Three things novice EV buyers need to consider

Some of the things enthusiasts brag about, it turns out, are true, David Booth writes.

With so much hype surrounding electric cars, it can be hard for the first-time EV buyer to distinguish myth from reality regarding range. So here is Motor Mouth’s basic guide to this contentious issue — and the first conclusion may surprise you.

There’s no such thing as range anxiety — in the city: If you’re driving a particularly low-range porker like Volkswagen’s e-golf and just happen to live in Flin Flon (cold weather would greatly reduce its already paltry 198-kilometre range) you might have a few anxious moments. But for the most part it’s almost impossible to run out of electricity driving around town in a modern electric vehicle. Yes, even in a city as large as Toronto.

Electric vehicles are particularly well suited to urban driving. Thanks to the low-speed efficiency of electric motors and the wonders of brake regeneration, most current EVS hit their rated ranges easily. If your car’s little digital readout says you have 300 km in the “tank,” chances are it will eke out every single one of them.

More importantly, most people simply don’t drive as far as they think they do. EV proponents love trotting out the fact that the average commute is something less than 60 km, and they’re right. The convenience of plugging in your car at home is definitely situational: Simply put, if you’re a bucks-up Audi e-tron or Jaguar I-pace owner, then you probably have a multicar garage with a built-in wall charger. Replenishing your EV’S spent electrons is as simple as popping out of the driver’s seat, reaching for your conveniently placed SAE J1772 plug, and your car will be all juiced up come morning.

On the other hand, for those who live without house or apartment parking, street charging is currently pretty much non-existent. Personally, I find it a lot easier to gas up at the Esso around the corner once a week than fiddle with electric cars parked in my driveway.

You really don’t see many Teslas in the fast lane: I just spent a week prowling Southern California’s busiest highway and I didn’t see a single one. Considering how many Model 3s there are on the roads in

and around Los Angeles, it was quite startling.

Curiosity had me take a Nissan Leaf Plus tester out to Ontario’s almost empty off-hours Highway 407 and measure its electricity consumption at a number of different speeds. At a perfectly legal 100 km/h, the Leaf used about 20 kilowatt hours per 100 km. With 62 kwh of lithium-ion on board, that works out to range of about 310 km. That’s less than the 349 km Nissan claims, but hardly worth mentioning.

Ratchet the speed up to 130 km/h, however, and things go to hell in a handbasket. Nissan’s consumption metre actually doesn’t go high enough to measure what the Leaf consumes when trying to hold a steady buck-thirty, but I know that I was way over its 45 kwh/100-km maximum the entire time. Driving.ca