The EV Rally Results Are In: What 1,000 Miles Really Proved

Five days, more than 1,000 miles for the cars and vans, around 900 for the trucks and trailers, and a finish line at Allianz Stadium in Twickenham, the show we covered in our review of Everything Electric Greater London. The results of the GREENFLEET Mythbusters EV Rally were published on 16 September, and they are more interesting for what they measure than for who won.

The short version: a Toyota bZ4X and C-HR+ crew from the AA got the most out of their cars, a haulage firm beat the official efficiency figure for its electric Mercedes truck by a wide margin, and the safety table was topped by a Chinese van maker on one route and a charging company on the other. The longer version is about what these scores can be asked to carry.

How the rally was set up

This was the sixth running of the event, and the first to split into two routes. Cars and vans went from Exeter up to Solihull, across Wales, past Newcastle and down to Twickenham, covering more than 1,000 miles. Trucks and trailers ran their own route of around 900 miles, with electric HGVs and buses checking in at the charging hubs built for them. Between the two routes, the teams covered more than 1,850 miles, according to the AA's briefing before the start.

The point of the exercise, as the organiser puts it on the rally site, is to stop debating what electric vehicles can do and measure it instead. The 2026 theme was myths: range anxiety, charging queues, towing, whether an electric van or truck can hold a commercial schedule. The route included the highest roads in Wales and England to answer the charge that electric vehicles are slow.

Where the numbers came from

Every competing vehicle carried a tracker from Quartix, the rally's technology partner, and two scores were produced from five days of driving: an efficiency score and a safety score.

Efficiency was measured as a percentage of the vehicle's peak official manufacturer figure in miles per kilowatt-hour, with teams submitting dashboard readings that were checked against the tracker data. Cars and vans were scored against their official figures directly. Trucks were benchmarked against weight-dependent manufacturer figures instead, since HGV efficiency is quoted according to gross vehicle weight while car and van figures are quoted unladen.

Safety scores came from the same trackers, recording how each vehicle was actually driven across the full route rather than on one timed section.

The efficiency scores

On the cars and vans route, the AA took first place at 88.5% in a Toyota bZ4X Touring and a Toyota C-HR+, followed by Kwik Fit on 85.2% and Speedy Hire on 62.5%.

On the trucks and trailers route, FSEW International Freight Forwarders, running as part of Team SAGA Trucks in a Mercedes-Benz eActros 600, recorded 140.2%. The event's media crew finished second at 68.2%, driving a fully laden 44-tonne eActros 600, with GRIDSERVE third at 40.6% in an electric DAF.

That 140.2% figure deserves a plain reading. It means the truck went further on a kilowatt-hour than its official benchmark suggested it would. The truck benchmark is not the same as the car benchmark, so it is not a claim that an electric lorry is more efficient than an electric hatchback. It does show how much of real-world efficiency sits with the driver, the load and the route, and how much of the official figure is a laboratory assumption.

The spread within each route says the same thing. Two teams on the car and van route, driving broadly similar machinery over the same roads, finished 26 percentage points apart. That gap is mostly about how the vehicle was driven and how each crew planned its charging stops.

The safety scores

Farizon Auto UK topped the cars and vans safety table at 92.8% in its V7E medium electric vans, with the AA at 92.0% and Lex Autolease at 91.6%. On the trucks route, GRIDSERVE recorded 99.2% in a DAF electric truck, with FSEW close behind at 98.9%.

Read alongside the efficiency table, those two sets of results pull in different directions in a useful way. The team that drove most gently over the whole route did not automatically win the efficiency prize, and the most efficient truck crew did not automatically top the safety scores. Real fleets face that tension between pace and economy every working day.

What the rally does not prove

Three honest caveats keep the results in perspective.

First, the two routes are not comparable with each other. A 140.2% score on the truck route, measured against a different benchmark, cannot be set beside an 88.5% on the car route as though both measured the same thing. Within each route the comparison holds; across them it does not.

Second, this is a demonstration run by an industry that wants electrification to work. It is organised by GREENFLEET, sponsored by Lex Autolease, and populated by manufacturers, fleet operators and charging companies with a stake in the outcome. The vehicles were current models, many of them supplied for the event. The truck route was plotted around hubs that were known to be open and working, including GRIDSERVE's Electric Freightway sites at Moto Exeter, Moto Tamworth, Extra Baldock, Stevenage and Markham Vale, and a heavy-duty hub at Immingham. Two of those are motorway services of the kind we looked at in our guide to motorway charging. A rally designed to show the chain working is testing the best case, not the average one.

Third, a safety score measures driving behaviour as recorded by a tracker over five scored days, which is not the same thing as accident risk, and it cannot capture the day when a hub is full, a charger is offline, or a driver is on the fourth drop of a tight morning. Payload utilisation, weather and depot charging economics do not appear anywhere in the scores.

What it does prove

Since more than two million electric cars now sit on UK roads, up 45% on a year earlier according to the AA's own figures, the relevant question has moved on from whether electric vehicles can do long journeys. The rally answers a narrower version of it with evidence rather than assertion.

A convoy of electric cars, vans and full-size trucks covered around 1,900 miles of British roads in five days without the route being abandoned, and the charging stops that made that possible are the same public hubs any driver or fleet can use, part of the network we surveyed in our mid-year charging round-up. On the truck side, that matters most. The discussion about electric freight has shifted from whether suitable chargers exist to whether there are enough of them, which is a smaller and more solvable problem, and one we look at in our piece on the freight charging buildout.

The efficiency spread is the most actionable finding for anyone running a fleet. Between 40.6% and 140.2% on the truck route, and between 62.5% and 88.5% on the cars and vans route, the difference between a strong result and a weak one was rarely the vehicle. It was how the vehicle was driven and how the charging was planned. That is a training and operations question, and it is cheaper to fix than a new truck.

The honest read

The rally is a showcase, and it should be read as one. It shows that on a planned long route, in current vehicles, using hubs that are already open, the whole chain works. It shows the practical ceiling of efficiency for a well-driven electric vehicle, which is a genuinely useful number for anyone building a business case. What it cannot show is how the network behaves on an unplanned Tuesday in November. The results are worth having precisely because they are measured, and worth keeping in proportion because of who is measuring them.