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Comment by tirant | Hacker News Reader

Don’t stay there: EVs are even reporting consumption in terms of kWh/100km or kWh/100miles instead of just average kW.

What people care about when talking about EVs and consumption is generally how much distance they can cover. If you take away the distance factor and just report power, it becomes meaningless/almost useless.

Many people think of driving in time rather than distance. I'd say it's actually more common to say a city is 3 hours away rather than 200 miles.

What makes kW less useful is really just that most EVs don't advertise their capacity very prominently. But if you knew you had an 80 kWh battery and the car uses 20 kW at freeway speeds, then it's easy to see that it'll drive for 4 hours.

I understand all this but the most important question for me is definitely still "how much distance can I cover on a charge"? That's why I prefer kWh/100km.

The problem with this is that destinations are a fixed distance away, whereas their time distance is not fixed. In most journeys people want to reach a specific place rather than drive for a given amount of time.

Directly reporting required power is still comparable among vehicles: 55kW vs 49kW, eg

Which is definitely less intuitive because it hasn't been introduced to the public, but is interchangeable in the same quirky way we already compare MPG (Distance/Volume) with lt/100KM (Volume/Distance)

Heh. To borrow an idea from xkcd (measuring gas consumption as area): The kWh measures energy, right? And energy is force times distance. So energy divided by distance is force! Let’s all start measuring EV consumption in newtons, folks. It even makes intuitive sense: It correlates well with how hard you need to push the car to get it going at the usual travel speed. But it sucks if you need to figure out how far you can travel on a given charge.

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