The Karachi Man Who Drove to Babusar Top on an EV

By Fahad Hassan · 30 August 2026 · 9 min read · ChargePK Blog

Ask most people in Pakistan whether you can drive an electric car from Karachi to Babusar Top, roughly 1,400 kilometres ending on a 4,173 metre (13,691 feet) mountain pass, and they will smile politely and say no. Sohail Asif spent three or four years quietly asking himself the same question. This summer, in a BYD Atto 2, he answered it. He rolled onto the top of Babusar with 39% still on the clock. Here is how he got there.

The question that sat in his driveway for years

Sohail wanted an EV long before he bought one. The maths was appealing. Less petrol, less maintenance, cleaner, and a car he could someday run off his own solar. But wanting and doing are different sports.

Back then the motorways were a charging desert, EVs cost a fortune, after sales was a shrug, and one question loomed over all of it. Buy the car, sure, but where do I actually take it? And for Sohail it was never just Karachi to Islamabad. Anyone can do the easy half. His real question was the mountains. Could the same car that crawled through Karachi traffic haul itself all the way up to Babusar Top?

Then the map started filling in

Slowly, things changed. New EVs arrived. DC fast chargers began sprouting along the motorways, Moro, Sukkur, Zahir Pir, one after another, and the terrifying gaps between them started to shrink.

Then he stumbled onto one of our Facebook posts. A list of Pakistan's charging stations, all in one place, with map pins and phone numbers. He started jotting them down. Nooriabad, Moro, the ones along his route. None of it was dramatic. It was just a growing pile of small reassurances, and at some point the pile got tall enough. He sold his petrol Honda, bought the Atto 2, and went looking for the only proof that counts. A real long drive.

A dress rehearsal before the main act

He picked the car up on Khalid Bin Waleed Road in Karachi with about 75% in the battery, no home charger of his own yet, and therefore no room to wing it. First stop, the Shell pump by the Karachi Toll Plaza. Up to 88%. Then Nooriabad, where he did not actually need a charge but stopped anyway, just to see whether the stations on his list were real or wishful thinking. They were real. At Moro, he had already called ahead.

This was the whole point of the early legs. Turn the unknowns into numbers. How far does an easy right foot really get you? How long does a fast charger take? Which roads quietly eat your battery? And the big one. Can you trust a motorway charger you have never seen? Nooriabad and Moro said yes.

Then came Kandiaro, and for Sohail that is not a dot on the map, it is home. He stayed a couple of days, and while he was there he did the smartest thing on the whole trip. He practised. He rigged an extension cable for a humble 3 kW charger and charged the car at his own house for the first time. Nothing glamorous, but knowing he could always roll out on a full battery changed everything. He now had a real feel for the car's range, and a rule he would lean on the rest of the way. Ease off the speed, stretch the range.

Kandiaro to Islamabad, at a gentleman's pace

He rolled out of Kandiaro on a full battery from that humble home charger and kept it to 70 to 80 km/h. Not heroic, but that is the trick. It carried him 330 kilometres in one run, past Sukkur, all the way to the Zahir Pir service area, where the battery read 9%. That is the number that makes your palms sweat. Equal parts pride (look how far we have come) and dread (please let the next one work). It did. The Multan service area, then Centre Point Hotel at Gojra, then Sial, then Centaurus Mall in Islamabad. Each charger handing him to the next like stepping stones across a river.

And then he was at the foot of the part he had daydreamed about for years.

A message came from the north

Islamabad was always where his imagination ran out of road. He had been posting his progress on Facebook the whole way, and that is how we got talking. Our message was short. Do not drive home from Islamabad. Keep going, into the Kaghan Valley. There is charging up here now. So he did.

Into the thin air

From Islamabad he climbed to Murree, then threaded through Nathia Gali and Abbottabad to Balakot, and found exactly what he had been promised. He charged at Faheem's Balakot EV Hub, the little solar backed charger that has quietly become the gateway to the valley, with Pine View Hotel as backup down the road.

But the chargers were only half of it. The other half was a phone that kept buzzing. Battery at Naran? At Batakundi? At Moon Restaurant? All the way up, there was someone on the other end asking the right question at the right moment, which, when you are 200 km from the nearest city on a road that does not forgive mistakes, is worth more than any spec sheet.

Balakot to Babusar Top

He topped up in Balakot, again at Shogran, then pushed through Batakundi and past Moon Restaurant onto the road he had been picturing for years. And as the switchbacks climbed and the air thinned, the scenery stopped being scenery. It became a final exam of a very old question. Can an electric car actually reach Babusar Top?

It can. He crested the pass with 39% left in the battery, and to Sohail that was not a percentage, it was a verdict. Years of hesitation, planning, second guessing and quiet experiments, all answered by a car sitting calmly at 4,173 metres, 13,691 feet, in a place he had long assumed was simply too far. Not the end of the story, he will tell you. The start of a new one.

Sohail's charging stops

The whole route, and where he plugged in. Live prices, power and contact numbers for each are on the ChargePK map.

What Sohail's drive teaches the rest of us

The good news. It is far easier now than when he started. Apps like ChargePK put every station's location, map link, phone number, power and per unit price in one place, and increasingly, whether it is live or down right now. Sohail's own rules for anyone eyeing a long EV run:

• Look up the chargers before you leave. Know your stops, and know the one after each stop in case it is busy.
• Call the operator and confirm. One phone call beats a two hour detour.
• Keep a backup charger in your back pocket. A plan B for every plan A.
• Always hold a sensible reserve. The mountains cost more than the brochure range says. The range converter shows you what a quoted range is really worth.
• Do not over schedule it. Give yourself a spare day and the whole trip relaxes. The charging time calculator tells you what each top up costs you in hours.

Frequently asked questions