Data from thousands of EVs shows the average daily driving distance is a small percentage of the EPA range of most EVs.
For years, range anxiety has been a major barrier to wider EV adoption in the U.S. It’s a common fear: imagine being in the middle of nowhere, with 5% juice remaining in your battery, and nowhere to charge. A nightmare nobody ever wants to experience, right? But a new study proves that in the real world, that’s a highly improbable scenario.
After analyzing information from 18,000 EVs across all 50 U.S. states, battery health and data start-up Recurrent found something we sort of knew but took for granted. The average distance Americans cover daily constitutes only a small percentage of what EVs are capable of covering thanks to modern-day battery and powertrain systems.
The study revealed that depending on the state, the average daily driving distance for EVs was between 20 and 45 miles, consuming only 8 to 16% of a battery’s EPA-rated range. Most EVs on sale today in the U.S. offer around 250 miles of range, and many models are capable of covering over 300 miles.
I don’t need a scientific study to know that most days I’d need my car for a significantly lower driving distance than the few long-range outliers.
The problem isn’t a logistical of “Wow! Turns out I can commute with an EV because I don’t drive 400 km to work each day! Thank you Mr. Scientist!” but a financial one. The large majority of people can afford one car, if any, and this one car has to work for everything. Do you think people are happy investing in a 20k or more EV when they still have to rent a car to visit their familiy over holidays?
If it’s just for the sake of driving around town daily, EVs need to get significantly cheaper to be interesting for people with normal incomes.
Basically this. My commute is a little over 40 miles. If I got a leaf (which my dad used to have, so I know it well), I could get there and back. Unless I had to make an additional stop on the way home. Or run a significant errant on my lunch break. Then it might get squiffy.
But, okay, maybe I have a spouse I can ask to run errands and stuff for me. Then I just have to worry about when its hot or cold enough I need to run the AC or heater, in which case my range goes down to 60 miles. Good thing that only happens 11 months out of the year.
Don’t forget you’ll lose like 1.5% of your overall battery life like every year.
Then, don’t worry. If the battery needs replaced it will only cost you…$8,000.
My battery got replaced at 5 years old due to a warranty issue
Before that I had lost a grand total of 1.6% battery capacity, and I charged almost exclusively through fast chargers
Battery degradation is massively overexaggerated
You also literally just said you had to replace your battery, the capacity readouts the vehicles give are often not correct. It’s literally impossible for a car or phone or anything that uses rechargeable batteries to know true capacity loss without a full discharge (ie car stop/phone shuts off ect.) and is charged to 100% capacity. Unless you do that capacity lost can only be an estimate based on expectation of degradation and total usage with an added curve on boltage levels.
You had it replaced at 5 years under warranty, so it had less than 100k miles on it and you were 3 years away from having to pay out of pocket even if you managed to go the 8 year warranty without hitting the 100k mark. Your car had a $12,000 failure after just 5 years (or dangerous issue that had to warrant a new battery) but you’re defending the thing because it got replaced under a federally required warranty. Good job, my guy.
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Would it make sense to rent a car for those longer journeys? I know I’m not in the wasteland of car dependency that is the US, but I don’t own a car because it would just sit around costing money 99% of the time. I rent a car for the 1%.
Nah, renting a car on top of whatever you’re already paying for the short range car is expensive. Hundreds of dollars for even a couple of days.
Even if you only need a car for those long trips, that’s a huge expense on top of the travel costs (hotels, food on the go, gas, etc).
I’ve had to rent a car to go up to northern states to visit my or my wife’s family a few times, and it’s crazy how expensive it is. I drive a little subcompact because I actually like small cars, but you can’t pack two adults, a kid, and all their luggage into one little hatchback.
I can kinda see someone that lives with good, cheap public transport in a city saving enough on not owning a car (insurance, licensing, etc) to make it feasible if they aren’t renting more than once or twice a year, but even that can blow the balance if it’s an extended rental.
The cost of a week in another state via the rental, just for the car was more than the car payment, insurance, and approximate maintenance costs for my car for the month. Mind you, I do have a very cheap to insure car that didn’t cost much (13k), so the balance for most people isn’t as extreme.
Plus, you can’t rent without a credit card reliably, if you want to go out of state. A credit card isn’t exactly impossible for everyone, but it’s still a limiting factor for enough people that renting anything like that is impossible.
That’s why I waited until 2019 to get an EV. If I was still married, I’d have gotten one earlier and used it strictly as a commuter. But being single, I needed at car that could also handle occasional road trips up to 12 hours or so. The Model 3 fit my needs and has been the only car I’ve driven for almost 5 years now.
