The Best EV SUV in Australia, Ranked on What It Costs

Most lists of the best EV SUV in Australia rank the contenders on how they drive. This one ranks on what they cost, because that’s the part that’s checkable and the part that’s usually missing. Six cars, all mid-size, all on sale now.

The winner is the cheapest one, which is a boring answer until you look at the margin: over five years it costs $20,908 less than the dearest car here, on a sticker price gap of $16,910.

The more useful finding is in the insurance column, where a premium quoted on a new car turns out to be about a fifth of what five years of it add up to, and both brands that undercut BYD on day one cost more than it does a year later.

How I ranked these

Four things, all published and all checkable: the price, the five-year cost of running it in NSW, the range you get per dollar, and the warranty.

The five-year figure is the list price, plus NSW stamp duty, plus five years of registration, plus five years of insurance. Registration is $84 plus $596 motor vehicle tax for the tare weight band these cars fall into, plus $650 for a green slip, which is a Sydney estimate. Stamp duty is at the NSW passenger vehicle rate.

The insurance line needs a word, because it’s where comparisons of this kind go wrong, including an earlier version of this one. The usual method takes a brand’s new-car premium and multiplies it by five. CHOICE actually publishes separate averages for new, one, two, three and four-year-old cars, from a January 2026 sample of more than sixteen thousand EV quotes, and premiums move a long way across those five ages. So I’ve added up what CHOICE publishes for each brand instead.

Three limits on that, all of which matter.

CHOICE has Geely at only two of the five ages, new and one year old. I’ve held its one-year figure of $2,219 across years two to five, which means $8,876 of the Geely’s $10,498 is one cell repeated four times. That’s an assumption, not data, and the Geely is the car that wins this page.

These are also five different sets of cars priced in the same month, not one car followed for five years. The four-year-old Kia average is what people paid in January 2026 to insure Kia EVs built in 2021 and 2022, which are not EV5s.

And there’s no premium inflation in any of it, which pushes the totals the other way. Read them as a ranking, not a forecast.

Every price below is the list price, before on-road costs, so the cars are directly comparable. Drive-away pricing moves with the state you’re in and whatever campaign is running that month, and two campaigns running right now matter enough to get their own section.

Two of the six can’t be given a five-year figure at all. Neither Zeekr nor XPeng turns up at any of the five ages. CHOICE’s only explanation is that where a brand is absent, there weren’t enough quotes to average, which limits its sample and not what insurers know. I’ve written more about why the newest brands are missing from the insurance data elsewhere.

The full comparison

Model	List price	Battery	WLTP range	Vehicle warranty	Battery warranty
Geely EX5 Complete	$41,990	68.4 kWh	475 km	7yr / unlimited	8yr / unlimited
XPeng G6 RWD Standard	$51,800	68.5 kWh	480 km	7yr / unlimited	8yr / 160,000 km
BYD Sealion 7 Premium	$54,990	82.5 kWh	482 km	6yr / 150,000 km	8yr / 160,000 km
Kia EV5 Air 2WD SR	$56,770	64.2 kWh	400 km	7yr / unlimited	7yr / 150,000 km
Zeekr 7X RWD	$57,900	75 kWh	480 km	5yr / unlimited	8yr / 160,000 km
Tesla Model Y RWD	$58,900	60 kWh	466 km	5yr / unlimited	8yr / 160,000 km

List prices, before on-road costs.

Two cars here won something at the 2026 Drive Car of the Year awards. The Zeekr 7X RWD took best medium SUV under $60,000. The Tesla Model Y took best electric vehicle under $60,000 and then the overall title.

One scope note before the numbers. This is the mid-size electric SUV segment. Smaller and cheaper EVs are on sale in Australia and they will beat every price here.

Best value electric SUV in Australia

The Geely EX5, and not narrowly.

Model	List price	Stamp duty	Rego, 5 years	Insurance, 5 years	Five-year fixed costs
Geely EX5 Complete	$41,990	$1,260	$6,650	$10,498	$60,398
BYD Sealion 7 Premium	$54,990	$1,850	$6,650	$9,860	$73,350
Kia EV5 Air 2WD SR	$56,770	$1,940	$6,650	$10,832	$76,192
Tesla Model Y RWD	$58,900	$2,045	$6,650	$13,711	$81,306

Purchase price, stamp duty, five years of registration and five years of insurance. Charging, servicing, tyres and depreciation are not in it. Insurance is a brand average applied to a specific model, and some of those averages blend very different cars: CHOICE’s BYD figure covers everything from a Dolphin to a Sealion 7, where its Geely figure is effectively one model. The totals rank these cars, they don’t price them.

At the ends of the table the gaps are wide. The Tesla is $16,910 more than the Geely on the windscreen and $20,908 more over five years, with insurance accounting for $3,213 of the widening and stamp duty for another $785.

Cheapest to buy is also cheapest to own here, all the way down the order.

What a new-car premium doesn’t tell you

A quote on a new car is the number everyone shops on, and across these four brands it’s between 15 and 23 per cent of what CHOICE’s five figures add up to. Call it a fifth. Choose between two cars on premiums quoted today and four fifths of the bill isn’t in front of you.

