Automakers are currently in a race to see who will offer the most range. And if that of today’s models was already more than enough? This is what a study reveals.
As electric cars have become more and more popular, car manufacturers have sought to reduce the infamous stress of breakdown by adding ever more battery cells to their vehicles, which in turn allows them more to increase their margins. But the results of research from the University of Delaware show that, in many cases, motorists could be satisfied with models offering the least autonomy.
This study, published in the American journal Energies, followed 333 thermal car owners living around Atlanta, in the State of Georgia. The team behind it traced the driving habits of each of them back to 2004 and then compared their annual mileage needs to the range of a selection of electric models.
They thus discovered that 37.9% of them could have been satisfied with a model with a real radius of action without recharging 230 km, a distance that the vast majority of current proposals are capable of accomplishing, without having to change anything in their daily life. In other words, by recharging exclusively at home, at work or in car parks where they would have parked anyway, more than a third of them would not have needed to take a detour or s stop specifically to hook up.
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This is all very well, you might say, but why not have a little more autonomy, just in case? Because there are actually many disadvantages to having a huge battery pack in your car: it will be more expensive to buy, less efficient and more difficult to produce, which not only makes it more polluting to assemble, but also doubly less attractive economically for its driver.
Obviously, there are still scenarios where greater autonomy is necessary, but this only concerns drivers who frequently cross the country and only a few people in the study corresponded to this profile. And for those who embark on long trips on a more occasional basis, for example for holidays, it would be, according to the same report, much more economically interesting to simply rent a suitable car to satisfy these exceptions.
And if it’s true with Uncle Sam, it’s all the more so on our side of the Atlantic where the average annual mileage is much lower. How many times a year do you cover more than 230 km in one go?
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