Some brands of electric cars cheerfully forget about the long battery life. It’s a mistake. Beginners in electric cars take note.
[Updated with Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson.]
A friend recently told me that he plans to buy an Audi e-tron 2019 with a “significant discount” when the last 2019 stock is removed from the lot. This e-tron, with a 204-mile diversity assessed through the EPA, would be its first electric vehicle.
“I’ll be fine. I don’t want a very long reach,” he says.
False.
I told him I would. The challenge is that car buyers who are unfamiliar with electric cars (and there are tens of millions in the United States) do not perceive electric cars.
Three words that more: rank, rank, range
In peak cases, an electric vehicle with an estimated diversity across the EPA at approximately two hundred miles will not reach two hundred miles. Often not even close.
Instead, you’ll get between 75 miles and 150 miles, depending on the temperature you have, the type of topography you find on your trip, whether your air conditioner is on and whether you fully loaded your car the night before, or any other number. variables, which have effects on battery life. (My EV is rarely fully charged and only charged at 50-60%).
It’s this moment in fact that brings him home. This flash point, oh, when you realize you don’t have enough battery to get to where you want to be in a hurry. And it’s 24 km from the nearest charging station and this “fast charge” takes forty-five minutes.
Tesla knows and be careful
Tesla strives to increase the diversity of its cars and deliver greater battery generation (and faster charging speeds).
Its cheaper edition of the Y model, for example, is only available in a long-range configuration: 316 miles. It’s a resolution calculated through Tesla. Nothing less, it’s so 2017.
“I think the new popular for Range will be only in terms of the U.S. EPA, about three hundred miles away. So I think other people will expect the number to approach three hundred miles as usual.
—Elon Musk, Tesla’s second quarter 2020 earnings conference call on July 22
Musk, of course, is right. A sane automaker will not sell a new electric vehicle until fall 2021 with a diversity of less than three hundred miles or at least a style that provides this kind of optional diversity.
Otherwise, first-time buyers will ruin the day they purchased a vehicle, change the car a year later, and pay off the debt forever.
The manufacturer of new electric vehicle companies, Lucid, understands that.
“Scope and effectiveness are widely identified as the maximum applicable evidence problems through which the technical prowess of electric cars is measured,” said Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO of Lucid Motors, in a message he emailed me.
“For the owner of the Lucid Air, having more than 500 miles at a bachelor rate means a genuine sense of ‘confidence in autonomy’, whatever all electric vehicle owners have,” Rawlinson said.
——
Observations:
My friend thinks Audi will eventually offer significant discounts on e-tron 2019 due to poor sales in the U.S. And excess inventory.
Some readers have pointed out the opposite: for example, when driving in the city, you can get a autonomy greater than the EPA estimate.
I have been driving/owning electric cars since 2013. Lately I’ve been driving a 2018 Chevrolet Bolt. Before that, he was driving a Chevy Spark EV and a Chevy Volt.
Comments or suggestions can be sent via a direct Twitter message to twitter.com/mbrookec or [email protected]
I am a founding member of CNET News and Hardware Editor at CNET, a generation journalist who contributes to the New York Times, and a reporter and editor-in-chief of Asian Wall.
I was a founding member of CNET News and Hardware Editor at CNET, a generation contributor to the New York Times, and a reporter and editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, the latter in Japan, where I lived for ten years. He is currently a reporter for Fox News.