The biggest hurdle a first time EV owner must face and overcome!
BHPian ashishk29 recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
A short discourse on range anxiety (or lack thereof)
Ever since I bought an EV, most of my conversations with colleagues/friends who are curious about my car inevitably steer() to the direction of those two words dreaded (mainly out of annoyance) by most EV owners. “Range anxiety”.
With my car nearing the ~5000km mark, wanted to share some thoughts on it.
First off, this is the particular set of SoC and range estimation that made me formulate this chain of thoughts:
After my commute on Friday, I was just below 20%. I planned on charging my car on Saturday. Since I have ToD variable tariffs on electricity, I planned on charging Saturday night. And that’s when an extremely rare thing began. A blackout. Power outage in my entire area. Major transformer blown out. Well. My charging was certainly postponed.
Come Sunday, and now the weekly chores are staring at me. Power is still not back on. I was already at 15%. And I started the day. Drove around all morning, going down from 15% to 12%. I pulled by the roadside.
And I thought to myself, I wasn’t feeling even the slightest hint of range anxiety! Not just because I knew power would be back and my home charger would eventually be up. But even if some emergency showed up, I had multiple 30-60kW DCFC stations around 10minutes from where I live. I could go to any one of those, and get 20% SoC in 15 minutes of charging. That 20% easily translates to 100km on my car. And I’m pretty sure I can find a 120kW or so DCFC within a 100km radius.
It’s like I have finally realised what I can expect from my car. And driving around at SoC below 15% isn’t really anything special. If I drove carefully, I could easily extract 80km or so even from that 15%. I know what the charger situation really is like. I know what chargers I can count on.
Now all this might seem pretty mundane and usual to most other owners and veteran EV owners.
But to me, as a first time EV owner, this sense of comfort/peace with being at low SoC’s is an important milestone. This gives me confidence that if push comes to shove, I won’t be stressed even if I had to search for chargers on a highway while already being at 15% battery. And that, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle a first time EV owner must face and overcome!
Bonus: Random pic of my car. Was looking rather nice that day
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