Range anxiety is the term given to a driver’s fear that a vehicle has insufficient energy storage to reach his intended destination â and it’s one of the most common reasons people give for not embracing EVs.
In theory, it’s a simple problem with a simple solution (remember to charge!) but it can also be confusing. To understand all the nitty gritty, just follow our 10-point range anxiety explainer. (If you’re already worrying that you might not reach point 10, this is definitely the list for you…)
1. Range anxiety is the fear that your EV can’t go the distance. In a 2019 survey, respondents worried that they would be “stuck in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to charge my car”. They described how you can “get someone to buy some petrol for you so you can drive to a petrol station, but you can’t bring an extra battery”.
2. While this is at least partly true, those who are worried can take some comfort in statistics. Most people drive no more than 100 miles per week and even the oldest, smallest electric car – the Nissan Leaf – could do 109 miles on a single charge back in 2010. The average new electric car does 200 miles on a charge while big dog Mercedes EQXX can cover more than 600 miles.
3. This means you could charge most cars once per fortnight and never run dry. Plus you’d save a lot of money. For a small petrol car like a Ford Fiesta, 100 miles of travel costs around £14, and a Land Rover is more like £30 – while an electric vehicle would typically cost just £7.
4. Electric cars also have an energy recovery mechanism called ‘regenerative braking’, which can extend range further. In this function, the brakes slow down the car by harnessing its kinetic energy and saving it back into its battery. Over short, stop-start journeys, this makes driving very efficient indeed.
5. New batteries will offer even greater range. Developments in lithium-sulphur batteries should be able to offer five times as much charge as the current industry-standard, lithium-ion batteries.
6. Being left without charge when you drive somewhere new (a worry for many) is becoming less likely too as the number of public charging points is increasing. At the end of April this year, according to EV charging point app Zap Map, there were 31,507 charging points across the UK, with more than 1,000 new ones added per month.
7. Evening Standard readers are even less likely to be left stranded â as the highest density of charge points are found in Greater London with 10,411, followed by the South-East with 3,962.
8. But what about battery life? Phone and laptop batteries seem to start deteriorating as soon as their warranties expire so surely the same is true for cars? Not massively. Current car batteries lose around two per cent of their capacity a year. If your car’s range is 150 miles today, you’ll lose just 17 miles over the term of a five-year battery life.
9. If you’re still concerned about electric vehicles after reading this, maybe it’s not range you’re worried about but change. Research from Sussex University found that technical questions about range often masked people’s concerns about advancing technology.
10. Conversely, after 12 weeks driving, EV drivers could comfortably cover the vast majority of their trips without feeling anxious, a study in Berlin found. So ultimately, maybe the best way to overcome range anxiety is to buy an EV?
