EV vs hybrid vs petrol: the honest mid-size SUV maths for Australia

In our hatchback study, the electric car won at every driving distance, because the EV price premium had shrunk to $800. We promised the mid-size SUV edition would take a different turn. Here it is: same model, same honest real-world numbers, opposite answer.

The reason is one number. An electric BYD Sealion 7 Premium is $59,857 drive-away. A petrol Mazda CX-5 G25 is about $44,500. That’s a $15,400 premium — nineteen times the hatchback’s. Meanwhile the all-new RAV4 arrived in Australian showrooms this year, hybrid-only, from $45,990 plus on-roads — call it about $49,500 drive-away for the base GX. So the hybrid asks for a $5,000 premium, and the EV asks for three times that.

The short answer

For an average driver (12,000 km a year), the electric Sealion costs about $970 a year less to run than the petrol CX-5 — almost identical to the hatchback’s saving. But the same yearly saving now has to repay $15,400 instead of $800. The RAV4 hybrid saves slightly less per year — about $940 — but repays its $5,000 premium in about five years.

Option (average driver)	Pays for itself in	Extra cost vs petrol	Saving vs petrol
RAV4 hybrid (our pick)	~5 years	~$5,000	~$940/yr
Sealion EV	~16 years	~$15,400	~$970/yr
EV + solar	~9 years	~$22,100	~$2,420/yr
EV + solar + battery	~9 years	~$32,600	~$3,570/yr
EV, fully off-grid	Never — see below	~$65,400	~$4,630/yr

These numbers are for when you’re buying a car anyway. Already own one that works? Keep it — see below.

Eyeing a different SUV, or a plug-in hybrid? Our free hybrid vs petrol calculator runs these same real-world figures on your own cars and kilometres — petrol, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and EV side by side, every field editable, no sign-up.

As with the hatchback piece, read the table right: the solar, battery and off-grid rows price those systems as new purchases made alongside the EV. Already have solar on the roof? That money is spent — leave it out of the EV’s sums, and your deal is better than the bare-EV row shows.

The driving-distance effect is stronger in this class. Light drivers (8,000 km a year) barely justify even the hybrid — its saving falls to about $660 a year and the payback stretches towards eight years. Heavy drivers (20,000 km a year) are the opposite: the hybrid pays for itself in about three years, and the EV options genuinely come alive — more on that below.

Brochure figures vs the real world

Same discipline as last time: we model on measured, on-road consumption, not brochure claims. Where Australia’s real-world testing program has measured a car, we use its numbers (EVs measured at the power point, charging losses included):

Car	Claimed	Real world	Uses more than claimed
BYD Sealion 7 (electric)	19.9 kWh/100km	~23.2 kWh/100km	~+17%
Mazda CX-5 (petrol)	7.4 L/100km	9.0 L/100km	+22%
RAV4 hybrid	4.5 L/100km	~5.2 L/100km	~+16%

Two honesty notes. The Sealion 7 hasn’t been through the Australian program yet, so its figure is calculated from the measured gap on its stablemate the Dolphin — and Europe’s Green NCAP drove one on real roads at 21.45 kWh/100km before charging losses, which lands within a few percent of our figure once you add them. The RAV4’s number splits the measured evidence: the Australian program found the previous model used just 2% more than its lab figure, while the NRMA’s on-road test of the new one returned 5.4 L/100km against the 4.5 claim. We’ve used 5.2 — if the truth is nearer the kinder test, the hybrid’s win only grows.

Notice who the thirsty one is: the petrol CX-5 uses 22% more than the brochure says. That honesty gap costs its owner about $340 a year — and our model charges it faithfully, which actually helps the EV and hybrid cases. The hybrid still wins.

Why the SUV answer flips

Nothing about the electricity changed — charging the Sealion at home costs about the same per kilometre as charging the Dolphin. What changed is what the saving has to repay. And as last time, “fastest payback” and “most money” are different questions — so here’s where each option stands after ten years, in today’s dollars, against the petrol CX-5:

• RAV4 hybrid: about $2,800 better off
• Sealion EV: about $7,300 worse off
• EV + solar: about $2,200 worse off (the solar earns its keep; the car premium eats it)
• EV + solar + battery: about $3,900 worse off

(Same quick maths note as the hatchback piece: we count future dollars as worth a bit less than today’s — that’s the fair way to compare a big purchase now against savings that arrive slowly.)

On a flat power plan, nothing electric beats the hybrid over ten years in this class. The hybrid captures most of the fuel saving for a third of the EV’s premium — that’s the whole verdict in one line. A battery without solar is the worst buy of all: it stacks a second premium on the first for almost no extra saving on a flat rate — about $17,800 underwater at ten years. And fully off-grid? Even counting the fixed daily supply charge you’d never pay again, it’s around $28,000 worse than staying connected with the same solar and battery — the biggest “we tell you when not to spend” in this series so far.

