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When it comes to diving into the world of electric vehicles, there are two big worries that keep EV buyers up at night: range and price. Price and range are in quantum entanglement if you will, where tinkering with one invariably shakes up the other. So, while the price aspect is clearly on the table, let's delve into how much we might sacrifice in pursuit of savings.
So, I decided to put these worries to the test, and take a deep dive into the data to see just how beefy battery needs to be for a comfy long-distance journey.
7 EVs, 7 routes, 7+ hours driving
In this test I'm sending all these virtual cars on a virtual tour across Germany, France, Poland, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Romania for 7-11 hour drives. I will use HERE Technologies and TomTom EV route planners: their advantage lies in the ability to finely customise the parameters, allowing us to simulate a wide range of electric cars, both real and hypothetical. Additionally, they integrate global charging station data, precise traffic patterns and offering a controlled environment that eliminates the unpredictability of real-world variables. While simulations have their limitations compared to actual drives, they enable a direct comparison between different scenarios, making it easier to evaluate the relative impact of specific factors – in our case relative impact of battery size on travel times.
The test routes cover good part of Europe (excluding Nordic countries to avoid divagations on very low temperatures): Berlin to Innsbruck, Cracow to Gdansk, Hamburg to Paris, Bilbao to Malaga, Zaragoza to Seville, Milan to Naples, Paris to Toulouse, Budapest to Bucharest.
Cars 40kWh to 110kWh
In this electrifying experiment, let's imagine we're dealing with vehicles akin to the Hyundai Motor Company (현대자동차) Ioniq 6 or a Tesla Model 3, each available with battery options ranging from a 40 kWh to an impressive 110 kWh.
Regarding consumption we will assume consumption curves which mimics those models, with auxiliary consumption at 1kWh/h.
Now, before we hit the road, let's talk charging. I'm using the Hyundai Ioniq 6's charging curve because, which while is one of the best in the market (except maybe for the Porsche Taycan), but it's the kind of curve you'd find in the mid-range market, so we're keeping it fair.
We're scaling it up or down based on our virtual cars' battery sizes (so C-rate curve is always the same)
Result: 1kWh per minute
First let's set up baseline: this is the amount of travel time it takes for a car with an 80 kWh battery (based on average values from TomTom and HERE).
As you can see charging time constitutes only a relatively small portion of the total travel time in most cases. What truly surprised me was the difference in the overall trip duration between small and large batteries. Below, you can see how total charging time improves when we increase the battery size by 10 kWh:
While getting to 60kWh battery yields significant improvements, above 60kWh, increasing battery pack size by 1kWh reduces whole day trip duration by less than 1 minute.
Let's break it down for the most popular battery sizes - the 60 kWh and the 80 kWh packs. On average, you're only looking at spending a smidge more time on your day trip, just ~4% longer (18 minutes on average) than if you were rolling in a car with a bigger battery. And this holds true across all our test countries.
If you're thinking of upgrading from an 80 kWh pack to a 100 kWh pack, well, the improvement is even more minuscule - around 2.5% of travel time reduction
Does this imply we should stop worrying about the range and embrace 60kWh batteries? Not exactly. While the test adopts realistic assumptions about cars and utilizes current infrastructure, it's overly optimistic about the reliability and availability of stations. The shift away from concerns over battery size hinges on the dependability of infrastructure. The EV challenge isn't just about developing superior batteries (solid-state, LFP, NIB/SIB, etc.) but also about creating infrastructure which is plentiful and reliable.
This short is an attempt to confront common range fears and anxieties with numerical evidence. I hope is that it provides encouragement to those who are hesitate to get electrified until affordable cars reach 1000 kilometres (or 621,371 miles) of range.
Stay charged!
Additional Points on the Above Figures
Weather
The assumptions are based on mild to moderate weather conditions, excluding factors like rain, snow, or strong headwinds. Similarly, the potential benefits of tailwinds are not considered.
Cars
The performance curves discussed are more applicable to sedans, such as the Ioniq 6 or the Tesla Model 3. However, if we were to apply these to a Tesla Model Y, the results would be slightly different, though not significantly.
Charging
The charging curve mentioned earlier, while above average, is feasible for medium-priced cars. This curve is already achievable in Hyundai's E-GMP platform cars and the Tesla Model Y produced in Berlin.
ABRP differences
A Better Routeplanner : is one of the most comprehensive and popular EV route planners available. However, it tends to be optimistic regarding speed predictions, so results you will see there will be different than what you see here. In contrast, TomTom and HERE use extensive real drive data to calculate realistic speeds for each road segment. Therefore, the average speeds of around 110 km/h that we achieving in the test are what you can realistically expect, barring extraordinary circumstances like driving on Christmas Eve or during World Cup finals.