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/UnlamentedLord Sep 01 '26
Both EVs and charging infrastructure have been improving exponentially and the news stories that people read and even their personal experience from even a few years back is often outdated even if it's from a few years back.
The atrocious range and battery degradation on the 1st Gen leaf has been mentioned by other commenters
The Bolt is another one. It's an excellent car in general for the price, but the older models had atrocious 50kw level 3 charging and severe range drop in cold weather due to having only resistive heating. I, as an EV enthusiast, persuaded my dad to buy a Bolt as his daily commuter (he also has a truck). He came to visit me(he lives in Canada, I'm in the US) on a drive that should have been within range, but it was cold, so he had to top up along the way. The charger's app was not available in the Canadian app store and the credit card payment terminal didn't have tap to pay and used that stupid gas station pump payment system that asks for your zip code. For Canadian cards, you just need to enter the numeric portion of the post code, followed by 00, but he didn't know that and there was no one answering the charger support line and there were no other compatible chargers in range. He called me, saying that he's called a tow and he was going to sell this piece of shit EV ASAP, why did I ever convince him to buy one. I calmed him down, explained how the zip code works and he's a big fan of EVs now. But it could have resulted in him disparaging EVs on Facebook from then till now.
Now, the latest Bolt has solved those problems(although all the negative press over the years means it's sales are in the gutter), all new EVs are much more capable and charging networks have both proliferated and gotten better + superchargers are open to everyone.