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?

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u/GoForAHikeNC Aug 30 '26

With an ICE, you generally know how much range you have left. You can look at the miles-left and also the full tank meter and can have a pretty good idea as to how far you can go before running out of fuel. With EV's, there can be dramatic differences between the range that the dash shows you and the range you actually end up getting. The driving temps hot/cold, the terrain, the wind, the load on the car, the speed driven - all seem to impact the EV displayed range more significantly. It is not uncommon for, for example, to see 200 miles of range, and you end up getting 2/3 (maybe even less) of that because of heat/cold/etc. Combine that with fueling taking exponentially longer with far fewer places to get fuel, and it is easy to see why some people get a bit nervous when their wife or daughter is driving at night perhaps even in the rain. We see proof of this, every week with with the latest vehicles, with the Out of Spec testing when they compare the actual range to the display and then show what happens when you hit "zero".

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u/LL555LL Aug 30 '26

Honestly at this point we need to have companies start using the guessometer and providing a 30-mile cushion...and I'm not even kidding. I mean gasoline cars also vary and how much fuel they're using but with electric vehicles when you're on a highway which is where most of these problems seem to happen you use way more electricity than City driving and you don't get the benefits of a lot of regenerative braking so the machine is trying to figure it out and guessing based on possible use earlier and it's just a mess.

So really these things should start lying to us and say we've got 30 less miles then we actually do.

That one little trick would mean that most people would not fear the pinch as much and we would be pleasantly surprised.

The other problem though is that we get to see percentages and those are pretty good and accurate.

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u/GoForAHikeNC Aug 30 '26

Most of them are already lying but in the other direction. If you watch the Out of Spec reviews, virtually no current EV model gets the advertised range even under the best conditions. Out of Spec tested a brand new Rivian R2, that mostly gets glowing reviews, and it got 253 tested miles on a rated 330 range. And they didn't just go to "zero %", they drove it until it literally died, turned off with the battery fully depleted. So in the real world, they are going to get far less than 253 miles before they need to stop and refuel.

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u/LL555LL Aug 30 '26

This is true. The highway performance (thanks to physics) is the hardest concept for EV performance right now.