The “for now”: how the EV catches up

Stretch the horizon or change the conditions and the gap starts closing. Three findings worth knowing before you sign anything:

• At fifteen years, the full EV + solar + battery kit reaches about $5,200 better than petrol — nearly level with the hybrid’s $5,800. Stay put long enough and the stacked savings almost close the premium.
• On a cheap overnight EV plan (details below), EV + solar turns positive at ten years — about $2,300 ahead of petrol. Still a whisker behind the hybrid’s $2,800, and a future ~3c/km road user charge would take most of it back. Close, not there.
• Heavy drivers flip the verdict. At 20,000 km a year, EV + solar beats petrol by $1,500 over ten years even on a flat rate — and by about $11,300 on an EV plan, well clear of the hybrid’s $7,700. The more you drive, the more electric wins; the average driver just doesn’t drive enough to carry the price gap yet.

That’s why our verdict says for now. EV SUV prices are falling the way hatchback prices already fell. When this class’s premium drops to a few thousand dollars, the hatchback maths arrives here too — and we’ll update the model when it does.

Charge it right — the trick most people miss

The same two free moves as the hatchback piece — and they matter more here, because the car uses more:

• Cheap overnight EV plans. Several big retailers now sell plans with overnight EV charging around 4.5–8c/kWh — versus a typical 36c/kWh flat rate. That one change is most of the “for now” list above. Compare plans on the government’s Energy Made Easy site.
• The Solar Sharer window. Eligible households in NSW, south-east QLD and SA can opt into three hours of free midday power — if the car is home at lunchtime, that’s free driving. We’ve covered how it works and the catches.

And the same myth is worth killing at SUV scale: at 12,000 km a year the Sealion needs under 8 kWh a day — about four hours overnight from an ordinary power point. Most average drivers don’t need the $1,800 wall charger; we only priced one in for the heavy-driver case.

The road-trip reality check

Mid-size SUVs do exactly the things home charging doesn’t cover: the Easter run, the towing, the school-holiday kilometres with the boot full. The honest exceptions from the hatchback piece apply here with more force:

• Cost. Public fast charging runs about 40–65c/kWh (up to ~85c/kWh on some ultra-rapid chargers) — well above your home rate, and five to ten times a cheap overnight EV rate. Holiday kilometres cost more than commuting kilometres.
• Queues. The charging network is growing, but the crunch lands exactly when every family travels at once, on the Easter and Christmas runs between capitals — and this is the class of car most likely to be making them.

That’s the hybrid’s honest practical advantage: it asks for no infrastructure at all — and it drinks least exactly where SUVs usually drink most, in stop-start suburban running.

Security comes before savings

Same professional pecking order as last time: keep the energy flowing first, cut the cost second, green it third (full piece coming). In the hatchback class, choosing the hybrid meant paying a little extra for the security of a second fuel network the grid can’t take down. In this class, unusually, the security pick and the money pick are the same car — the family hauler that still drives in a blackout. If the EV maths tempts you anyway (heavy driver, salary packager), solar and a battery buy back some of the security you gave up by electrifying. And off-grid — which never stacks up on cost — is really a pure security purchase for properties with no real choice; price it as one.

Already own a car that works? Keep it

Even more emphatically than last time. Selling a five-year-old CX-5 (worth roughly $25,000 private sale) to buy the electric Sealion means putting in about $34,700 to save under $1,000 a year — the payback runs past twenty years at every driving distance we analysed. The hybrid switch doesn’t pay early either. Run the car you own to the end of its life, then buy the efficient thing. No exceptions survived the maths in this class.

The fine print that actually matters

• The one case where the EV wins today: salary packaging. The novated-lease tax exemption applies to EVs, not hybrids — worth thousands a year, easily enough to outweigh the premium if you qualify. The full exemption ends for new leases after 31 March 2027; get advice before then.
• A road charge for EVs is likely someday — none today; at the much-discussed ~3c/km it would claw back about half the EV’s running-cost edge. For scale: at its real-world 9.0L/100km, the petrol CX-5 already pays about 4.8c/km in fuel excise — so a fair charge levels the field rather than tilting it. It’s a toggle in our model — try it.
• Battery life. The Sealion 7 carries BYD’s 8-year/160,000 km warranty. Heavy drivers reach that odometer cap at about year eight — worth knowing before the fifteen-year numbers seduce you.
• What we left out, on purpose: resale differences, insurance differences, tyre wear — stated in the model’s README rather than guessed. The Hyundai Tucson (petrol) and Kia EV5 are reasonable alternates to our pair; neither changes the shape of the answer.

The verdict

• Buying a mid-size SUV at replacement time: hybrid first — it banks most of the fuel saving for a third of the premium, and doubles as the energy-security pick.
• Drive well above average, or can salary-package? The EV (ideally with solar and a cheap overnight plan) already wins — run your own numbers before defaulting to the hybrid.
• The battery-and-solar kit is a fifteen-year play in this class; off-grid remains a security purchase, not a savings one.
• The premium is the whole story. When electric SUV prices close the gap the way hatchbacks did, this verdict flips — that’s not a hedge, it’s a forecast.

Every number above comes from the same published model as the hatchback piece — an Excel workbook that simulates a real household hour by hour, with every source and assumption on its README tab. Download the model (Excel workbook, ~1 MB), switch the vehicle pair to SUV, change our assumptions to yours, and check us. That’s the point. (Don’t want a spreadsheet? The calculator does the car-vs-car sums in your browser.)

Earlier in this series: the hatchback edition — where the EV wins outright.