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’m sorry but this just sounds like trying to justify a potentially already-made PHEV purchase more than anything by cherry-picking strange bits of data.
Try Hyundai or Tesla instead of picking literally the worst brands lol
Gas engines just don’t fail today man. It will almost always be the battery pack. Stats prove it.
I’ve looked at a fair number of these different vehicles from different manufacturers.
Your stats prove you can cherry-pick among the notoriously worst of brands for electrification, but not anywhere near the point you want to make.
The concern is that you have basically two different drivetrains to worry about, where if either fail you’re (potentially, depending on what/where/etc fails) without an operational vehicle at worst.
The concern is that you have basically two different drivetrains to worry about, where if either fail you’re (potentially, depending on what/where/etc fails) without an operational vehicle at worst.
Meanwhile, the Toyota Prius has been sitting on the top reliable cars for the last 20+ years…
There’s like, statistics… ya know? We don’t have to hypothesize the problems or “expected” problems. We can look at these cars and their long history now and see where the problems occurred.
This is utter horseshit. Gas cars fail way more because they have way more parts and all of those parts require more maintenance.
I would know, I bought a house and put a kid through college with the money I made fixing gas cars and now I’m changing careers cause EVs are taking over and they rarely break.
The batteries degrade over time slowly, especially compared to gas engines. Just compare the warranties! Gas drivetrains get 3 year / 36k mile warranties. EV battery warranties are 8-10 years.
Gas drivetrains get 3 year / 36k mile warranties.
Um…
You know that Hyundai has a 10 Year, 100k mi Engine warranty, right?
If you’re going to snark, do understand your sources first. Consumer Reports uses a “what they think will happen” for the reliability of a given item, it is not a wholly objective figure. They aren’t stats.
It’s a wonderful tool for a purchasing decision where you want to be cautious and consider the worst case scenario but it isn’t useful as a tool for much else.
Considering the vehicles you chose have low volume, do understand something:
How Many Samples Does CR Have of Each Model?
A typical vehicle has about 200 to 300 samples for each model year. When we have small sample sizes for models, we may use brand history and the reliability of similar models that may share major components to determine our predictions.
The stats I posted are history / survey results.
Consumer Reports conducts surveys where they ask car-owners of various model years how many issues, and what kind of issues, their cars have.
I know the difference from “predicted reliability” and their “Reliability history” page. There’s a reason why I’m posting history. These survey results look back into the past and is more appropriate for our discussion.
Before criticizing my methodology, you probably should see what pages I’m posting and understand the material I’m quoting.
The reliability data comes from our Auto Reliability Surveys of Consumer Reports members. In all, we received responses on over 330,000 vehicles in our 2023 surveys, detailing 2000 to 2023 models and some early 2024 vehicles.
Oh look. We even got overall% problems.
Guess what? Its the battery again.
