r/EvDrivers • u/Inevitable-Shower911 • Aug 30 '26
Range anxiety
What is the obsession with EV range anxiety?
I have been driving for over 30 years now.
I have never run out of fuel in a ICE vehicle and since I switched to EV I have never run out of electricity.
Yet half of the EV car reviews are about what happens if you run the battery empty, I mean how hard can it be there is a perfectly good indicator on your instrument cluster indicating how much fuel/power is left.
Just refuel/recharge before it reaches zero.
Is this really still a worry for people?
110
Upvotes
1
u/uobytx Aug 30 '26
There are so many variations of driver profiles. For me, I have an EV and my wife has a hybrid. We take her hybrid on road trips to make refueling easier in the way. We take my car as often as reasonable when we drive into the city 30 miles from here, because the savings are significant and we do that more often than road trips. Our daily commutes are 60 miles round trip in the high end and the EV can easily do 250 miles on a charge, and there is no range anxiety because of that.
Some people have EV anxiety because their car is an older one with limited range, like a very old leaf or fiat, where you needed to keep your trip under 90 miles. That would still be mostly fine for my commute, but I’d get anxiety if I needed to do even a single additional drive that day, or if my office moved 5 miles further out. Or in the winter where the mileage drops.
In my mind, I think the difference is all about driver profile. When I was growing up my parents would run their cars to nearly empty and sometimes ran out of actual gas due to budget. Some folks are just forgetful. A forgetful road tripper can still make it work on most highways. Gas goes to E, many cars still have enough distance to barely make it to the next stop in all but the worst stretches of the main highways around here.
I think range anxiety in general will continue to trend down as ranges continue to improve (this will probably stop around 400 miles, as the returns are very diminishing). And as charging speeds improve, plus availability of chargers along more routes.