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Comment by eb0la | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if car manufacturers are working with this limitations in mind. I feel cars with combustion engines suffer at 20-30 km/h but electrics seems to be okay with that. Am I right?

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You're in the wrong gear. But yes, electric vehicles have a much more linear supply of torque which is maximum at low speeds.

What do you mean by suffer? I’ve never had any problem driving at any speed in any car apart from crawling (1-2km/h) in a manual.

Current petrol engines are designed operate at optimal efficiency in the 60-90 km/h range. Electric cars on the other hand can operate efficiently at much lower speeds due to how electric engines work.

Efficiency here primarily refers to km/unit of energy. So if you care about minimising pollution in the city centres it's much better if all cars can drive either 70 km/h or not at all through city centres.

And of course regenerative braking greatly enhances electric car efficiency in city driving. The flip side is that the battery gauge usually drops alarmingly fast on the highway if you're mostly used to city driving.

ICE cars tend to have gears, and can drive very well in lower gears. You don't want to do 30 in 4th gear.

Correct. In my Hyundai Matrix I drove at 3rd gear.

Look up the efficiency curve for you engine. To get the most of it you should be driving at the highest gear at around 70-90 km/h. Driving in lower gears is obviously not a problem, but that doesn't make it efficient.

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