I was told my electric car had a driving range of 800km… I had barely made it out of Brisbane when the real trouble began

An Aussie four-wheel driver has slammed EVs for having ‘terrible’ driving ranges after putting a hybrid vehicle to the test in a cross-country road trip. 

Gold Coast man Shaun Whale was only 100km into a 2,000km drive from Brisbane to the Simpson Desert last month when the BYD Shark hybrid vehicle he tasked with the journey already needed a charge. 

‘I’ve apparently got a range of 800km, I’m 100km-ish out of Brisbane, I’ve got a quarter of a tank of fuel and I’m out of battery,’ he said in a video posted to the popular YouTube account, 4WD 24/7. 

‘So, something’s not quite right at the moment.’

He interrupted the journey to stop in at a designated charging station, where the first outlet he tried turned out to be out of order. 

Lacking the cable required to use a separate outlet within the same station, he drove on to a second charging station where the only vacant outlet was again out of order. 

Only at the third station – after two failed attempts and already hours into the drive – was he able to begin the charging process. 

While he agreed the vehicles were desirable for those driving short distances in urban areas, Mr Whale concluded the technology was ‘not quite there’. 

‘Overall, what I’m seeing with these vehicles is it’s a little bit of a false economy… in the sense that all the great things you want out of a ute are not quite there,’ he said. 

‘My whole point is these PHEVs (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) might suit people in the inner city with short commutes, but don’t cut it if you drive long distances,’ he told the Daily Mail. 

‘They are terrible when it comes to fuel consumption compared to a standard diesel ute if you plan on driving any real distance.’ 

The unreliability of public EV chargers is a major concern among road users, with 13 per cent of registered chargers in Australia being unavailable when reviewed in May. 

Of Australia’s nearly 6,000 registered public charger sites with 15,290 connectors, nine per cent were under repair and four per cent were listed as ‘coming soon’.

Arcadis national asset management lead Clara Owen, who extracted the data from PlugShare, said the issue stressed the need for better monitoring and maintenance.

‘We need predictive maintenance, we need real-time monitoring and networks that perform like critical infrastructure,’ Ms Owen told The Drive.

‘If I turned up at a petrol station and they said “sorry we’re out of petrol,” you can imagine the furore. Chargers should be the same.’

Australian Electric Vehicle Association (AEVA) president Chris Jones has called for financial penalties for operators who fail to maintain their chargers. 

‘There absolutely needs to be some kind of financial penalty for neglecting service licence agreements,’ Mr Jones said.  

‘The thing that’s grinding our gears is the fact that charge point operators are often in receipt of public funds to expand their footprint, but they never seem to prioritise the maintenance of their hardware.’

The complaints are widespread on EV user social media pages, with many sharing similar stories of abandoned road trips and emergency tow operations.     

When Tanya Turner-Jones took her BYD SUV on its first road trip in March, she made sure to plan ahead, mapping out a charging destination along the way. 

Only upon arriving at the charging station did she find out the charger was out of order, and the second charger required a cable she didn’t possess. 

‘There were no other chargers in this town,’ she wrote on the popular Facebook group, EV Owners Australia. 

‘The distance to our destination was less than the available kms/charge so we pushed on but we didn’t get there. 

‘I pulled over on a side road at about 2 per cent charge and got towed to our destination. I felt so stupid and learned a lot of lessons.’

The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) tested five EVs in its Real-World Testing Program and found some models drove up to 111km less on the road than they did in laboratory testing.

The 2023 BYD Atto 3 was the worst performer, with a driving range of 369km on a single charge — 23 per cent less than the 480km recorded in its lab testing.

The 2024 Tesla Model 3 had a real-world range of 441km, which was 14 per cent less than the 513km it achieved in the lab.

The 2022 Kia EV6 and the 2024 Tesla Model Y both had driving ranges eight per cent shorter than their lab tests.

The best performer was the 2024 Smart #3, which logged a real-world driving range of 432km, five per cent below its compulsory lab test.

Daily Mail contacted BYD for comment.