We tested how air-con, lights and heated seats affect an electric car’s battery

Your electric car’s battery is already at 60%. It’s getting late and there’s still another hour of driving to do yet – but then, disaster. A standstill traffic jam. You’re not going anywhere soon and naturally your eyes drift to how much battery power you have left. Will your electric car make it?

Electric cars are still relatively new and there is a lot of misinformation out there about battery range, including dystopian style warnings of dormant electric cars strewn across our roads because the air-con (or lights, or similar) drained the battery in a traffic jam.

But is this for real or can electric cars cope in dormant traffic? We put it to the test and simulated a traffic jam in an electric SUV, the VW ID.4.

Electric cars and traffic jams – here’s what we did
Coming to a halt in a traffic jam in an electric car can be nerve wracking, and you’ll likely question whether you can still listen to the radio or keep the air-con going.

We simulated a traffic jam in a VW ID.4 electric SUV and had:

Music streaming through Android Auto
Both front heated seats turned up to max
Air-con going
Dipped headlights on (not on automatic, but manually on)
Tablet plugged into a USB socket playing a film.

And here’s what happened:
As you can see in our video, above, in just over an hour and 15 minutes:

We lost just 2% of battery from a 77kWh battery
That’s the equivalent of only 8 miles of range.
We then took the car for a short drive to make sure the car hadn’t given us an overly optimistic remaining range based on the car’s lack of movement. In this case, it hadn’t.

Read more: which?

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Nine-out-of-10 electric vehicle owners do not see themselves ever switching back to diesel or petrol cars.

According to the latest research by What Car?, when asked why, 65% of owners gave the reason that electric cars are better for the environment, while 62% said the tech and cars will only improve in the future, so they see no reason to switch over.

Lower running costs were highlighted by 56% of owners, while 50% said they believe electric vehicles are better to drive. The 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was also cited as a reason for not switching back by 36% of respondents.

For the 10% who said they are considering going back to petrol or diesel cars in the future, having a vehicle with better range was given as the main reason by 51% of respondents.

The need to own a cheaper car in the future had 20% of responses, while 15% said they believed petrol and diesel technology will improve in the future, making them more sustainable.

The study also asked electric and plug-in hybrid owners why they chose their vehicle in the first place, with 65% stating they wanted to own a car that was better for the environment.

Read more: MOTORTRADER.com

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To every age dogged with pollution, accidents and congestion, the transport solution for the next generation seems obvious – but the same problems keep coming back

In the 1890s, the biggest cities of the western world faced a mounting problem. Horse-drawn vehicles had been in use for thousands of years, and it was hard to imagine life without them. But as the number of such vehicles increased during the 19th century, the drawbacks of using horses in densely populated cities were becoming ever more apparent.

In particular, the accumulation of horse manure on the streets, and the associated stench, were impossible to miss. By the 1890s, about 300,000 horses were working on the streets of London, and more than 150,000 in New York City. Each of these horses produced an average of 10kg of manure a day, plus about a litre of urine. Collecting and removing thousands of tonnes of waste from stables and streets proved increasingly difficult.

The problem had been building up for decades. A newspaper editor in New York City said in 1857 that “with the exception of a very few thoroughfares, all the streets are one mass of reeking, disgusting filth, which in some places is piled to such a height as to render them almost impassable to vehicles”. As well as filling the air with a terrible stench, the abundance of horse manure turned streets into muddy cesspools whenever it rained. An eyewitness account from London in the 1890s describes the “mud” (the accepted euphemism among prudish Victorians) that often flooded the Strand, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, as having the consistency of thick pea soup. Passing vehicles “would fling sheets of such soup – where not intercepted by trousers or skirts – completely across the pavement”, spattering and staining nearby houses and shop fronts. Manure collected from the streets was piled up at dumps dotted around major towns and cities. Huge piles of manure also built up next to stables and provided an attractive environment for flies.

All of this was bad for public health. The board of health’s statisticians in New York City found higher levels of infectious disease “in dwellings and schools within 50 feet of stables than in remoter locations”, the New York Times reported in 1894. According to one turn-of-the-century calculation, 20,000 New Yorkers died annually from “maladies that fly in the dust”, clear evidence of the dangers posed to health by reliance on horses. To make matters worse, horses were frequently overworked, and when they dropped dead, their bodies were often left rotting on the streets for several days before being dismembered and removed, posing a further health risk. By the 1880s, 15,000 dead horses were being removed from the streets of New York City each year.

