If you’ve ever watched an electric car’s quoted range evaporate faster than a Highveld puddle in summer, you’re not alone. But before you blame the battery, consider this: the biggest gap between what an EV promises and what it delivers usually comes down to speed, temperature and driver habit. And two of those sit firmly in your hands.
Speed is the single biggest culprit. Air resistance climbs steeply the faster you go, and an EV feels that drag more acutely than a petrol car because there’s no engine efficiency curve working in the opposite direction. A petrol engine, counterintuitively, runs better the harder it works, which masks some of the cost of speed.
An electric motor is already near its best, so nothing gets hidden. The difference between 120 km/h and 130 km/h on the N1 will affect your remaining range more than almost anything else you do that day.
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Regenerative braking is the second lever. Lifting off early and letting the car slow itself recovers energy that friction braking would otherwise throw away as heat. In stop-start traffic, where a combustion car is at its worst, an electrified vehicle is at its most efficient — provided the driver anticipates rather than reacts.
Pre-conditioning matters more than most owners realise. Heating or cooling the cabin while the car is still plugged in draws from the wall rather than the battery. On a cold Highveld morning, that’s several kilometres of range you keep in reserve.
“Most of this is just smoother driving,” says Vusi Machie, Product and Pricing Manager at Volvo Car South Africa. “The car rewards someone who looks further ahead. That was true before electrification. It is simply easier to measure now.”
Charging habits are the other half of the equation. For daily use, most manufacturers suggest keeping the battery between roughly 20% and 80% rather than routinely charging to full, and charging overnight at home on the lowest tariff available. Rapid public charging is best kept for journeys that genuinely need it.
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Owners whose vehicles are subject to an active service action should follow the specific guidance issued to them directly, which takes precedence over any general advice.
Planning helps too. Setting a charging stop as a destination lets the car pre-condition the battery on approach, so it arrives at a temperature that can accept power quickly. Arriving with a cold pack is one of the more common reasons a charge takes longer than expected.
“None of this is about driving carefully in the sense of driving slowly,” Machie says. “It is about spending energy where you want it rather than where the car loses it by default.”
The technology does most of the work. The remainder is habit — and habit is the part that compounds.
Colin Windell for Colin-on-Cars in association with
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