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The kinds of situations that drive range consideration for things like trucks is that your planned route suddenly becomes unavailable after you've already burned most of your range. Range anxiety isn't about the ideal case.

I've had several situations in the Mountain West when roads suddenly closed <25 miles away from my final destination (and fuel). Some of these required upwards of 100 mile detour on rural roads with almost no civilization. That detour was not part of the original range calculation. For an EV the detour may not even be an option, you have to go backwards to a major highway to find a charging station that may be in range.

Hell, I've nearly come up short in an ICE vehicle a couple times. I try to keep 150-200 miles of spare range on my vehicle when I am in that kind of country. That is hard to do on a typical EV.

>>I try to keep 150-200 miles of spare range on my vehicle when I am in that kind of country. That is hard to do on a typical EV.

Plus the additional anxiety of trying to figure out if dropping temperatures will add massive downside variance to your initial range estimate.

I just drove 100mi in freezing temps (around 25F) at mostly interstate speeds (70+) mph. I completed my trip around 95% of EPA. Maybe a function of the quality of your EV.

So if I have a vehicle with let's say 250 miles of range, you want me to let it get to 100 miles at least left to drive 100 miles to the charger, then drive 100 miles back, leaving me with 50 miles of range until I have to do it again?

I'm not really against electric anything, but not following the logic of the examples in this comment.

No. You normally don't charge at fast chargers at all. Instead, you start your trip with a 100% charge from home charging.

Then after 3-4 hours of driving (200 miles with towing) you stop for 20 minutes to charge to 80% and continue on your journey.

Being within range of a charging station doesn't mean you can charge, it means you can get there. So yes, in a crisis, it means you could charge without risk of being stranded. But looking at most of the places I've been on that map, it would require me to go out of my way, often times an 1hr or more, to charge.

For gas this isn't a problem because gas stations are not just within a certain radius of me, they are on my route. But in your map, one of the towns I'm frequently in would require a 75 mile detour to charge, which doesn't really work.

“There’s at least one spot within 100 miles where you can wait 20 minutes to get enough charge to get to the next charger” is not an argument that will convince someone to give up the convenience of the gas station.

What exactly is convenient about gas stations?

They're everywhere and you can get a full charge in 5 minutes.

And you don’t need to fill up again at the next one.

usually you don't need to fill up again at next 100 or so, given how much of them there are

Yeah that's what I meant by full charge. Most fast chargers only give you a topup in 20 minutes.

The convenience argument works for a small segment of the population that road trips a few hundred miles at a time regularly. For the rest of us, EVs are far more convenient. I don't ever go to a gas station, and every day I start out with 320 miles of range. I stop at the EV equivalent of a gas station two or three times a year. I've saved a lot of time not having to get gas every week.

The people I know make those road triys. Sure 99% of the time we don't, but we expect the car to do it

And as I pointed out, pretty much all these road trips are already possible, although some may require slight detours.

With some fairly limited changes, they won't require any detours.

The changes are not limited. Gas pumps are everywhere. EV chargers are much more limited which means you have to stop where they are. You can make the trips, but sometimes it means you are stopping to charge in places you didn't want to be which can be a significant change. Worse the places you might want to be often don't have a charger so it can mean stop to charge in some gas station you don't want to spend half an hour at, then drive 10 minutes to the museum you want to be at. (even in the rare case there is transit at the gas station, they don't want you parking at the charger for 3 more hours after you are fully charged)

> slight detours.

If you're up in Neah Bay, WA (and I have been out there in the past so this isn't a fantasy scenario) and suddenly realize you need to charge, you need to drive over an hour and ten minutes to Forks, WA. But they only have a 250kW charging station, so you're going to need to wait 30-40 minutes. Now if you need to get back to Neah Bay, you're going to spend a total of 3 hours.

And, for my case, Neah Bay, WA is closer to the nearest charging station than where I most typically am for work.

If you _live_ in Neah Bay, you likely use your home charger. There are also slow chargers in nearby hotels for tourists.

If you are traveling, through then you just plan to have enough charge to reach the next charger (50 miles away in Forks).

I know that area well, I travel through it every several months. It also does not have a lot of gas stations, and the existing ones are about $1.5 over the regular price per gallon.

You have a BEV with 400 miles of range when at 100%?

The US isn't flat. Range can vary considerably with climbing into the mountain passes, or in cold weather.

It's mostly a wash, the efficiency on the descent balances the climb, and overall you get respectably close to the same range you'd have gotten on a flat route.