If we built good regional/national/international transit, a lot of the longer range issues could be fixed. Some people may still need more range/more storage but high speed rail could get people farther more effeciently than their EVs and be suitable for many trips.
If we had better infrastructure, there would be fewer commutes using cars.
US transit that could efficiently take you to every city you may need to go to in the US would be absolutely insane to try and pull off. It’s great for countries the size of one or two of our states, but try to imagine what a transit network to get you from Clarksville Iowa to Clinton Missouri would actually look like. It would need to be insane.
But it’s not that insane: the key is to use each transportation for where it’s good, rather than make the same mistake we did with cars and apply it everywhere.
- we could connect probably 80% of the US population with high speed rail at a similar effort to other developed countries
- accept that personal vehicles are the best choice for a small portion of our population
Currently one of the reasons we’re stuck is one side expecting to always need a car and the other wanting to take their cars. But there’s a medium where we could all be happy, where most trips are transit and no one is left without options
How different is that really from a road network?
China has done it pretty well, and there’s no reason we can’t too. It’s just our car and oil lobbies would rather people spend stupid amounts of money on driving everywhere than literally any other form of transit.
I live in SF and bus/train everywhere and it’s fantastic. Never have to look for parking, I get natural exercise in my daily routine through walking, and I’ll spend at absolute max $1100 a year for unlimited transit rides which might cover the insurance cost on an okay car. There’s no excuse for the shitty transit system we have in the US.
Oh wow. I like totally forgot that everyone in the country lives in an expensive and large, dense city that they almost never have to travel outside of. Silly me.
That only works well for people in about 40 cities in the country. The average home cost in San Fran right now is $1,200,000. The average home cost in a place like Blue Springs Missouri is about $300,000. So tell you what, give me $900,000 to make up the difference and I’ll move to San Fran and stop bitching about public transport not being viable on a national level, because most of the country can’t afford to live in that type of city. Apparently unless you’re homeless. You have way more people living on the streets.
I never said that, but okay.
My point is we have no excuse for not at least connecting our major metros together by transit, and having good transit within them. I grew up in the country, I lived 6 miles from the nearest town. I’m well aware it doesn’t work everywhere, but the majority of people, in fact, DO live in cities, and yet we still insist on cars being the main mode of transportation for almost every single metro except like 3 of them. It’s terribly inefficient and horrible for the environment.
Yeah, the majority live in cities. But not the like 40 cities that I stated. Most people don’t live in those. You’re skewing what I said. There are over 300 cities in the US, and most of them aren’t like NYC, LA, Atlanta, and San Fran etc.
These studies come from the wrong angle to convince anyone. Average isn’t what people are concerned about. It’s getting to grandma’s house, who lives 150 miles away.
However, that isn’t insurmountable, either. 250 mi range with some charging infrastructure upgrades can cover almost all of North America just fine. Yes, even when it gets cold. Plenty of EVs on the market can do this.
Get more charge stations out there, and tell the industry to stop making only $45k base price SUVs for EVs.
The less range the longer the charge times too, although some of the newer lower power density chemistries like the sodium ones seem to charge a bit faster.
Those 10-80% charge times don’t magically get better if the battery gets smaller they stay roughly the same.
Bingo. We bought a PHEV with a smaller 26 mile battery because 1) that’s more than enough for our daily range, 2) when we need to travel or do a lot of errands in a day we have the range to do it, and 3) it’s much cheaper than a full EV of the same size (7-8 person vehicle).
I’m fine with an EV that only has a 100 mile range. Im just not willing to pay more that $15k for it. It obviously can be sold for that much. I don’t need a seat warmer or even powered windows, just a box with windows.
I would have seriously considered this when I was married. That’s a perfect choice for a two car family. I already had the smaller, more efficient, cheaper car for my commute, and splurged on the other car so the whole family would be comfortable on trips. Same thing.
Of course now that it’s just me, and only one car, that car has to cover almost all of my use cases.
Now that kind of thinking will get us in trouble. How will the wealthy CEOs and shareholders make money?
Honestly this would be an ideal car option. I own a hybrid now that gets between 45-50 miles with a 10 gal tank. Paid 28k total. I plan on using it as my long distance traveler and an EV as my daily driver, once prices come down.
This. Ffs why doesn’t this exist. A friend of mine bought a used Leaf. They are pretty cheap and he barely drives anywhere. Perfect for that situation.
