Study should help ease ‘range anxiety’ for EV drivers

Electric vehicle batteries keep getting larger, and the typical driving range between charges keeps growing.

The shift is partly a response to “range anxiety” — the fear of being stranded because EV batteries don’t have enough power to get to the next charging station — an idea so familiar in discussions of electric vehicles that it was spoofed in a Ram Super Bowl ad last month.

But this concern is unwarranted for a large share of EV customers, according to research from the University of Delaware.

Willett Kempton, a University of Delaware professor, and his team looked at driving data for 333 gasoline vehicles over one year in the Atlanta area, and then created a model to see the extent to which various EV options would have been able to meet the needs of those drivers.

They found 37.9% of the drivers would have been able make all of their trips for the year using a small EV like a Nissan Leaf as their primary vehicle and charging at locations like home, work or wherever the vehicle was parked and charging was available.

The hypothetical vehicle had a 40 kilowatt-hour battery and range of 143 miles.

To put this a different way, more than a third of drivers were able to meet 100% of their needs with an EV with a relatively small battery and didn’t need to make any additional trips for the sole purpose of charging.

Keep in mind, drivers who can’t meet their needs in this scenario aren’t stranded indefinitely by the side of the road.

They just need to find charging options outside of their typical routines, which usually means stopping at fast-charging stations on longer trips.

About the only time the longer range is essential is for cross-country trips, when a vehicle with a larger battery is going to need fewer stops. But cross-country driving trips are rare for most drivers.

“It’s cheaper to rent a car for two days (per year) than to spend 10 grand on a much bigger battery,” Kempton said.

The co-authors, who also included researchers from the Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and Georgia Tech, looked at scenarios involving EVS with various sizes of batteries and charging systems.

They found longer-range vehicles would rarely, and, for some drivers, never, need to use the upper reaches of their range.

But having low-cost EVS available is only one part of the equation. Another big issue is having access to adequate charging, which is a challenge for many people in urban areas who rely on on-street parking near where they live.

Kempton said policymakers need to be thinking about how to put chargers where people park overnight, or else it won’t be practical for someone to own a vehicle with a small battery.