I borrowed a Kia EV3 Long Range Air base model to find out whether a smaller electric car can handle a proper rural Australian road trip — not just the city-to-city corridors everyone already knows work fine.
The route took me from Sydney, over the Blue Mountains, through Orange, Coonabarabran, Parkes, Canowindra, and back. Over 1,200km all up, with my dad along for the ride.
The car averaged around 15–16kWh/100km across varied terrain, and we had zero range anxiety the entire trip, something I couldn’t say for a lot of popular Chinese EVs with roughly two-thirds the real-world range of this car.
Charging was everything from Tesla Superchargers (where a one-month membership gave us seriously cheap rates) to the most unusual stop of the trip: a mechanic’s shop in Coonabarabran running a Tesla 11kW charger on a trust-and-pay-later system.
Along the way we visited the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring, the Parkes Radio Telescope, an abandoned gold mine at Peak Hill, the fish fossil museum at Canowindra, wind farms, beautiful canola fields and more bakeries than I probably should admit.
The Parkes Supercharger site was unfortunately shut for car park resurfacing – a good reminder that regardless of quality, one charger brand per town/city is never enough.
By the end, I was ready to call the Kia EV3 Air LR a strong candidate for my car of the year for 2025.
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