Does familiarity breed contempt, or confidence? That depends on a lot of factors, but a recent study showed that after about 3 months of electric vehicle ownership, EV drivers gain confidence and drive further afield. Familiarity can breed range confidence rather than range anxiety, so please don’t buy into the range anxiety crap being sold to you by some car companies.
The study, published in November 2013 in Transport Policy
, gave a MiniE to 87 drivers and tracked their behavior over several months. After three months their assessment of driving range increased quite a bit.
As we see in this chart, a large portion of them realized their real driving needs are small, with 50% or so driving less than 100 kilometers a week, and 80% driving less than 70 kilometers a day.
What happened over the course of the trial is the participants adjusted their perceived range requirement downward. In other words, real experience with electric car driving gave real practical education about real driving range needs.
This reminds me of my early days of owning an electric vehicle. I’d take it out for a spin just to experiment with riding range – that is, a “range test”. I hear of others doing the same thing, and I think what’s going on is a testing of this new thing to see if we can trust it.
- Highway design could decrease death and injury risk, if “we” chose smarter designs - March 28, 2015
- GM really did trademark “range anxiety”, only later to abandon that mark - March 25, 2015
- US Government releases new regulations on hydraulic fracturing, that some call “toothless” - March 20, 2015
- Tesla Motors magic pill to solve range anxiety doesn’t quite instill range confidence - March 19, 2015
- Update on Galena IL oil train – 21 cars involved, which were the supposedly safer CP1232 design - March 7, 2015
- Another oil bomb train – why are they shipping crude oil by train? – Symptoms of fossil fuel addiction - March 6, 2015
- Chevron relinquishes fracking in Romania, as part of broader pull-out from Eastern European fracking operations - February 22, 2015
- Answer anti- electric car articles with truth and pride – truth outshines all distortions - February 19, 2015
- Apple taking big risk on developing a car? Please, Apple, don’t go there! - February 16, 2015
- Toyota, Nissan, Honda working on Japanese fuel cell infrastructure for Japanese government - February 12, 2015
