What 3 years of driving an electric car taught me about range “serenity” and energy consumption

It's been more than 2 years since I described here [1] how I selected a battery electric car model to meet my personal needs: a retail price below EUR50,000, a type-approval electric range of more than 300 km, and a fast-charging capability of at least 150 kW. In a few weeks, I'll return my vehicle to the dealer as it's the end of the 3-year lease period.

So, how was it? In short, pretty uneventful.

I never suffered from range anxiety. Most of the time my battery range was more than enough just relying on my Wallbox charger at home. And if I really needed some extra juice, there was always a public charger nearby.

I'd describe my experience as one of range serenity instead of range anxiety.

My experience matches the conclusions of a recent ICCT study [2] which found that a car with a battery on the smaller end of the range of capacities on the market is sufficient for the vast majority of urban and rural car drivers. I feel that driving an electric car nowadays is not substantially different from driving a conventional combustion engine car, except that the electric car is quieter, cleaner [3], and the exceptionally strong torque is more fun to drive!

What about the real-world energy consumption of my electric car? From previous analyses [4] we know there's roughly a 14% gap between official (Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure [WLTP]) values and real-world fuel consumption and CO2 values for conventional gasoline and diesel cars.

For plug-in hybrids, the difference is larger and these typically consume [5] three to five times more fuel than advertised by official test values. In the European Union, all new combustion engine vehicles must report anonymized real-world consumption values via on-board fuel consumption meters [6] and statistically meaningful results are accessible [7] to the public. Battery electric vehicles are still exempt, though, and that unfortunately leaves us with a data and knowledge gap.

I kept track of my own real-world consumption values and Figure 1 summarizes my observations.

For this chart, I also used data from Spritmonitor.de [8], a free public platform that's well known and commonly used among vehicle owners, especially in Germany where I live. Based on a total 13,000 km of driving and a total of 2.4 MWh of electricity that I tracked [9] as part of 50 re-charging events over more than 2 years, my average real-world electricity consumption was 18.7 kWh/100 km. The fluctuation throughout the year is interesting: During the summer months, my average consumption was as low as 14 kWh/100 km, and in December the average was nearly 26 kWh/100 km.

It's also important to note that my electric vehicle is equipped with a heat pump [10] that uses electric energy more efficiently to heat the cabin and battery in winter.

References

^ here (theicct.org)
^ study (theicct.org)
^ cleaner (theicct.org)
^ analyses (theicct.org)
^ consume (theicct.org)
^ on-board fuel consumption meters (www.eca.europa.eu)
^ accessible (eur-lex.europa.eu)
^ Spritmonitor.de (www.spritmonitor.de)
^ tracked (www.spritmonitor.de)
^ heat pump (www.spritmonitor.de)