Electric vehicles don’t lose power like combustion cars do when driven at high altitudes, but driving up a mountain pass will make their range disappear much quicker than normal. An EV consumes significantly more energy when climbing a gradient than on level ground, but if you follow the climb with a long descent with lots of brake regeneration, you should recover many of the lost miles.
That’s exactly what TFLEV’s Loveland Trials EV test can reveal. It involves driving from Boulder, Colorado, to the top of Loveland Pass, which peaks at an elevation of 11,990 feet, and going back down the same way. Driving on the same road both on the ascent and the descent is the only way to have some semblance of accuracy when comparing the amount of energy spent going up with what is recovered through regeneration on the way down.
