Data from thousands of EVs shows the average daily driving distance is a small percentage of the EPA range of most EVs.
For years, range anxiety has been a major barrier to wider EV adoption in the U.S. It’s a common fear: imagine being in the middle of nowhere, with 5% juice remaining in your battery, and nowhere to charge. A nightmare nobody ever wants to experience, right? But a new study proves that in the real world, that’s a highly improbable scenario.
After analyzing information from 18,000 EVs across all 50 U.S. states, battery health and data start-up Recurrent found something we sort of knew but took for granted. The average distance Americans cover daily constitutes only a small percentage of what EVs are capable of covering thanks to modern-day battery and powertrain systems.
The study revealed that depending on the state, the average daily driving distance for EVs was between 20 and 45 miles, consuming only 8 to 16% of a battery’s EPA-rated range. Most EVs on sale today in the U.S. offer around 250 miles of range, and many models are capable of covering over 300 miles.
It is physically impossible for an EV with much fewer parts, all of which require no maintenance, to be less reliable than a gas car with highly complex parts like transmissions and differentials and combustion engines.
I’ve worked on both for a living. I’ve seen first hand which cars come into the shop and how frequently. I used problem tracking websites like Identifix daily to see common failures on all the cars I work on.
EVs rarely break.
Gas vehicles turn into paperweights if you go too long without changing the oil.
And transistors, and transformers, battery management systems, and inverters aren’t complex?
Are you making fun of my degree? Power engineering is a masters-level subject at a minimum, and easily reaches into the PH.d level.
As I stated earlier. I’ve got an electrical engineering degree. When EV buffs talk about the “simplicity” of EVs I can’t help but roll my eyes. Yall probably can’t even pick out the right chips for a Li-ion BMS, or tell me the differences between LiFePo4 or NMC Li-ion is.
There’s some highly technical magic going on here. MOSFETs, Power-circuits, complex inverters, microcontrollers to carefully time the movement of electricity with the movement of those magnets. There’s a hell of a lot more complexity in there than people realize. And when things go wrong, there’s not much else to do but replace the entire damn part, because it requires a very advanced facility to create electric motors, the chemistry behind these cells, or PCBs for those battery packs.
Moving parts wear out due to friction. The electronic parts you listed are not moving parts and rarely fail. I would know, as an automotive technician they come to me when they break.
If you really were an engineer, you would know about minimizing points of failure. And you would be able to recognize gas vehicles have exponentially more points of failure due to the amount of moving parts and sealing surfaces and combustion temperatures.
It’s easy to claim you’re an engineer on the internet. But you’re definitely not talking like an engineer.
Hear hear.
Engineers look at empirical results most of all. They don’t dismiss large, 300,000+ car surveys just because they’re inconvenient to your argument.
I’ve said my piece on the reliability of battery designs over the past 5 years. Hopefully battery engineers improve their reliability moving forward. I don’t think it’s going to be easy though, as the simulated models of the internals of Li-ion cells is just such a devilishly difficult problem.
Technical magic???
BMS systems are far from it. Lots of technical work going into simplifying measuring techniques, automatic switching between series parallel linking of cells based on system needs (at my company)… but the essentials of measuring current, thermal and voltage? Lmao. I’m making fun of your degree, as a holder and EIT myself.
If you’re into BMS systems at all, you know that the ridiculous levels of modeling are chemistry / cell specific, to the point that would make the typical layman’s eyes glaze over. A litany of cell types (NMC, LiFePo4, NCA) and more as new chemistries are invented (or go in and out of fashion) requires updates to BMS, the modeling of how the internals of the cells work, and how all of that is related to the voltage/current/temperatures of individual cells.
Measuring voltage/current? Yeah, that’s easy.
INTERPRETING voltage/current? That’s the hard part. And requires a giant mess of R&D effort on these cells and their individual chemistries.
There’s nothing “simple” about that battery pack. The shear number of control systems that go into a modern battery-pack it should be proof enough to you.
https://stock-tesla.com/en/asy-tested-bms-96s-mdls-1021970-00-b
Not only is there difficulty in building and manufacturing this… there’s also difficulty in maintaining this item. I mean yeah, we don’t maintain it, its just replaced wholesale. But there’s also the whole 400V will-instantly-kill-a-technician problem if they’re not careful.
Sorry, I have designed complex 4 and 6 layer high speed FPGA boards, this BMS board looks moderately dense but not crazy, nor does it look like it’s dealing with high speed signaling.
Try dealing with RF or something, those PCBs are quite a bit crazier.
The models for the cells are implemented in software. You know what’s easy to update in place? software. You know what’s hard to update in place? Mechanical systems. That’s my point.
Then I’ll chalk it up to another FPGA programmer dissing Power Engineering and the complexities of handling of high voltage lines.
Lmao go for it, I deal with systems shoving kiloamps at multi-tens of kv around quickly, I’ll chalk it up to a small fry “power” electronics engineer not knowing better, as is customary for you so far.
GaN MOSFETs, because igbts are too slow, tech you, @[email protected], haven’t even gotten to touch yet. TeChNiCaL MaGiC in your parlance.
So you do touch BMS systems and understand that the hundreds or thousands of MOSFETs that control the electrical currents of a ten-thousand cell battery pack are arranged in systems of series and parallel … Running advanced modeling software that tries to peer into the internal chemistry of modern cells…
Yet you want to convince me that this is simpler than the like, 15 gears that make up Toyotas Powersplit Device?
In the long run, yes.
How do you account for tribological degradation in tolerances over time? There are techniques to negate the problem entirely, my 40+ year old Japanese motorcycle uses high-ish pressure hydrodynamic bearings to allow oil to be the “wear” surface… But it isn’t foolproof.
Newer techniques rely on better metallurgy, oil additives which precipitate on designated surfaces, etc etc etc. It’s one of those things you and I have both observed where the more you look at it, the more complex it gets.
Now change gears (haha) and observe the complexity of analog/digital systems. You and I front-load the complexity, so that any configuration changes should (mostly) be possible in software. “Oh no, we didn’t use this particular junction of p-n MOSFETs”… They added $3 to the BOM, but our flexibility/redundancy is increased.
Look, you should know as well as any EE that solid state systems, when run within parameters, have a tremendous unchanging mtbf. While there are currently issues with undersizing MOSFETs and igbts, I expect our engineering models (in our heads) of what to expect from these evolving electronic components to adapt to these new operating environs, the already reasonable reliability will only increase.
Failure of these packs and their bms’ are low enough that we can point to specific failures, versus how often we see someone with serious ICE engine issues in the local mechanic’s shop.