Study: Average EV Drivers Use Just 12.6% of Car’s Range

‘Range anxiety’ for EV drivers may not be as big of a concern as most people think, reports Tim Levin in Inside EVs. “Even as consumers demand electric cars that can go 250, 300 or even 400 miles between charging sessions, research shows that they can usually make do with far less. Recurrent, a firm that tracks range and battery health in thousands of EVs, crunched the numbers and learned that electric car drivers only use a small fraction of their batteries each day.”

According to the report, most electric cars with 350-375 mile range average 40.9 miles of driving per day. “Taking the weighted average across all EVs suggests that drivers tend to use 12.6% of their car's rated range daily, Recurrent found.”

As Levin explains, “So the obsession with more and more EV range is less about what people do on a regular basis and more about ‘what if?’ scenarios.” A survey from Recurrent shows that once people buy an EV, just 22.8 percent of owners worry about range. “This suggests the industry's ‘range arms race’ is creating expensive solutions to problems that don't exist, or exist for only a moment before people really experience EV ownership,” says Recurrent.