging figures are derived from its own charging data and calculations using supplied figures rather than simply taken from a manufacturer claim, which matters here: charging speed is the variable that drives the result.

A more economical EV that doesn’t have as high a peak DC charge rate may actually be quicker on a road trip because it’s using less electricity.

This table shows the estimated 1000km road trip times for every EV currently on sale in Australia.

Between the best and the worst there is more than three hours.

Some cars may have less range, but faster charging – and that faster charging is what can make the difference and shave crucial minutes off the overall time.

In many instances, on a long run, how fast a car charges matters more than how far it goes between charges.

How we calculated the 1000km charge times

Every one of those numbers rests on assumptions.

For energy use, we assume freeway cruising at 110km/h, the maximum limit across most of Australia – and the speed you’re likely to target if you’re doing 1000km in a single hit.

It’s also a speed that isn’t very friendly to an EV.

Because EVs are so efficient around town, aerodynamic drag has a bigger impact on a freeway.

Blame it on physics.

If you double your speed you quadruple your aero drag.

So, at 100km/h the car is having to work four times harder to push the air out of the way than it did at 50km/h.

That’s why we’ve pulled back the estimated range you’ll achieve at freeway speeds.

To make the calculation easy we’ve assumed highway range is 80 per cent of the official WLTP claimed range figure.

During our extensive EV testing we’ve found that’s pretty close to what you’d expect, albeit tending towards the conservative side.

For the estimated time, we assume an average of 100km/h.

It’s almost impossible to average 110km/h over a full day, once you factor in towns, roadworks, an 80 zone here and there and the plethora of caravans that can slow things down.

Ten hours of driving is the result, and it is identical for every car in the table.

Really, then, the thing that separates them is charging time.

And once you’re on a road trip, we assume you’ll never charge back to 100 per cent until you get home or at a slow overnight charger, all because the last part of the top-up takes too long.

You’re better off using the lower state-of-charge levels to maximise charging speed (that’s the reason manufacturers typically quote charge times between 10-80 or 20-80 per cent).

A 600km car therefore covers about 432km on its first leg (we assume you left from home with the battery at 100 per cent), then about 336km between each stop thereafter (we assume a 10-80 per cent charge, or 70 per cent of 432km).

Where our 1000km charging model is optimistic

Yes, we know what you’re thinking.

There’s never a charger exactly where I want it.

And – yep – in many instances we agree.

But for the purposes of this model we’ve assumed a fast charger appears exactly where you need one.

On the Hume and the Pacific Highways – Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane – you will find decent high-power chargers reasonably spaced, and the model may not be far off reality.

But the chance of a working, unoccupied 350kW charger sitting precisely where your car hits 10 per cent is remote.

Treat the number as a best case built on an ideal network, not a schedule.

There is a second simplification. We use one fast-charge figure per car, and every EV behaves differently across the state of charge.

Most pull hard at the low end and taper as they fill, some hold peak power far longer than others, and battery temperature moves all of it.

carloop’s figure assumes that tapered charging curve rather than a peak-power claim, so it already reflects how a car actually fills rather than how quickly it can be made to look good for a moment.

We have allowed for this to a degree – a partial top-up is credited as slightly quicker than its share of the full window, because it happens in the fast part of the curve. It remains an approximation.

But, we’ve also been conservative

It’s not all about best-case scenarios with our 1000km trip time estimates.

We require you to arrive with 50km still in hand, for example.

We start every leg from 10 per cent, when in reality most drivers stop with more than that left.

And because arriving with a buffer should not be able to invent a stop that no human would make, any small top-up needed at the end is added to the previous stop rather than sent to a fresh charger.

The thinking is that someone would rather spend another few minutes adding that 10 or 20km of range rather than factoring in another stop for what is essentially a splash-and-dash.

The result sits somewhere between an ideal run and a real one — closer to what a well-planned trip looks like than what a badly planned one does.

What our 1000km time estimate is good for

No, we’re not pretending this is the tool for you in planning your next big EV adventure.

Often the software in an electric car does a terrific job of planning your charge locations and times with the aim of reducing the overall charge time; it knows where the chargers are, how powerful they are and what your car is capable of.

This tool is all about the showroom.

It converts two often-heavily-marketed speci into one number that reflects how the car will actually behave on the day you hit the long road, and it exposes cars whose impressive range hides a slow charging curve.

On this measure the fastest-charging cars in the country are barely slower than a petrol car over a long day, and the slowest turn a big drive into a genuine planning exercise.

Which is worth knowing before you sign, rather than somewhere out the back of Bourke…