"If a hypothetical car owner buys a $40k BYD and saves $30k in...

"If a hypothetical car owner buys a $40k BYD and saves $30k in fuel costs alone over 5 years"

For starters, if someone wants to buy a Chinese-sourced product that has zero precedence in terms of quality and reliability, they can knock themselves out. That idea is not for everyone, that's for sure.

Then, to your $30k in fuel cost savings ambit claim: I've de-bunked this kind of savings advert for EV on several occasions in discussions with friends and family.

Starting with, who spends $6k pa on fuel?

Let's do the numbers:

At the current fuel price ($1.97/litre in my area, but let's call it $2.00/l for easy maths) and fuel consumption (6.5 l/100km, the manufacturer spec [1], but lets call it 7.5 l/100k to be conservative), that car would have to be doing 40,000 km per year.

According the ABS, the average distance travelled per vehicle in Australia is 12,100km [2] .
Note that figure does not distinguish between passenger and freight vehicles about 20% of vehicles are freight, which obviously travel far more than 12,000 km pa, meaning that annual passenger vehicle is meaningfully less than 12,000km, say conservatively 10,000 km pa (assuming trucks, which comprise 20% of the total vehicle fleet, do 20,000km pa)

So, your implied 40,000km pa travelled distance is a full four times higher than the actual distance travelled as calculated from the data.

Ergo, your fuel savings claim is overstated by a factor of four.



[1] https://www.carsguide.com.au/toyota/rav4/2021#fuel-consumption




[2] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/i...ey-motor-vehicle-use-australia/latest-release