AAP

An Australian car club will put an electric vehicle through its paces over the next three years to test its "real life" performance for motorists.

Queensland's RACQ has taken delivery of a Mitsubishi iMiEV (iMiEV) - the first mass-produced electric car sold in Australia - and will test its reliability, range, power consumption and running costs to see how it compares with hybrid and petrol vehicles.

Research leader Steve Spalding said the car would be used by different people for different reasons, from work, shopping and school runs to holiday drives, to see how consumer friendly it is for the average driver.

He said motorists feared getting stuck on the roadside in an electric car and wanted to know things like how long the battery would last.

"One of the things we will be doing is looking to effectively run it out of charge - how far will it go before it eventually stops," Mr Spalding told AAP.

e what we've found was that it captured the attention of people ... and people tended to ask questions, not about its range in kilometres but about distance, like will it get to the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast?"

RACQ chief executive Ian Gillespie said most people drove less than 100km a day.

"It's important that we can see that these vehicles are able to cope with that task on one charge of a battery," he said.

"They say they can and so far the evidence is supporting that but in regular daily use that might be another thing.

"So we're going to be putting it through its paces."

The iMiev uses a lithium-ion battery system and has a battery range of 140 to 160km and a top speed of 130km/h.

It takes eight hours to fully charge from a standard power socket but a quick charge system allows it to charge up to 50 per cent capacity in 20 minutes.

Mr Gillespie said some were concerned about the availability of charge points should they buy an electric car.

But he said he had no doubt electric cars would figure in the future, with charge points installed in places like shopping centres and service stations for convenience.

"All of the difficulties that you might think would prevent it from being used can be overcome," he said.

"If you think about it, if someone had said 100 years ago these vehicles are going to run on petrol and they're going to have to put petrol stations all over the country, including in the outback, so that we can top up, people would have thought that's too hard.

"It's not."

The project will also allow the RACQ to tweak its road-side assist service for electric cars.