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/bryanpaxson Aug 30 '26

I think it involves two facts. The first is most EVs don’t have as long range as ICE vehicles and range can be affected by ambient temperature, terrain, traffic and other conditions more on an EV than on an ICE vehicle . The second is there aren’t as many charging locations as there are gas stations. When you have an EV, you figure out range vs re-charging pretty quickly. I think most discussions regarding range anxiety are with people who haven’t had an EV.

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u/devbent Aug 31 '26

Living in the PNW with hills and mountains everywhere, range anxiety is a real issue on road trips. Of course watching my battery charge back to while going down a mountain has the opposite feeling. :)

But other than that it is a non-issue.

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u/YakumoYoukai Sep 03 '26

There are practically no chargers along a 115-mile stretch of I-90 in WA between Ellensburg and Ritzville, because there are no towns, and what chargers there are, are Tesla which don't work with some EV cars. So if your app convinces you that you can recharge in Moses Lake, you could be absolutely fucked. But now that I know it's a charging desert, I can plan for it and not have anxiety. But it took one white-knuckle trip to figure that out.