Can a completely normal electric family hatchback drive coast to coast across the Australian Outback? Welcome to TopGear’s most ambitious electric roadtrip yet...

WORDS OLLIE KEW

PHOTOGRAPHY DEAN SMITH

BEST EV CROSSOVER

By day the Outback is vast and terrifying, while by night it’s vast, dark and terrifying

This is one of the few tourist destinations that actually does look like its picture

In Australia, almost hitting a kangaroo with your car is what’s known as a jump scare

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY YEARS AGO,

the luxuriously bearded explorer John McDouall Stuart needed three attempts to complete the first northerly expedition across Australia. About five minutes into his successful mission, he was kicked in the head and lightly trampled by a startled horse. Being the hardest known form of human – a Victorian Scotsman – Stuart refused to go to hospital and was instead stretchered for almost a third of the 2,000 mile odyssey.

I am not the hardest known form of human. I am a part-avocado, ‘ask YouTube how to erect shelves’ millennial. This attempt to retrace Stuart’s steps in an electric hatchback at the first time of asking is also likely to be a headache.

The road I’ll use is named in McDouall’s honour: the Stuart Highway. It lasted until the late 1980s before it was fully paved. Speed limits weren’t enforced until 2007. Usually raw distance is the enemy of any EV roadtrip, and we’ve got plenty of that – 1,920 miles from Adelaide, capital of South Australia to Darwin, biggest city in the Northern Territory. But for the next four and a half days the environment itself is a challenge for almost any car. We’re spearing straight into the Australian Outback. A respect demanding wilderness largely untouched by phone signal, teeming with deadly animals, where summer temperatures can soar past 40ºC during the day and drop below freezing after dark.

But it’s mild in Adelaide this morning and our base spec Kia EV3 (with £3k Long Range battery upgrade) promises 400 miles on its full charge. The local dealership’s lent us a spare wheel (EV3s are only shipped with the emergency foam) and we’ve bagged an extra cable to hook up to rural three phase power outlets at caravan parks if the charger network is a letdown. All that plus photography and video gear, rations, bottled water and a hefty towrope is bundled into our diesel SUV support car – carefully selected for its 3.5 tonne haulage capacity. You don’t stroll off into the Outback without a contingency plan. And the less weight the Kia has to carry, the better.