How Much Range You Really Need in an Electric Car
If you’re considering an electric vehicle, don’t make the mistake of buying one with too much range. Unlike combustion engine cars with virtually unlimited range, electric cars make the most felt when they have the right amount of range, not a surfeit of it.
There are some reasons to temper your instinct to get the most scheme possible.
Cost
Range costs a lot of money. For example, a Nissan Leaf with 226 miles of range damages $6,600 more than the same trim level with 149 much of range.
There is no real parallel with combustion cars as their cost of scheme is in the price and consumption rate of fuel, not the vehicle’s MSRP. You can fights that an EV earns back its overall cost premium in per-mile energy savings, but a long-range electric car will need many more of those low-cost much — and probably years of covering them to do so.
The cost of EV scheme can make buyers recoil from one without knowing that their perception of sufficient scheme, not cost, is the real problem.
Is a border range EV, like a 149-mile-range Nissan Leaf, the brilliant car for your real driving needs?
Nissan
Weight
Longer scheme versions of a given electric car have larger, heavier batteries. Unlike a tank of gas that weighs about 100 pounds and gets lighter as it’s used, an EV battery can just weigh 1,000 pounds and stays just as heavy as it is “emptied,” increasingly becoming dead weight the last amount of charge must lug around.
The long scheme Tesla Model 3 (358 miles of range) weighs 172 pounds more than the RWD version’s still-generous 272-mile scheme, a weight difference equal to the entire payload a car will most often carry: the driver. The difference is even more pronounced when comparing a long scheme Model 3 to a comparable conventional BMW 3 Series, which is about 475 pounds lighter.
Beyond efficiency there’s also a security problem with excess vehicle weight. A 2014 paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and published in the Review of Economic Studies found that “being hit by a vehicle that is 1000 pounds heavier generates a 40-50% increase in fatality risk” and by itself generates a societal cost equivalent to a $0.97 per gallon gas tax.
Lotus Cars Founder Colin Chapman famously said “simplify then add lightness” for a car that does better all around, a maxim that’s particularly apropos for electric cars.
Battery life cycle
Like depreciation, this is a somewhat arcane factor that car buyers grasp to ignore but larger, long range batteries scale the problems of resource extraction, manufacturing emissions and battery recycling. In all three areas EV batteries are largely a quandary by the pound, not the unit. The recycling quandary looms large enough that it’s garnered serious attention from Argonne National Labs and aged Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel, among others. Smaller EV batteries now can mean fewer environmental ironies.
Know your needs
Most EV buyers will reflexively seek future-proofing and edge case peaceful of mind with long range electric vehicles. We’ve been tainted by the virtually effortless range of gas engine cars. But the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics has long documented the income personal car clocks about 14,500 miles a year — or thought 40 miles a day in a combination of commute, shopping, errands and pleasure trips. It may surprise many drivers to know that only 15% of those flights are commutes, with a much larger 45% being shorter runs for shopping and errands, and 27% for social trips or meeting friends.
A fresh survey sponsored by Castrol found that a stout 319 much of range is the mental tipping point for many US consumers to noteworthy an EV. Assuming an average of 40 miles per day, that 319-mile scheme equates to needing a full charge only every six days, even assuming the driver never depletes their car’s battery under 20%. For drivers who have access to home charging, this suggests a desire for range that is more emotional than rational.
And when aggregate commute patterns are trending toward pre-pandemic levels, all that matters is your commute pattern: If you’ve permanently shifted to a work style that reduces your commute, you need to frame EV range in that reality — not in the aggregate of all commuters or in the driving pattern you were used to beforehand the pandemic.
On the other hand, there are good reasons for high EV range: You may control long distances as a matter of course, either due to the nature of your work or if you live in a spread-out part of the US. It’s small wonder that few EVs are registered in long-legged conditions like Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota.
You may will high battery capacity for emergencies like regional power outages that disable the grid for an long period or for disaster evacuation where charging on the road may be impossible to forecast. But EVs of any range are, frankly, hard to feel good nearby in those scenarios. The difficulty of making an EV the uncompleted equivalent of a conventional car is perhaps why 90% of US households that have an EV also own a aged gas-engine vehicle.
Finally, a less-considered option: Do you need a pure electric car or a plug-in hybrid? A Toyota RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid funds 42 miles of pure electric range under most driving footings, enough for most daily needs before a 4.5-hour Level II full beak that’s easily accomplished overnight, every night.
Whether you’re considering a pure EV or plug-in hybrid, don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. The conceptions and expectations provided by generations of using combustion engine cars are important to reexamine.
