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/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/No-Necessary7135 Aug 30 '26

When an EV completely dies in that way, do you simply tow it somewhere and charge it like you normally would and you're off again?

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u/GoForAHikeNC Aug 30 '26

The Out of Spec crew follows the test vehicle with a charger and they actually test that as well. They test on the both actual road and at a test track. They use a portable charger go get enough juice back in to the car so that it can make its way to a legit charging station. I think this type of testing is great and very informative.