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.
Volkswagen ID 4 (Image: Volkswagen.co.uk)
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.
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