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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

I think Tesla still has a leg up on range. I looked into buying an F150 but the range is just a bit low for me. The Lightning has a purported EPA range of 320 miles which if you subtract off the top 10% and bottom 10% means it really has 250 miles of usable range at EPA standards which would probably drop it to 150-180 if you're driving it at highway speeds with a load. It's just a bit too low for me if I'm going to take this thing camping or hauling a trailer for a boat.

That said, I think 150-180 miles is plenty of range for people who would just drive this thing to work and back.

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Important to note that many tesla models under-perform their EPA estimates when tested in more real world conditions while most other manufacturers tie or outperform them, sometimes substantially [1].

The Mach-E for instance has a -48 mile EPA range compared to an M3LR but only a -4 mile range in the edmund's test.

Same for Taycan, EPA rating of 203, edmunds got 323.

Tesla M3P EPA is 310 but edmunds got only 256.

When you factor in actual expected range and price (especially the federal tax credit) Tesla's range advantage is rapidly disappearing and as far as I'm aware there isn't anything coming down the pipe that will radically change that (4680s maybe, but we haven't seen any of the touted benefits proved out yet).

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...

I tend to prefer the insideevs 70 mph test, as its closer to a practical test, but yes, the range in the real world is different from the rated range to varying degrees.

Teslas tend to come pretty close to their EPA highway rating when tested on the highway under similar circumstances. But the EPA highway rating isn't the one that gets advertised. :sigh

That makes a lot of sense, most people talking about range don't care about commuting range but care a lot about # of recharges to travel some long distance so it stands to reason that highway numbers are more valuable than a combined metric.

Although for me traveling up and down 95 is so slow that I end up hitting the city number on my hybrid :)

Most Teslas are similar. ~320 miles at best, and closer to 200 in the real world on the highway with reasonable buffers.

320 is a fair mark, but I didn't do the math for real world reasonable buffers for the lightning. That would drop it further to about 130-150 miles.

I'm confused. You said you subtracted off the top 10% and the bottom 10%?

TBH, comparing my Model Y to the Lightning, the only range issue that I see is the charge speeds. The Lightning's 400V CCS system limits it a bit, so charge times would be quite a bit higher on longer trips.

Yeah, you pretty much have to do that with any EV.

You don't want to frequently charge over 90% to preserve the integrity of the battery. Same with the bottom 10%. You don't want to frequently drive the car down to 1%. I think it's not a huge deal if you drive it down to 5% or so, but as an owner of an EV, it gets pretty scary to go below 10% before you charge if you're on a trip. If the wind speed/ temp/etc gets out of control, it can sap your battery before you make it to the next station.

Ignoring 20% of the battery is pretty much the standard on today's EVs.

Isn’t F150 range calculated with 1000 pounds cargo?

I saw some speculation of that, but it isn't clear that its actually true.

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