Data from thousands of EVs shows the average daily driving distance is a small percentage of the EPA range of most EVs.
For years, range anxiety has been a major barrier to wider EV adoption in the U.S. It’s a common fear: imagine being in the middle of nowhere, with 5% juice remaining in your battery, and nowhere to charge. A nightmare nobody ever wants to experience, right? But a new study proves that in the real world, that’s a highly improbable scenario.
After analyzing information from 18,000 EVs across all 50 U.S. states, battery health and data start-up Recurrent found something we sort of knew but took for granted. The average distance Americans cover daily constitutes only a small percentage of what EVs are capable of covering thanks to modern-day battery and powertrain systems.
The study revealed that depending on the state, the average daily driving distance for EVs was between 20 and 45 miles, consuming only 8 to 16% of a battery’s EPA-rated range. Most EVs on sale today in the U.S. offer around 250 miles of range, and many models are capable of covering over 300 miles.
I’m sorry but this just sounds like trying to justify a potentially already-made PHEV purchase more than anything by cherry-picking strange bits of data.
Try Hyundai or Tesla instead of picking literally the worst brands lol
Like seriously, do you look up stats?
If you’re going to snark, do understand your sources first. Consumer Reports uses a “what they think will happen” for the reliability of a given item, it is not a wholly objective figure. They aren’t stats.
It’s a wonderful tool for a purchasing decision where you want to be cautious and consider the worst case scenario but it isn’t useful as a tool for much else.
Considering the vehicles you chose have low volume, do understand something:
The stats I posted are history / survey results.
Consumer Reports conducts surveys where they ask car-owners of various model years how many issues, and what kind of issues, their cars have.
I know the difference from “predicted reliability” and their “Reliability history” page. There’s a reason why I’m posting history. These survey results look back into the past and is more appropriate for our discussion.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/car-reliability-histories-a1200719842/
Before criticizing my methodology, you probably should see what pages I’m posting and understand the material I’m quoting.
Oh look. We even got overall% problems.
Guess what? Its the battery again.
Of course it’s the battery. Nothing else breaks on an EV!
Similar to the rising rates of cancer these days because people are living longer and surviving everything else more due to medical science.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/electric-vehicles-are-less-reliable-than-conventional-cars-a1047214174/
It is physically impossible for an EV with much fewer parts, all of which require no maintenance, to be less reliable than a gas car with highly complex parts like transmissions and differentials and combustion engines.
I’ve worked on both for a living. I’ve seen first hand which cars come into the shop and how frequently. I used problem tracking websites like Identifix daily to see common failures on all the cars I work on.
EVs rarely break.
Gas vehicles turn into paperweights if you go too long without changing the oil.
And transistors, and transformers, battery management systems, and inverters aren’t complex?
Are you making fun of my degree? Power engineering is a masters-level subject at a minimum, and easily reaches into the PH.d level.
As I stated earlier. I’ve got an electrical engineering degree. When EV buffs talk about the “simplicity” of EVs I can’t help but roll my eyes. Yall probably can’t even pick out the right chips for a Li-ion BMS, or tell me the differences between LiFePo4 or NMC Li-ion is.
There’s some highly technical magic going on here. MOSFETs, Power-circuits, complex inverters, microcontrollers to carefully time the movement of electricity with the movement of those magnets. There’s a hell of a lot more complexity in there than people realize. And when things go wrong, there’s not much else to do but replace the entire damn part, because it requires a very advanced facility to create electric motors, the chemistry behind these cells, or PCBs for those battery packs.
Technical magic???
BMS systems are far from it. Lots of technical work going into simplifying measuring techniques, automatic switching between series parallel linking of cells based on system needs (at my company)… but the essentials of measuring current, thermal and voltage? Lmao. I’m making fun of your degree, as a holder and EIT myself.