I suppose that's on a flat track with no wind, and not stop & go.
For someone who had driven ICE vehicles all my life, it took me a little while to get a handle on the range factors an EV has...they're a little different than an ICE vehicle. For starters, hard acceleration has little to no effect on the range you'll get -- hard to believe, but pretty much true. Of course accelerating harder draws more current from the battery, but you get up to speed quicker so you're not accelerating as long. On an EV, efficiency stays pretty high even under hard acceleration, so it's almost a wash, whereas on an ICE vehicle, accelerating hard reduces the motor's efficiency and can flush fuel down the drain pretty quickly.
Starting and stopping also isn't as much of a major factor as you might think. Of course lots of starting and stopping does have an effect, but because you spend more time going slower under circumstances like that, it really doesn't drop your range that much.
That's because the overwhelmingly dominant thing that will reduce your range is speed. Under pretty much all circumstances, the slower you go, the more range you'll have. EVs ALWAYS do better on the EPA city mileage loop than on the highway loop, just because the speeds are lower. Of all the things that eat your battery's charge, wind drag is by far the biggest factor, and anything you can do to reduce that effect will increase your range. Since wind drag goes up as the cube of road speed, slowing down will have a huge impact on your range.
It's interesting to note that all vehicles experience the same effect -- slowing down in your Dodge will always reduce the losses due to wind drag as well. The fact that most vehicles get better mileage on the freeway than around town is really an indictment of their lousy performance around town. An ICE vehicle's efficiency is really hideous under that usage model.
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Topic: 2010 DS Range (Miles) (Read 1050 times)