The order doesn’t hold either. Here is every Geely, Kia and BYD figure CHOICE publishes:

Vehicle age	Geely	Kia	BYD
New	$1,622	$1,774	$2,220
1 year	$2,219	$2,150	$2,056
2 years	not published	$1,593	$1,971
3 years	not published	$1,891	$1,859
4 years	not published	$3,424	$1,754

Read the first two rows. On a new car the order is Geely, Kia, BYD, cheapest to dearest. One year later it is exactly reversed. Nothing in that depends on an assumption; those are six published cells, and every one of them is a real average of real quotes.

After that it gets murkier, and I’d rather show you why than hand you a total and move on. BYD’s line falls every year, which is the only clean series of the three. Kia’s jumps around, and the $3,424 at four years old is more than double its own two-year figure. Hold Kia’s four-year premium at its three-year figure instead and its five-year insurance drops from $10,832 to $9,299, which would make Kia the cheapest of the three to insure rather than the dearest. Geely simply stops after year one.

So I won’t tell you which brand is cheapest to insure across five years. What I will tell you is that whichever way you resolve those two problems, the answer isn’t the one on the new-car quote.

The ranking of the cars doesn’t turn on it. The BYD is $1,780 cheaper than the Kia on the sticker and attracts $90 less stamp duty, so it stays ahead over five years by $2,842 on CHOICE’s published figures, or $1,309 if you throw the outlier out.

What’s actually on offer right now

Everything above uses list prices, which is the only fair way to line up six cars. It’s not what you’d pay this month, and on the Kia and the BYD the difference is big enough to flip them.

As at August 2026, Kia is advertising the EV5 Air Standard Range from $49,990 drive away for private buyers until 31 August, covering twelve months of registration, CTP, stamp duty and dealer delivery. BYD is covering the on-road costs on the Sealion 7 Premium for orders placed between 1 August and 30 September and delivered by 31 October, which puts it at $54,990 drive away. Both are advertised as estimates before options, and BYD’s terms note that metallic paint costs extra.

Put five years of insurance and four more years of registration on top of each:

	Kia EV5 Air SR	BYD Sealion 7 Premium
Drive-away price today	$49,990	$54,990
Registration, years 2 to 5	$5,320	$5,320
Insurance, 5 years	$10,832	$9,860
Five-year total	$66,142	$70,170

The Kia is $5,000 cheaper to get into and $4,028 cheaper over five years, the reverse of what the list prices say. Campaign pricing appears and disappears, so check what’s actually running before you use any table to choose between two cars, this page included.

Best range for the money

Range figures on their own tell you very little, because a bigger battery costs more. What’s useful is how much range each dollar buys.

Model	WLTP range	List price	Range per $1,000
Geely EX5 Complete	475 km	$41,990	11.3 km
XPeng G6 RWD Standard	480 km	$51,800	9.3 km
BYD Sealion 7 Premium	482 km	$54,990	8.8 km
Zeekr 7X RWD	480 km	$57,900	8.3 km
Tesla Model Y RWD	466 km	$58,900	7.9 km
Kia EV5 Air 2WD SR	400 km	$56,770	7.0 km

Five of these six sit within 16 km of each other on range, between 466 and 482, while their list prices span $16,910. If range is what you’re buying, almost all of that $16,910 is buying something else.

The Kia is the outlier at the wrong end. The Air Standard Range’s 64.2 kWh battery gets 400 km, the shortest here for close to the highest price. The Long Range version fixes that and lists at $61,170, at which point you’re comparing it against different cars.

The Tesla points the other way. It has the smallest pack in the group and it still does 466 km. I’m not converting that into a charging bill, because the battery figures in this table aren’t all quoted on the same basis, some gross and some usable, so a kilowatt-hours-per-kilometre number built out of them would be comparing different things. I’ve set that problem out in the cheapest EV piece. The short version: across the two cars in this segment I could compare like for like, the entire efficiency spread is worth about $117 a year, so it isn’t where the money is either way.

The best warranty in the segment

Geely, by a wider margin than it wins on price.

Seven years unlimited kilometres on the car and eight years unlimited kilometres on the battery. The 70 per cent capacity floor that comes with it isn’t the differentiator, since Kia, BYD, XPeng and Tesla all guarantee the same 70 per cent. What’s different is that the Geely’s eight years carry no distance limit, where every other car here stops at 150,000 or 160,000 km, according to CarExpert’s brand-by-brand summary.

The car itself is a closer contest than it used to be. Kia and XPeng both match the Geely at seven years unlimited on the vehicle, and XPeng’s is recent: it moved to seven years unlimited with the 2026 G6, up from five years and 120,000 km under its previous Australian distributor, so older comparisons still have the short number. Tesla and Zeekr sit at five years unlimited. Only the BYD puts a distance cap on the car itself, at six years or 150,000 km.

Where the Geely stands alone is the battery, which is the expensive part. It’s the only one here with no kilometre attached to either number.