Because the industry focused on the segment of the market that makes the best margins, not the most volume. Then they started prices at $45k, but only made five of them. All the ones you could actually buy were premium models that added at least another $20k.
A bunch of people buy them on 10 year/20% APR loans, but even that market is only so big. They’re then left with a bunch of excess stock. Headlines run about how nobody wants EVs as if the industry didn’t create this mess for themselves.
This is such a bone-headed approach. Averages are meaningless. People don’t have one car for short trips and a different one for long trips.
You’re worried about range but did you know that range is only a problem for 3% of the journeys you make? Just stop visiting people, going on holiday, or travelling for work and it’s fine!
is only a problem for 3% of the journeys
If each trip is one day, you’re telling me the car will not be useful ten days every year? Phrase it like that and it becomes much more obvious how useful that is
Except it doesn’t. Because your fancy electric car demands $700/month already.
Now you want them to have an extra 2 grand to throw at rental cars for 10 days. On top of the car payments, and the actual vacation expenses.
Your salary pays your bills everyday of the year except the first of the month. How odd. That’s only 12 days per year. Nothing to worry about.
Your salary pays your bills everyday of the year except the first of the month. How odd. That’s only 12 days per year. Nothing to worry about.
The Ontario NDP mandated 12 days a year unpaid leave for certain government workers to avoid layoffs, and that single act has prevented them from taking office for the last 30+ years. Not really a comment on 12 days missed pay, or how EV range can be a problem in a minority of situations, more of how the public can be whipped up into a disproportionate response to a minor inconvenience endured by a relatively tiny group of people.
an extra 2 grand to throw at rental cars for 10 days.
Who’s your rental car guy? You need a new rental car guy.
I drive every month over 1100km one way and then few days later back home. It’s almost impossible to do it with EV
But that makes you:
1.) not an average motorist, in no country 2.) not really the target group for current EVs
There will never be a perfect solution for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that most people couldn’t just switch to an EV without any problems at all
We have a PHEV with a paltry 26 mile range for a family of 5 but that still means we go over 700 miles on a tank before filling because my wife works 5 miles from where we live. See how we aren’t the same?
OP: Your car should only get you to work and back because what else are you good for?
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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair,
I went with a plug-in hybrid and it feels like the optimal solution at this point in time. I get enough electric range to cover my commute and local driving (i.e. maybe 90%+ of my driving) and gas for when I need more range. I barely burn gasoline and the battery is on the smaller end so it didn’t take so many resources to manufacture. The downside is having the complexity of both IC and EV drivetrains within the same vehicle, but so far it’s been pretty low maintenance (about 6 years so far).
Another happy PHEV driver here. It’s really the best of both worlds as the charging infrastructure is built out and vehicle costs come down. Wife went 700 miles last fill up because she travels to the country once a week. If we stayed in the city we’d be well over 1000 miles before filling.
Yeah. Average trips most days amounts to not needing much.
But that’s just most days. To be a replacement for a vehicle it has to also handle the rest of the days, and if it can’t, that means you’ll have to have two vehicles instead of just one, and one of them will have to be an overpriced 1,100 pound giant battery, or an ice vehicle.
In other words, saving the planet with ev’s means you’ll have to own more vehicles.
Phev ftw?
It would be much more useful for a study to look at the outliers, since that’s what people decide by. How many trips, how many days in a typical year will I not have the range.
My EV theoretically can go 330 miles. Last month I drove to a town 110 miles away, drove around for the weekend, and came back. But I needed a recharge enroute. The first month of the year and I already had a trip not handled by home charging. In theory it should have but the reality is I already have two days where range became a concern. People have made decisions on less
So you’re saying that the people who don’t average longer driving range needs are the ones who bought EVs?
That tracks.
It absolutely doesn’t translate to any useful information for everyone else, though.
Also, average drive length is completely irrelevant for this question. People are not worried about their typical daily trips when evaluating a new car’s range, they’re worried about the occasional longer trip they might have to make and not having to have a separate car or other accommodation for that.
Agreed. Traveling to my boyfriend’s parents’ place is a nightmare in my EV and renting a car for the trip every year is expensive and uncomfortable comparatively. It adds like 6 hours to the trip or an overnight stay in the middle.
This study is brought to you by greedy corporations in an attempt to justify shitty products for large sums of your money.
The problem is that something that works for me 90% of the time ends up completely fucking me the other 10%. That might be manageable, but the thing is that the easiest way to manage it is to just get a vehicle with more range.
