Overcoming EV Range Anxiety

Electric vehicles are becoming more and more common, not just with more models being offered, but also with EVs making up an ever-larger segment of the automotive market. But EVs are still a long way from making up a majority of the market. There are a variety of reasons for this, but range anxiety, and its “cousin” charging anxiety, can still be stubborn factors for quite a few buyers. That said, there is a lot of old information still in circulation, not to mention outright myths, so we’ve put together a guide examining what the EV market has to offer today.

Range Anxiety VS Charging Anxiety

Range anxiety has been a talking point surrounding EVs since the first production models debuted. Range Anxiety is the idea that an EV just simply can’t travel very far on a charge, and will leave the driver stranded. This still concerns some people, but it’s not brought up as much as it used to be for a few different reasons. The first is obvious, lots more people are buying EVs and not having these problems. You can see that the roads aren’t littered with dead electric vehicles, and maybe more importantly, the EV range itself has also improved dramatically. A range in the neighborhood of 300 miles used to be a feature of only the most expensive EVs, but today it’s fairly normal, and an EV now needs to be able to exceed 400 miles on a charge for it to be noteworthy. And even if range hadn’t improved, charging infrastructure certainly has, with far more public chargers available everywhere. Which brings us to charging anxiety.

Charging anxiety is an offshoot of range anxiety, and comes from the idea that your EV will be running low on charge and you won’t be able to charge up because all of the nearby public chargers will be occupied, vandalized, or otherwise nonfunctional. This one is a little harder to dispel, as we’ve all pulled up to broken gas pumps any number of times, and it’s reasonable to think that this will be an issue with charging stations as well. That said, a lot of this anxiety comes from the long charging times associated with Level 2 charging, and a fear of being stuck behind someone who needs hours of charging to get home. But today, an increasing number of public chargers are DC fast chargers, which will charge up your vehicle exponentially faster than an AC charger. The Porsche Taycan, for example, can charge from 10 to 80 percent in just 18 minutes. On top of this, there are simply more chargers now than there used to be, and even in the rare instance that a charger is down, finding another one isn’t such a tall order. But really, with the range of modern EVs, most people rarely use public chargers at all, charging up at home overnight instead.

Other Electrified Options

If the performance and fuel savings of an electric vehicle sound appealing to you, but you still aren’t totally sold on the idea of a full EV, there are other options. Conventional hybrids remain popular, but the plug-in hybrid segment is growing incredibly quickly. This is a type of drivetrain that splits the difference between gasoline and electricity by letting you drive entirely on electricity, entirely on gasoline, or a mix of the two. Batteries aren’t as big as they are in pure electrics, but many models have enough range for most daily commutes, but the beauty of a PHEV is that if you do run out of all-electric range, the gasoline engine can just take over. It’s true that you still use some gasoline with a PHEV, and that’s an advantage that a pure EV has over a PHEV, but there are undeniable benefits as well, and it’s easy to see why this is such a fast-growing segment.