Several purchase criteria stand out when it comes to acquiring an electric car. Autonomy is clearly one of them. This is why we wanted to know the minimum radius of action that would take you over the course. This was the subject of our survey of the week.
In France, the share of electric cars is increasing from year to year: between January and July 2022, it stood for example at 12.1%, an increase of 31.6% compared to 2021, the figures told us. from AAA Data. Over the months, the offer grows, technologies improve (a model with 1000 km of autonomy will land in Europe), although prices tend to increase, crisis obliges.
Buying an electric car is an important financial act. It is therefore normal that you closely scrutinize the market, the models and especially their characteristics. Among them, autonomy is undeniably one of the main purchase criteria. A range that is too small could put some people off, especially for long trips.
Define uses
However, a few important points should be remembered. On average, the French cover a daily distance of about thirty kilometers by car. In this case, a connected vehicle with overflowing autonomy would have very little use. It would be more useful for long journeys.
Long journeys, precisely, are much rarer. They intervene during the holidays – either a few times a year – or on certain long weekends. In any case, fast charges come to the rescue to recover a full energy in no time.
For example, a Kia EV6 (77 kWh, Propulsion version) recovers 197 km in 10 minutes of charging, and even 309 kilometers in 20 minutes. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 (73 kWh, Propulsion version) recovers 164 km in 10 minutes and 273 km in 20 minutes. In short, waiting times can be short depending on the model.
600 km, the perfect range?
Due to a bug in our survey module, few of you responded to our question of the week, but the results are quite marked all the same.
If some people advocate overflowing autonomy to legitimize the purchase of an electric car, others, like Elon Musk, see no point in it. The boss of Tesla had spoken on this subject, arguing that this threshold is a misinterpretation: “you’d be dragging around unnecessary battery mass, which degrades acceleration, handling and efficiency“, he advanced.
In short, the autonomy of an electric car remains one of the cornerstones of the product. For more than a third of you, the minimum range to take the plunge is 600 km, while a quarter of you prefer not to take any risks and bet on 800 km.
Finally, note a tie for the answers 400 and 1000 km with 18% of the votes.
What’s most interesting isn’t so much the survey responses as the accompanying comments. Several of you mentioned not the autonomy, but the network of chargers as well as the waiting time necessary for refueling. Noext specifies for example that “with my thermal anywhere in France I’m never more than 5 min from a station and 5 min to refuel», a sentence that sums up the opinion of many of you. It is also necessary that the announced autonomy is not just a WLTP cycle calculation, but a minimum insurance, in winter as in summer.
Ideally, for many of you, including InfinityX, “the most important thing is that the recharge between 20 and 80% is done in 10 to 15 minutes, just enough time to go to the toilet and stretch a little“.
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