There’s no better way to test an electric vehicle than a real road trip. Two Filipino AION V owners just proved that long-distance EV travel across the Philippines isn’t a someday thing. It’s already here.
Romel Emperado and fellow AION V owner Rommel Laranjo weren’t testing the car for GAC Philippines in any official capacity. They were driving their own vehicles, on their own routes, comparing notes after the fact the way owners do.
But together, their trips answer a question that’s trailed EVs around the Philippines since the first ones hit local roads: can one actually cross an archipelago, or only survive within a single city’s charging radius?
Less stress, no sleepless nights
Emperado’s background is in solar materials and technology, which shows in how closely he tracked the trip. Cruising at a steady 80 to 100 kilometers an hour, leaning on single-pedal driving and regenerative braking, and keeping the AION V in power-saving mode, he logged an average efficiency of 13.9 kWh per 100 kilometers, more than 20% better than the conservative estimate he’d budgeted for.
The number that mattered more to him, though, was the one on his old fuel receipts. “Going from spending ₱9,000 to ₱10,000 a month on diesel, to essentially free charging with my EVs made taking on this cross-country adventure a no-brainer,” he said. He’s careful to separate the two claims he’s making: that the trip was comfortable, and that it was cheap. Comfortable took planning. Cheap was just arithmetic.
“I wanted to share this with the EV community to banish fear and range anxiety,” Emperado added.
“People think a long-distance road trip like this is stressful, but it really wasn’t. I didn’t drive at night, so I wouldn’t have tiresome and sleepless nights. We just hung out at malls or slept at Airbnbs while the car charged.”
Where the road ends and the ferry begins
Laranjo’s version of the same test started smaller and closer to home: a 34-kilometer daily commute, now run on a diesel SUV’s replacement. The bigger trial came when he drove the AION V from Cebu to Mindanao, which meant two Roll-on/Roll-off ferry crossings, not just highway.
Ferries are where an EV’s advantage gets easy to overlook, since nobody’s driving. But that’s exactly where Laranjo noticed the difference. With no combustion engine idling to keep the cabin cool during the queue for embarkation, his family sat in air-conditioned comfort with no exhaust fumes and no fuel burning while the ferry loaded.
“The car is smooth and responsive with great pickup, and we still made it home with 36% battery to spare, even with the air conditioning running the entire day,” he said, finishing the leg with 183 kilometers of range still in reserve.
“We used to spend up to ₱3,000 a week on fuel for our traditional cars, so switching to daily home charging, and supplementing it with our solar setup, made a huge difference,” Laranjo said. “Driving all the way from Cebu to Mindanao proved that long trips are completely doable.”
All about timing
Here’s the thing about an archipelago: it was never a road trip in the uninterrupted, point-to-point American sense.
Filipino drivers have always budgeted for a ferry queue, a delayed sailing, a stretch where the highway simply stops at water.
What Emperado and Laranjo’s trips reveal is less about the car and more about a fit nobody had quite named yet: an EV’s need to pause and an archipelago’s need to pause were already built for each other. The trip doesn’t ask drivers to accept new inconvenience. It asks them to spend an inconvenience they were already budgeting for on something useful.
The country’s public charging network is still catching up to that idea. As of late April 2026, the Department of Energy counted roughly 1,600 accredited charging stations nationwide, a mix of AC chargers, DC fast chargers, and battery-swap stations, concentrated mostly around Metro Manila. Executives in the industry have been blunt about why the buildout is slow going: the country’s geography, spread across thousands of islands, makes a single connected charging spine a genuinely harder problem than it is almost anywhere else in Southeast Asia.
If you’re planning a similar route: both owners’ trips leaned on the same low-tech workaround, timing charging stops to things you’d do anyway. Malls, hotels, and Airbnbs with outlets or on-site chargers turn a multi-hour charge into an errand run or a night’s sleep instead of dead time.
Mapping charging points before departure, rather than hunting for them en route, was the one habit both owners cited as the difference between a stressful trip and a manageable one.
Masato Katsumata, Chief Technology Officer of GAC International, framed the owners’ trips as data GAC couldn’t generate in a lab. “The AION V was designed around people’s real-world mobility needs, from everyday drives to longer journeys,” he said. “Their trips across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao provide valuable insights beyond controlled test conditions, helping us continuously refine our vehicles for the way Filipino drivers actually travel.”
GAC is campaigning this kind of owner story under the banner #LifeWithGAC, and it’s easy to read that as marketing framing dressed up as authenticity. But the numbers Emperado and Laranjo are reporting, the efficiency logs, the fuel-cost comparisons, the leftover range, aren’t the brand’s to spin. They’re the owners’ receipts.
Laranjo’s trip ended with 183 kilometers still on the battery. He hadn’t needed them. But driving into Mindanao, off a ferry, air conditioning still running, engine never having burned a drop of anything to get him there, that number was the whole point of bringing it up.
The AION V is available at any of GAC’s 30 dealerships nationwide, with details at gacgroup.com/en-ph/test-drive.
Photo courtesy of GAC Philippines.
About The Author