People need to seriously consider 40mi range PHEVs.
Toyota Prius Prime, Ford Escape PHEV, and others have “EV-mode” buttons that drive exclusively on electric now. Meaning you could keep the gasoline for “emergency use only”, even as you enter highway speeds. (Older PHEVs would turn on the engine because they didn’t have this mode-selector button).
All the complexity of a gas engine, plus the cost of a battery. Just so you can use the range once or twice a year? What happens when you don’t use the gas engine for months and then go to start it with gelled gas? You’re trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn’t exist for 99%
Hybrids have been out for over 20 years, and this simply isn’t an issue.
Furthermore, “a problem that doesn’t exist for 99%” is false because this article is just talking about averages. When you look at the average mileage driven per state, it ranges from 9,900 miles to over 24,000 miles per year. There is no one size fits all solution. Would you rather someone drive an old Suburban 100 miles per day or a Prius prime 100 miles per day? It’s that simple. These people aren’t going to buy a BEV until the segment is nearly ubiquitous, if ever.
Once or twice a year? Do you mean daily? We have a phev Prius and it is great. It is able to run EV mode to work, but the trip home requires hybrid mode.
If you took the cost of gas engine and had a bigger battery instead, you could make it home without burning gas. How often do you travel more than 250 miles round trip? For me, that’s only once or twice a year.
I think people use the gas more than twice a year. For me, the electric could suffice for weekday commutes, but weekend trips end up requiring the gas.
I have personally avoided EVs in favor of PHEVs because I think charging all the time would be a pain. EVs like Tesla claim you get like 320 miles of range, but that’s on a full battery and they recommend only charge to 80%. So it drops to 256 miles. However even that is on the high end as driving at normal highway speeds, using AC or heat, in cold weather all kill the range even further. Tesla actually got caught exaggerating the range and canceling customer appointments over the issue. So, a realistic estimate there is probably more like 175 miles left. From there you probably don’t want to risk getting stranded and would need to find a charge with no less than 25 miles left. This gives an effective range of more like 150 miles out of the claimed 320. If you’re on a road trip, stopping every 150 miles for 20-40 minutes is going to be a pain.
As a model 3 owner of 5 years, your math is just wrong and charging is a minor inconvenience if you have a level 2 charger at home or work. I went the first 3 years with no home charging.
All the complexity of a gas engine
Batteries are more complex. A 200lb battery is less complex than 1000lb or 2000lb battery.
What happens when you don’t use the gas engine for months and then go to start it with gelled gas?
If only computers existed and had timers that automatically burned off stale gasoline.
Also, just fill up 2 gallons or so to minimize the stale gasoline effect. You’ll only be filling up once or twice a month with all the EV driving you’ll be doing in practice.
You’re trying to solve a problem that the article shows doesn’t exist for 99%
No. The 800+ to 1500+ extra lbs of battery you lug around with a full 300mi electric car is what’s actually being wasted in practice.
Sorry, fellow me/ee, disagree on complexity, having worked directly with both. Advantage of mechanical systems: theoretically predictable action, repeated endlessly so long as torque at the tires is req’d. Reality: tolerances in various parts open over time, resulting in a nonlinear decrease in efficiency and power. A symphony of hundreds of bolted joints, springs, tappets and valves, a sum of thousands of parts dancing while a complex ECU watches over the system. A single part or joint far enough out of tolerance will cause very, very expensive damage.
Battery powered vehicles: motor has full torque at close to zero RPM, all components in the control system are solid state, and software (always updateable) handles control decisions. Electric motor has 6 to 30 parts, based on whether liquid cooled or air cooled.
Batteries are absolutely not more complex than an internal combustion car. They’re newer, but not more complex.
Why is it that all the batteries are the things that fail in these designs?
And why is it that the gasoline engine lasts for a decade or longer, with very few repair issues? In fact, when was the last time you heard of an old car where the engine needed to be replaced?
When old cars break down, its the suspensions, the belts… radiator (those things rust / break surprisingly often), etc. etc. Its not really the ICE parts that break down.
Check engine lights, oil leaks, coolant leaks transmission leaks, timing belts, timing chains, thermostats, water pumps, compression leaks, vacuum leaks, catalytic converters, oxygen sensors, ignition coils , spark plugs, spark plug wires, distributors, fuel pumps, fuel filters, fuel leaks, cracked block, thrown rod, warped crankshaft, scorn cam shaft, cam phasers, differentials, transmission problems and on… and on…
These are just SOME of the repairs that are common to ONLY gas vehicles and you won’t have any of these problems with an EV.
