Yahoo Autos 10 Ways to Squeeze the Most Driving Range from an EV
Most modern electric cars offer enough driving range from their large-capacity battery packs that you likely don't need to worry about squeezing the most driving range out of your EV. Still, there are occasions when it helps to make the most of each kWh. Maybe you forgot to plug your EV in overnight and now have less range than usual to work with. Or maybe you just really enjoy the challenge of hypermiling.
Whatever the reason, you can save yourself time, worry, and dollars by utilizing the following expert techniques to net you the most range from your EV's battery.
Drive Gently
This is one of the oldest techniques in the book: Acceleration uses energy, whether you're driving a gasoline-powered vehicle or an EV. And the harder you accelerate, the more energy your vehicle uses. This is why you want to use as little energy to get up to cruising speed as possible.
Whenever traffic allows, drive as if there's an egg between your foot and the accelerator pedal. In other words, accelerate gradually and resist the temptation to push hard on the accelerator pedal. Accelerating hard may be difficult for some drivers to resist—especially in EVs, which have such an abundance of thrust off the line. But watch that power meter in the instrument cluster. The lower you can keep that bar or needle, the less energy you're using to get to a given speed.
Use Regenerative Braking in Town
Unlike cars that rely strictly on an internal combustion engine, EVs can recapture significant amounts of the energy used to get them up to speed as they slow down. Regenerative braking (known as "regen") effectively turns the electric drive motors into generators, slowing the car as the wheels spin it and returning energy to the battery.
Some EVs have adjustable regen, with the strongest setting usually enabling "one-pedal" driving—affording little use of the friction brakes in city or suburban driving. Most EVs also incorporate regen into the brake pedal itself. This usually triggers regen at the top of the pedal's travel and then transitions to the friction brakes after pushing the pedal past a certain point.
Plan Ahead
Watching what's up the road—a slowing car, a light turning yellow, traffic clotting up—enables you to lift off the accelerator pedal early, coasting down to slow the vehicle rather than accelerating up to the bottleneck and then braking hard. Planning ahead enables you to make the most of one-pedal driving, which eliminates an electric car's tendency to "glide" when power is removed and increases the amount of regenerative braking—so drivers only rarely need to apply the brake pedal. Instead, modulating the accelerator pedal handles virtually all of an EV's acceleration and deceleration needs.
Coasting down to a stop using regen returns the maximal amount of energy to the batteries. Some automakers even incorporate eco-coaching guidance to show how much of the available energy was recaptured.
Precondition the Car
One part of planning ahead is to heat or cool an EV's cabin while it's still plugged in and charging. This is an especially easy thing to do if you have a Level 2 charger at home.
Preconditioning uses grid electricity, as opposed to the car's battery pack, to get the cabin temperature to where you want it. This usually can be set up and controlled through the car's smartphone app. If your schedule is consistent, then you can even set it for a given departure time for as many days a week as you need.
Many EV batteries also benefit from preconditioning in extreme weather environments. This is because it brings the battery to its optimum temperature, thus ensuring its operating at maximum efficiency the moment you start to drive.
Keep Tires Properly Inflated
This one is shared with gasoline cars: Low tire pressure increases energy consumption due to greater rolling resistance. Check to make sure your tires are at the manufacturer's recommended pressure (usually on a label on the left-front door jamb). It helps to keep a tire pressure gauge in the glove compartment to eliminate any guesswork the next time you suspect one or more of your tires might be low. That said, many modern cars are capable of displaying their tires' pressure within the infotainment or instrument cluster screens.
Keep Your Speed Reasonable
EVs are far more energy-efficient than gasoline cars, which waste the bulk of their energy generating heat and noise. But no matter the power source, driving at higher speeds has a significant impact on energy consumption. Below roughly 30 mph, cars use most of their energy to move their own mass.
Above this point, though, cars must expend more energy pushing aside the air they move through. Note that the energy required to overcome wind resistance rises exponentially with the square of the speed. In layman's terms, this means you use a lot more energy at 80 mph than at 65 mph.
You don't need to be the person holding up a lane of traffic, but even cutting 5 mph off your freeway speed—perhaps going from 75 mph to 70 mph—will cut down your car's energy use significantly. Some EVs now offer an option in their navigation that chooses the route with the lowest overall energy consumption. These routes aren't necessarily the quickest or the shortest. Instead, they often promote the use of slower back roads, which tend to drain less energy than faster interstate highways.
Use the Cruise
Cruise control has evolved into a very sophisticated software-driven feature. Adaptive cruise control's ability to make minute adjustments is virtually always more energy-efficient than using our big fat foot to do the same thing.
In the case of EVs, that difference can matter more if the car has predictive cruise control. Such systems make adjustments in speed based on information gleaned from its GPS coordinates, effectively allowing your car to "know" what's ahead of it, whether that's an exit that requires slowing down or a hill that requires extra power delivered gradually.
Try Eco Mode
Virtually all cars now have more than one driving mode. Often this includes a dedicated "Eco" mode that reduces energy consumption by reducing accelerator response and acceleration rates, turning down the climate control, and sometimes even limiting top speed. We've found these Eco modes vary greatly: some are only noticeable at the margins, others are close to intolerable if you want to keep up with traffic. Test your car's Eco mode out; many EVs will show an immediate increase in displayed range if you switch into it.
Tune Your Climate Control
Climate control—heating and cooling the cabin—uses more energy than all the other accessories combined, but it's an area some drivers forget while trying to cut energy use. Some EVs now have a driver-only mode that directs cool or warm air only to the driver, rather than trying to keep the entire cabin at the same temperature.
Of course, the oldest EV trick is to use your seat heater and steering-wheel heater in cold temperatures instead of summoning heat from the climate system. It's well known that if your hands and your backside feel warmer, you do, too. We recommend keeping the cabin temperature five degrees above (in summer) or below (in winter) from where you'd normally set it, and then either direct the air vents toward you or use those heaters. You may not even notice the difference.
Coast When You Can
A few EVs enable the driver to disengage regen entirely, allowing the car to sail along as if it's in neutral. It's an eerie feeling at first, as a car optimized for low rolling resistance will glide an amazingly long way without losing much speed.
That makes this technique inadvisable in dense city and suburban traffic, but it works beautifully on lesser-traveled roads and on interstates—so long as you avoid using it on downgrades and don't work the brakes too hard. In cars with one-pedal driving capability, you technically can get the car into a coasting mode with sensitive use of the accelerator—by holding it at the point between acceleration and regen braking. Still, it's a difficult dance to maintain, and you're better off avoiding it. Regardless of what you decide, never, ever shift your EV into "neutral" to get it to coast.
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