Launch offers muddy this. Brands arriving in Australia often run extended cover for early buyers, and those offers move around and expire without much notice. If a longer warranty is part of why you’re choosing a car, confirm what’s current on the build in front of you and not what a review said six months ago. Zeekr Chatswood on the north shore will know what’s running on the 7X, and every brand’s dealers can tell you the same about theirs.

Best electric SUV for a family doing big kilometres

The Geely again, and here the reason is arithmetic rather than taste.

An eight-year, 160,000 km battery warranty is an eight-year warranty only if you drive under 20,000 km a year. Above that, the kilometres run out first. Kia’s seven years and 150,000 km binds a little later, at about 21,400 km a year.

The Australian average is somewhere around 12,000 km a year, and a household running one car for a school run, a commute and a couple of interstate trips can double that without trying. Doubling it is already enough to matter.

At 24,000 km a year:

– BYD’s, Tesla’s, Zeekr’s and XPeng’s batteries end at 6.7 years instead of 8

– Kia’s battery ends at 6.3 years instead of 7

– Geely’s still ends at 8, because there’s no distance limit to hit

Push to 30,000 km a year and it separates properly. Those same four batteries end at 5.3 years instead of 8, and Kia’s at five instead of seven. BYD’s car warranty ends at five years instead of six. The Geely still ends at seven and eight.

That’s up to nearly three years of cover on the single most expensive component in the car. The caps are printed in every specification table, including mine two sections up. What isn’t printed is what they do once you put your own annual kilometres next to them.

Range is the other thing families ask about. It separates five of these six by almost nothing and leaves the Kia 82 km behind the longest. Warranty kilometres separate them by much more.

What about resale value

None of the above counts depreciation, which for most cars is the biggest single cost of owning one. Nobody can price it for half this field, because you need years of used sales to see it and Geely, Zeekr and XPeng have been here a year or two. Kia is the odd case: decades of Australian history as a brand, almost none for the EV5 itself.

For the Geely that runs against everything else on this page. It wins on price, on range per dollar and on warranty, and it has the thinnest track record of anything here. I’ve put the full argument in the cheapest EV piece.

So which one should you buy

If you want the cheapest to own, the Geely EX5. Cheapest to buy, cheapest over five years, longest warranty with no distance caps, and more range per dollar than anything else here. The catch is the thing the numbers can’t show you, which is what it will be worth in 2031.

If you do serious kilometres, the Geely again, for the warranty and not the price. Nothing else here gets you past 160,000 km on the battery.

If you’re choosing between the BYD and the Kia this month, take the campaign prices seriously. On list prices the BYD is $2,842 cheaper over five years. On what the two brands are advertising in August 2026, the Kia is $4,028 cheaper. That swing is bigger than anything in the specifications.

If you want the longest track record, the Tesla Model Y. It’s the dearest car here and it insures for more than anything else, so it loses badly on total cost. What it has is more than a decade of Australian resale history, which is the one column every newer brand on this page leaves blank. It also took the overall 2026 Drive Car of the Year, for whatever that’s worth against $81,306.

If you want the longest range, the BYD Sealion 7 at 482 km, with the XPeng G6 and Zeekr 7X a kilometre or two behind at 480. Neither the XPeng nor the Zeekr can be fully costed yet, because their brands aren’t in the insurance data.

If your household does under 20,000 km a year, the distance caps never bind and the decision comes back to price and whether you like the car. That’s a fine basis. Just make it with the five-year figure in front of you and not the sticker.

Common questions

What is the best value electric SUV in Australia?

On five-year costs including stamp duty, registration and insurance, the Geely EX5 Complete works out at about $60,398 in NSW, against $73,350 for a BYD Sealion 7 Premium, $76,192 for a Kia EV5 Air Standard Range and $81,306 for a Tesla Model Y RWD. It’s also the cheapest to buy, so on these figures it wins twice. Those totals use brand-average premiums, so they rank these cars rather than price them.

Does the cheapest EV to buy stay the cheapest to own?

In this group, yes. Purchase price and five-year cost rank in the same order, and the gaps get wider, not narrower. What doesn’t hold is the insurance ranking. On a new car CHOICE has Geely cheapest at $1,622, then Kia at $1,774, then BYD at $2,220. One year old, that order is exactly reversed: BYD $2,056, Kia $2,150, Geely $2,219.

Which electric SUV has the best warranty in Australia?

The Geely EX5, at seven years unlimited kilometres on the vehicle and eight years unlimited kilometres on the battery. Every other car here caps battery cover at 150,000 or 160,000 km, which starts to bite above about 20,000 km a year. The 70 per cent capacity guarantee isn’t a point of difference: Kia, BYD, XPeng and Tesla all offer it too.

Which electric SUV gives the most range for the money?

The Geely EX5 at 11.3 km of WLTP range per $1,000 of list price, against 7.0 km for the Kia EV5 Air Standard Range. Five of the six cars here sit within 16 km of each other on range while their list prices span $16,910.

Why aren’t Zeekr and XPeng given a five-year cost?

Because neither brand appears anywhere in CHOICE’s insurance data, at any of the five vehicle ages it covers. CHOICE puts that down to not having collected enough quotes to average, which says nothing about what an insurer would charge you. Ring around for quotes on the exact variant and build year, since that’s the level insurers price at.