These are just SOME of the repairs that are common to ONLY gas vehicles and you won’t have any of these problems with an EV.
And yet…
You can theorycraft all you want. I have hard stats.
You don’t have any stats. You have a link to a consumer reports article based off a survey…
Let me show you how flawed that is:
I’m going to hold a survey of my household to see how many people say you are wrong.
The results are in! 100% of the people surveyed said you’re wrong!
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Not my experience.
What do you mean with batteries will fail?
I mean just that.
The internal chemical structure of Li-ion is only designed to work for a limited number of charge/discharge cycles. As the chemistry is stressed out, the internal metals begin to form dendrites (or in more simple terms, spikes) internally.
We have reasonable estimates for how long this takes, but everyone’s battery pack is different. And the process is invisible (you have to cut open & destroy a battery to figure out how much of these dendrites or whatever have formed). So the best we got are some computers slapped on the outside of the battery pack that measures temperature, voltage, current, and time to guestimate the effects from the outside.
As cells fail, modern BMS systems will reroute power away from degenerated cells. Its not that the problem was solved per se, its that modern battery packs have a bunch of extra cells waiting in reserve to pretend that nothing has happened to the end user. But this process eventually breaks enough cells that the whole pack fails and inevitably needs replacement.
Exactly when depends on how many cells were left in reserve, how much “fast charging” you do (which is extremely harsh on the internal chemicals), the temperature of the pack under use, and any aggressive driving you might do that heats up the pack more than usual.
Its… really complex. There’s a lot of research going on right now to try to stop these dendrites from forming.
EDIT: In any case, Consumer Reports reliability surveys on various parts of say… a Toyota Prius Prime or other PHEVs. Go look at them all, see what parts fail. Its the battery.
Here’s GM Volt. What’s the problem? Oh, the EV Battery again, and looks like the EV Charger is also terrible cause GM must have messed that up too.
But yes, its the electrical parts that are more complex and prone to failure in almost all of these cars.
Here’s Chrysler Pacifica. Oh boy, lots of parts of this vehicle is terrible. But as predicted, the EV Battery is among the worst of parts again.
… chrysler what are you doing
That Chrysler Pacifica is one of the few electrified solutions with 7 comfortable seats.
Despite that terrible reliability, its one of your best family-van options if you care about electrification at all. You just gotta grin and bear it.
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I chose Toyota first for a reason. The other two are just common PHEVs that came to my mind.
In all three cases, the Battery Pack is one of the least-reliable parts of the car. Even for notoriously unreliable cars, the worst part remains the battery.
I’m not kidding when I say that the battery pack is one of the most complex and least-understood parts of EVs, Hybrids, or PHEVs.
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It’s interesting to be on the other side of watching a subject matter expert being downvoted by laymen suffering from Dunning Kruger. Their feelings will always Trump your knowledge.
I’ve read enough on these systems to understand you’re speaking the truth here. Thanks for trying. I learned some new details on these system’s complexities.
If I have a 400 V 50 kWh battery and charge at 400 V 50 kW, won’t it be charging at 1 C? Like you could use the Nissan leaf as an example but it’s dishonest since it’s the worst type of battery cooling, air, which makes the cells die prematurely.
Tesla is one of the more failure prone brands. Hybrids are a bad solution since it won’t address the problem fully, and only serves to lengthen the ICE industry.
Hybrids are a bad solution since it won’t address the problem fully
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
There’s no perfection in engineering. Just a series of compromises. Anyone who is an absolutionist is going to have a bad time in engineering, policies, and politics.
Using fossil fuels in ICE is a waste of resources
The batteries may be more complex, but not for the end-user.
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There are 1000s of Priuses that require repairs every year, including the batteries that also go bad. So, all of the normal gas engine maintenance, plus the risk of a battery going bad too. It’s just basic logic.
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There are more parts and systems to break on a hybrid than a pure gas or pure EV.
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No, I’m pretty sure me and most everyone else have a pretty firm grasp on how far we need to go regularly, dude bros in jacked up F350s that live in the suburbs notwithstanding…
My minimum is, using only 60% of the battery (like you’re supposed to), 100 freeway miles after 10 years of ownership. I won’t use it like that regularly, but car that can’t go 100 miles between stops isn’t worth owning.
Doing the math, that works out to about 200-250 EPA range. I’ll settle for the lower side of those numbers and stress the battery on long drives, but I’d rather not.
