A road trip between Australia’s largest cities has put a petrol and an electric car to the test.
The trial run was conducted in partnership with CarExpert, testing a BMW 740i and its electric sibling, the i7 on the 900km journey between Melbourne and Sydney.
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The car fuelled by premium unleaded petrol came in first place both for both price and time efficiency.
“It was pretty surprising in the sense that you hear in the media that electric vehicles are cheaper to run,” CarExpert founder Paul Maric said.
“(We) probably weren’t expecting (the electric car) to cost more, and also weren’t expecting to have to stop as much as we did.”
The cars set off from Melbourne, fully fuelled — and charged, with scheduled stops in Tarcutta and Sutton Forest.
The journey cost $131.92 in the electric vehicle, while it cost $118 in the petrol car.
“If you are just driving in and around the city, an electric vehicle is going to be a more cost-effective option,” Maric said.
“But if you do frequently hit the road, that is something you need to keep in mind.”
Though they were travelling at the same speed when on the road, the electric car also made it to Sydney two hours and eight minutes later than its petrol counterpart due to charging times at each stop.
Some charge points throughout the journey were also out of order, adding to the delay.
“When we were driving as well, we had the issue of running into the Optus network outage,” Maric said.
“That actually took out a lot of chargers as well.”
To fully charge an ordinary electric vehicle using a standard connection at home, it takes about 30 hours. Using a fast charge connection, this lowers to 18 hours.
Charging that same car at a public fast charge point will take about 40 minutes.
While it costs about $15.50 to charge your car at home, it costs approximately $42 to charge it at a public fast charge point.
While electric vehicles are great for city drivers, they’re still not quite up to par when it comes to road trips, the CarExpert team said.
-With Blake Johnson