Fact and Fiction: RANGE
FACT & FICTION:
I'm going to deal with much of the fact and fiction around EVs, roughly in the order of which issues I hear most about, starting with “Electric cars don't have enough range”.
RANGE
How many miles or kilometres do you drive on average per day? How many times do you go on a long distance or multi-day road trip?
When you fill up your car with gas in most modern cars you will see a range estimate. This indicates an estimated (theoretical) number of miles you will get for your full tank. Practically no one pays attention to this number and the estimate is almost never achieved. Before I bought my first electric car, I was lucky enough to have a big heavy BMW diesel X5, provided to me as a company car at that time. When I filled it to the top with diesel, the range estimator often showed as high as 1,000 kilometres. I never got close to this number, ever.
How you drive, how fast, how many passengers, how much luggage, even the temperature affects how much fuel you use. I drove a ‘petrolhead’ in my car once; this guy was at one point my boss and collected sports cars, I remember telling him I never got even near 1,000 kilometres out of the tank. He reminded me that the number is kind of irrelevant, because the only thing that controls how much fuel efficiency you get is your right foot.
This is exactly the same in electric cars. The harder and faster you drive, the more gas you burn, or kilowatts you use. The average range of a gas car is 413 miles/663 kilometres on a full tank. Having driven an electric car thousands of kilometres all across Europe and having analyzed the data from over 10 million kilometres of UFODRIVE electric rental customers, I am confident in making the following statement.
The range of an electric car is irrelevant…
for the vast majority of use cases.
Range dominates when it comes to EVs in the media and despite my above statement, you will see advertised, constantly, electric cars with more and more range. There is constant talk of the 1000-kilometre (600 mile) battery for example. This is completely unnecessary. Indeed, the average range of electric cars today, at around 300 kilometres, is plenty for almost everyone’s everyday use.
Unless you are living in countries with virtually no highway charging network, then this is even enough for the vast majority of long-distance travel.
When we get close to running out of fuel, we go to our nearest gas station, or when we're on a long journey we fill up usually when we still have at least 1/4 of a tank in case we run out. Range anxiety, as it is known in the electric car space, has existed with internal combustion cars since the beginning.
There's a pretty good chance that you have probably run out of fuel at some point in your life. I have a couple of times.
In almost every single developed country on Earth, unless you're heading out into the wilderness, in the vast majority of cases there is no excuse to ever run out of gas. It takes just a little bit of planning if you're doing a long journey in a gas car.
And it takes just a little more planning if you're doing a long journey in an electric car. A little bit of advanced planning is all that is required with electric.
Access to home charging makes the use case for electric completely different to the internal combustion car. With a tiny bit of planning, in advance of any long journey, you will fully charge your car at your home. Not everyone has access to a charging point at their home, for example in apartments, and I will deal with this and the solutions in the next blog on charging.
You don't even need to install some expensive home charging wall box in your driveway or at the front of your house.
I have been driving an electric car for over 5 years and still haven't got around to installing a wall charger at my home. I usually just plug my car into a normal 220-volt domestic socket once or twice a week. When plugged into this normal wall socket, the car charges slowly, between 12 and 14 kilometers (7-8 miles) an hour of range added to the battery. This may seem extremely slow, but cars are unused 90% of the time.
Parking my car up usually around 8pm in the evening, I'm not leaving my house till 8:00am the next morning which adds around 150 kilometers (100 miles) of range over night. I could install a home charger and fully charge my car in around three hours, but so far my 220v normal plug is enough for my average daily commute, which is usually around 25 to 30 kilometers (15-18miles). When I plan a long journey, I usually plug the car in two nights in a row before I leave, which gives me a starting range around 380 kilometers.
As with a gas car, you never really get the stated range. I've got enough speeding tickets to tell you I drive too fast, and I have never managed to get 380 kilometers (230 miles) of range out of my Tesla Model S. Driving fast eats range. Also, on extremely cold days, when it's below zero Celsius (32 Fahrenheit), the range further diminishes. I would estimate I normally get about 250 kilometers range out of my car from full to zero, with fast highway driving.
I used to do a long-distance electric drive, before the pandemic, at least once every two weeks, I have done the Luxembourg to Brussels and back drive hundreds of times. I've also driven from Luxembourg to the Netherlands and back in the same day (around an 800km / 500-mile drive) and it works. There are already enough fast chargers across continental Europe to cover pretty much any journey today. The picture in the US is slightly behind but rapidly improving.
If you live in Germany, the average kilometres you drive per day is just 37. In the Netherlands that number is 35, in the UK its 34 while in Italy it’s as low as 25 on average driven per day. In almost every European country, the average amount driven per day has gradually declined over the past 20 years. In the UK, for example, back in the year 2000 the average driven was 41, so that went down 7 kilometers by 2020.
There are multiple reasons for this gradual decline, but it is in part due to changing ownership habits for cars, greater options for mobility like ride hailing, sharing and rental. Undoubtedly the massive shift to work from home due to the pandemic will further drive these averages down further.
Regardless of the reason, these numbers are well within the range of every electric car available. In Europe's largest economy, Germany, just 1% of daily driving commutes last 120 minutes or more, with most journeys between 15 minutes and one hour.
In the USA the average daily drive is just 25.9 miles per day, (41 kilometers). As in Europe, American drivers are driving far less than they were back in the year 2000 and there has been a gradual decline in most states.
If you ask yourself just how many kilometers or miles you do per day, it’s likely you’re somewhere around these averages. This data will of course have outliers, there will be people who do much longer commutes, and some much shorter, but these will be the exception. I once worked with a guy who drove almost 200 kilometers every day to work and 200 back, but these are the rare ones.
So, if most of us drive less than 50 kilometres per day, why is there an obsession with the range of electric cars when most electric cars have at least a 300 kilometres range?
It would seem irrational to have range anxiety with such small daily commutes. This is the very crux of the range debate; for 90% of the times we use a car, an electric is perfectly workable. Range anxiety fear comes from that 10% of driving when we plan to go beyond the range of the car. I can tell you that whenever I speak to anyone about long distance driving in an electric car today, they will bring up the time they drove 400 - 500 miles in a single day and how this would never work in an electric car.
However, in analysing long distance journey patterns, 95% of those long journeys will be on highways or major routes. In Europe, and most major highways in the US, highways are now well serviced with charging and supercharging stations for electric cars.
Electric cars work, today, and for the vast majority of your daily car needs; it's just a little different and requires some small habit changes. It's also important to remember that even though it works today, range is only going to become a smaller and smaller issue as charging availability, and fast charging networks, grow exponentially across the world.
FICTION: Electric cars do not have enough range today for my everyday needs. EVs are far more difficult to use than a gas car and are just not practical yet. There is a high possibility of running out
of charge in the middle of nowhere and becoming stuck. It's not possible to do more than 500 miles driving in a day. Electric cars will never replace gas cars for people who need to drive long distances every day.
FACT: Almost every electric car on the market today can deal with 90% of your driving needs. Most journeys are well within the range of electric cars today. For long distance driving in much of the US and Europe, highway supercharging networks are already sufficient for even the longest drive. It takes a different approach, a change of old habits, and a small bit of preparation to make sure you don't get into trouble on long distance electric driving. If you have access to even a standard 220 Volt socket at your home, you will probably only ever use chargers on the occasional long journey. When your range management goes wrong, it can really go wrong resulting in a potential tow truck event, but this will be almost as rare as running out of gas.
