Seems like it’s common across all EVs for the range to be inflated by around 20%, at least for freeway driving.
In a recent review, a Tesla did a slightly better job than most of the cars tested, as far as portion of stated range achieved.
In a recent review, a Tesla did a slightly better job than most of the cars tested, as far as portion of stated range achieved.
Most people speed on the freeway. Extra speed reduces range significantly.
The linked figure[0] and associated paper report that efficiency peaks for EVs at around 20mph and then the cost per mile increases roughly linearly, by about 25 watt-hours when the speed increases by 10mph.
Please excuse the archaic units.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ehicle-energy-economy-at...
And it is true of petrol cars as well. In my old clunker going from 110 km/h to 120km/h is a 9% speed increase but nets about 15% extra fuel consumption.
I just finished a long drive for summer vacation. Driving through Denmark (completely flat) at 130 km/h would absolutely wipe the battery, would be surprised if I managed even 350 km on a full charge. Driving over the mountains in Norway however, from 0m elevation to over 1000m and down again, at slower mountain roads (max 80 km/h), yielded almost 500 km on single charge.
I did not expect flat+high speed vs hill-climbing+low speed would be that dramatically different.
I have a 2022 Nissan Leaf with 220 miles EPA range. I've found that this number is reasonably close to correct if one is driving under 60mph on country roads under moderate climate conditions. We live in Ohio and so I have actually done long drives like that to go to remote places to go camping. (There are, surprisingly, both L2 and fast chargers around in rural Ohio but you definitely need an app and need to check ahead of time.)
Speed matters because air resistance increases exponentially with speed, not linearly. Driving 60+, lots of stop and go, or using HVAC a lot will bring it down the range to as low as 180, but that seems like the worst range I've seen. That was driving ~75mph with HVAC on.
No, drag is somewhere between linear and quadratic as a function of speed, not exponential. (Although it gets weird around the speed of doing.)
Heuristically, if you’re pushing through a cloud of particles, the number of particles you hit per unit time is linear with speed, and the impulse per particle is also linear with speed (because it’s the difference between your velocity and the particle’s initial velocity, times the particle’s mass, times a constant that’s around two for an elastic collision).
The set-up is so dangerous but so tempting.