Journalists from AutoBest jury from all around Europe took 10 of the best-selling EV’s with range of at least 200 kilometers.

While majority of people are still convinced, that electricity-driven cars are not every day usable, there are car manufacturers, promising range of a couple of hundred kilometers on a single charged. But in the end, what is The number or range an electric car on a single charge to be considered every day usable?

That was one of the questions Autobest members (including our Ediotr in Chief Dusan Lukic) were facing with when preparing first ever Independent Comparative Real Range EV test. We have thus decided to include 10 cars with a range of 200 kilometers. “This distance is far beyond any daily commuting in Europe, making any of these cars suitable for everyday drive. It is a crucial achievement of the car industry, signalling the end of the range anxiety," said Dan Vardie, Founder & Chairman of AUTOBEST.

Testing of chosen cars was made in Barcelona, partially on the premises of the famous Catalunya Curcuit and with a help of Coches.net portal. Actual start and finish of the test was set on the circuit. In between, drivers were set on 180 kilometers long trip thru urban areas, local roads and motorways before returning back to circuit where they were proceeding with driving with the speed of 70 kilometers until the batteries were empty. To get the most accurate data, drivers were switching between cars after every 30-40 kilometers and the route was driven twice to get a proper average data.

As mentioned, ten cars were used during the test: BMW i3, Hyundai Ioniq EV, Jaguar I-Pace, Kia Soul, Nissan Leaf, Opel Ampera-e, Renault Zoe, 4 Tesla Model X in Model S and Volkswagen Golf-e. Apart from Jaguar all the cars were stock, production cars, whereas the Brit was an early pre-production car from official reveal of the car. Therefore, the car did not have the latest software which Jaguar is using in new cars of this type, which contributed to the result thst was worse than expected.

Speaking strictly about the range, both Tesla cars, Model X and Model S, performed the best with making 400.1 and 422,7 kilometers on a single charge. However, both cars were equipped with 100 kWh battery packs, strongest ones available and also much stronger than any other car had. So to really get the picture of efficiency, we had set two indexes; first one comparing the WLTP range with real world data while the second one measuring consumption of the energy.

In the first category, Kia Soul was the winner. While according to WLTP the car only had 185 km of total range in the end it actually managed to cover 220.3 kilometers, which is 118 percent of WLTP estimated value. Three other cars – i3, Ioniq and Golf – also managed to ‘beat’ WLTP value, while Ampera-e managed to score 99,3 percent. On the other end of the scale was Jaguar with only 65 percent.

While both Tesla cars scored the best result in range, they however did very poorly on consumption of electricity, as they only managed to drive four (Model X) and 4,23 kilometers (Model S) on a single kWh. The only car performing worse was Jaguar i-Pace, making 3,48 kilometers. Apart from those – and Nissan Leaf – all the other cars managed to pass six-kilometer mark, while BMW i3 (6,98 kilometers) and Hyundai Ioniq almost reaching seventh kilometer.

Dan Vardie, Chairman of Autobest Jury, explains: “This was not a performance or a handling test and not even a maximum range test. Our goal was to check the real range of all those models to know how far it was from the announced WLTP figures (and having a reference to old NEDC), and to show the potential users of these vehicles what real range they can expect if they buy an electric car. However, AUTOBEST is not claiming that the released figures are the 'real-life’ range for the average customer of Europe, coming from a scientific approach. The figures for this test are for reference only, are authentic and represent the reality of our performed test in Barcelona surroundings. Under our ECOBEST Challenge project umbrella, we are also working to improve the test for next year in a more scientific way.”

 

July 24, 2018 Driving photo: Jaguar

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