Quentin Willson’s 250-Mile Electric Car Range Claim Looks A Stretch.
Former motoring journalist and electric car campaigner Quentin Willson was interviewed by Nigel Farage on GBNews and claimed that a 250-mile round trip in an electric car nowadays would be no problem. In my experience that isn’t very likely, especially if high-speed motorway driving accounted for the majority of the distance.
Now for sure, that would be easy with even the cheapest internal combustion engine (ICE) petrol or diesel car. An ICE would accomplish that day in day out with no range anxiety at all. But no electric car I’ve tested could make this 250-mile motorway round trip, and that includes my range winner, the Tesla Model 3 Long Range Dual Motor (£53,390).
Willson didn’t mention which electric car would accomplish the 250-mile return journey from the Midlands to London and back, nor did he specify the route, but I’m assuming that any journey of that length would almost totally mean fast, legal (indicated 80 mph meaning less than 75 mph in reality) motorway driving.
Of all the electric cars I’ve tested (see data box below) only the Tesla Model 3 would come close, and that might just eke it out accompanied by some serious range anxiety, although Willson did say if you needed to top up the battery, you could always plug into a street-lamp in Bayswater.
Good luck with that idea.
The Tesla Model 3 I tested came with a claim that the battery would manage range of 360 miles, but in reality I only managed an average of 341 miles. In highway cruise mode the Tesla shed range at an estimated 30.2% of the offered miles leaving about 240 miles. Not quite enough to make the 250-mile round trip, but this also hides some other negatives.
Any normal driver would probably seek to refill as soon as there was about 50 miles left. But also, if you needed to do this journey regularly you would have to take heed of the manufacturers’ advice. Limit your regular “fill-ups” to 80% of the total possible, and never let it get under 20%, and if possible try and plug in when there’s about 50% left. That would blow a hole in the long-distance range claims.
www.wintonsworld.com data (updated data now includes Ford Mach E, Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf, Fiat 500 E) *Tesla doesn’t reveal battery capacity Expect town and country driving to match this range.
Mr. Wilson is something of a shill for the coming EV “revolution” that, oddly, requires subsidies of all sorts to bribe drivers into the vehicles. This is coupled with a transparently obvious political move to decrease ICE emissions of CO2 precipitously with no cost-benefit analysis of any sort. Especially when the mass polluters in the rest of the world (Brazil, India, China, Russia, etc.) are given a pass, and not even required to meet current EU standards within a reasonable time period. Smells like a giant wealth transfer scheme to me.
I went for a test drive in a Renault Zoe (52kWh), on switching on it showed 99% charge an a range of 185 miles. Wipers and heater plus de-mist on and it showed a range of 165 miles. Only did 50 miles after which it showed a range of 95 miles. As a car it was actually quite nice, and well finished but £31,000 seemed expensive.
Maybe Quentin had a lucid thought?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpcMcgxjiL8
https://insideevs.com/reviews/562511/lucid-air-range-test-record/
The real-world ~185 miles range at that temperature I-Pace now looks officially out of the Ark.
Worse, people in California contemplating a $150-200k New Range Rover, the V8 top model, doing 15 mpg or less, will flock to this car. And then there’s the Gravity SUV car too.
UK has been too busy contemplating its navel: Brexit, then the blatantly obvious Scamdemic, which 99.9% of middle class Brits adored – a good piss up and ‘working from home’ – and of course house prices. The rest of the world, China, Korea, and the US, Germany, France and Italy to an extent, worked, feverishly, on EVs.