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.
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
No matter how well the mass transport system gets, you’ll still have to have the road network. Every business will have to get stuff delivered by large truck. Every housing area will have to get streets, and you also can’t eliminate highways. You could only potentially reduce how wide they are in some areas.
A road network has a much lower initial investment cost and can just sit there even if it’s underutilized, accruing comparatively very little in terms of ongoing maintenance costs, with no one needing to hyperventilate constantly about running a passenger service with enough asses in seats with sufficient regularity to recoup the costs. It can also go to a lot more destinations, and importantly can do so for mixed uses.
You could build train rails to the moon and back if you felt like it, but they’d decay quickly and it is statistically certain nobody would be riding on them to most places to justify paying for the upkeep, let alone the initial installation. This is not so with rural roads. There are also massive planning and logistical challenges you need to take into account for rail, mostly due to the fact that trains are crap at climbing inclines which is not an issue you’ll face (as much) with roads. This is why roadgoing vehicles have tires (well, one reason). You’ll be flattening mountaintops and boring tunnels and building bridges all over the place. It’s not cost or environmentally effective for little-utilized routes.
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.