I rented a mach-e recently. Went up to Snoqualamie pass from seattle. I used over 60 miles range in 10 miles on the steep part at the end, 1/6th. Going the other way I got a maybe 20% boost in distance over flat. There were a few places I was able to regen-brake, but I never had the battery go up, only stay flat. And a few times I lost enough speed that I didn't handle an interim flat well. I was extremely disappointed.

It turns out friction and drag are still things. On a pure downhill you would be able to roll, but it's not as good as going down is bad.

I also found that the car did a lot worse rolling down hill than my mini-cooper manual when I just put the clutch in, which got up to hairy speeds. Heck vehicle seemed to have more inbuilt resistance to just rolling than the fire engine I've run down that hill.

Overall I got 90 total miles of range and hit the flat at 10% battery. I was able to get 290 miles driving in seattle with the same vehicle.

That's weird. Seattle-to-Yakima at 70 mph average speed and 85 mph peak speed is about 1.5x the normal energy use for me (260 Wh/m vs 350 Wh/m). Leaving me with 20% of charge when starting at 100% (260 miles): https://imgur.com/a/Dhs38kJ

And this was during the wintertime, so with a reasonable amount of heating.

FWIW the mach e engages the regen brakes automatically when going downhill to prevent acceleration.

I routinely traverse Monteagle with no substantive loss in efficiency. Sounds like something goofy with the mach-e?

It might have been affected by the driving mode you were in?

For instance, one pedal modes (across manufacturers) tend to much highly favor regenerative breaking over friction brakes. Of the models I've driven such modes often seem to give you better feedback in the sweet spots of the pedal curve when you are just rolling and not braking/accelerating.

Additionally, in my experience rental cars are more likely to be in sports modes when you pick them up (I think some of the rental car places may even do this as policy to make customers happier when they rent them?), and down shifting them to more balanced energy modes (Ford's is called "Engage") can mean a huge difference in practical range.

I wouldn't buy a mach-e to baby it and feather the pedal, like what's the point.

I have several fun to drive relatively fuel efficient cars that are sunk costs. I work from home, they're just getting old. I have a pickup to go do dirty things like duck hunting.

The ev seems great for driving to work (I work from home) or around town. I was very unimpressed with it's short trip range and efficiency on a hill (whole trip empg was 44). I spent half as much time at the charger as I did driving. I'm sure it'll get better. Much higher charging speed would help a lot (Mach-e is limited to 150). The extended range battery would help.

Any other sub 3.5s 0-60 under 70 evs out there? If you can't tell I don't care about pure efficiency, I care about a fun to drive car that's got better efficiency than an IC and a usable range.

The point of mentioning the driving modes is the reverse of "baby the pedal", let software do that for you. EVs are software-defined cars. They have modes that say "don't worry about efficiency, just waste as much energy as I want" and modes that say "balance efficiency with raw performance". In both you can pedal about the same and the car determines how to balance raw torque versus battery efficiency and regen breaking versus friction braking for you.

Many EVs are just as fun to drive in "balanced" modes as they are in "sport" modes, but your efficiency goes way up. Rental cars seem to think you want "sport" modes that are more inefficient because you want to rev that 0-60 more than you want better trip range. That's maybe a good way to sell the EV as fun to drive, but it's not a great way to sell the EV as useful for long trips.

The trick is the EVs already offer both experiences in their software (because they can, because that's how they work), you just unfortunately need to learn the manufacturer-specific ways to change driving modes to get the most of what you want out of a rental car rather than what the last customer wanted or what the rental company thinks you want without asking you. (If you want both experiences knowing how and when to change modes is even more critical.)

most of the trip was in the lowest (most efficient) mode...

A friend of mine lives in Yakima, and loves her electric vehicle. But her trips to Seattle have become much less common, because she has to wait 2+ hours at the halfway point to recharge.

This involves crossing the Cascades.

F150 has a 130kWh battery, so heating is not an issue. Height changes are also not a problem. There are very few areas with large altitude changes, and even fewer ones that you'll likely need to pass through regularly.

This leaves mostly mountain passes around the Sierra mountains. And by some strange coincidence, they have plenty of superchargers in the vicinity.

The rest of the country can be, to the first order, considered flat. E.g. elevation change between Charlotte and Charleston is mere 300 meters.

Try looking at the bubble I live in around Martinsville VA. Fortunately if I had a BEV, most trips would be toward chargers though often not very conveniently. A common trip is to Meadows of Dan on 58W - where would you charge?

In general charger penetration appears slower on the East coast to me.