Paradoxically, the advent of the steam locomotive and the construction of intercity railway links, starting in the 1830s, had helped make the problem worse. Faster and more efficient transport between cities increased the demand for rapid transport of people and goods within them, which required a greater number of horse-drawn vehicles. “Our dependence on the horse has grown almost pari passu [step for step] with our dependence on steam,” noted one observer in 1872. The result was more horses, more manure – and steadily worsening congestion. One observer in 1870 wrote that Broadway in Manhattan was “almost impassable” at some times of the day. And when the traffic did move, it was deafening, as metal horseshoes and iron-rimmed wheels clattered over uneven surfaces. Straw was sometimes strewn on roads outside hospitals, and some private houses, to reduce the din.

Pollution, congestion and noise were merely the most obvious manifestations of a deeper dependency. An outbreak of equine influenza in North America in October 1872 incapacitated all horses and mules for several weeks, providing a stark reminder of society’s reliance on animal power. The New York Times noted “the disappearance of trucks, drays, express-wagons and general vehicles” from the streets. “The present epidemic has brought us face to face with the startling fact that the sudden loss of horse labor would totally disorganize our industry and commerce,” noted the Nation. Horses and stables, the newspaper observed, “are wheels in our great social machine, the stoppage of which means injury to all classes and conditions of persons, injury to commerce, to agriculture, to trade, to social life”.

Yet societies on both sides of the Atlantic continued to become steadily more dependent on horses. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of horses in American cities grew fourfold, while the human population merely doubled. By the turn of the century there was one horse for every 10 people in Britain, and one for every four in the US. Providing hay and oats for horses required vast areas of farmland, reducing the space available to grow food for people. Feeding the US’s 20 million horses required one-third of its total crop area, while Britain’s 3.5 million horses had long been reliant on imported fodder.

Horses had become both indispensable and unsustainable. To advocates of a newly emerging technology, the solution seemed obvious: get rid of horses and replace them with self-propelling motor vehicles, known at the time as horseless carriages. Today, we call them cars.

In recent years this transition has been cited as evidence of the power of innovation, and an example of how simple technological fixes to seemingly intractable problems will show up just when they are needed – so there is no need to worry about climate change, for instance. Yet it should instead be seen as a cautionary tale in the other direction: that what looks like a quick fix today may well end up having far-reaching and unintended consequences tomorrow. The switch from horses to cars was not the neat and timely technological solution that it might seem, because cars changed the world in all kinds of unanticipated ways – from the geography of cities to the geopolitics of oil – and created many problems of their own.

Read more: The Guardian

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ELECTRIC car owners can travel to some of the UK’s most stunning beaches for staycation trips on a single charge.

Analysis from LeaseCar has shown drivers can travel to locations such as Newquay Beach, Eastbourne and Brighton Pier with a range of electric vehicles. The warning comes as staycations are expected to soar in 2021 while electric car ranges continue to rise with many vehicles now capable of over 250 miles.

A spokesperson said: ”With travel still limited in and out of the UK Brits are likely to be going on plenty of road trips this summer.

“So we’ve done some research and located the best coastal locations that these popular electric cars would make it to on a single charge.

“There is always a worry that you might not make it to your destination off of one charge, so we’ve taken the hassle out of finding the best summer spots to take your vehicle.”

Ford Mustang Mach-E
LeaseCar says the most impressive electric car they tested was the Ford Mustang Mach-E which is capable of 260 miles on one charge.

They said this would take you from the centre of Birmingham all the way down to Newquay Beach.

However, experts at Waze have warned tourist areas such as Cornwall, Devon and the Lake District would be some of the worst affected roads.

Kia e-Niro
Drivers can travel from Birmingham to Eastbourne in the affordable Kia e-Niro.

The car is fitted with a 64kWh battery which provides a substantial increase compared to the old 32kWh battery.

This new tool provides an extra 100 miles meaning the car is now capable of 230 miles.

Mercedes EQC
LeaseCar says drivers can travel to the South Coast on just one charge using the new Mercedes EQC.

The experts said the model provides a “comfortable journey” as well as 230 miles of range.

Read more: EXPRESS

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