Comment by ekr
3 days ago
What people care about when talking about EVs and consumption is generally how much distance they can cover. If you take away the distance factor and just report power, it becomes meaningless/almost useless.
3 days ago
What people care about when talking about EVs and consumption is generally how much distance they can cover. If you take away the distance factor and just report power, it becomes meaningless/almost useless.
Many people think of driving in time rather than distance. I'd say it's actually more common to say a city is 3 hours away rather than 200 miles.
What makes kW less useful is really just that most EVs don't advertise their capacity very prominently. But if you knew you had an 80 kWh battery and the car uses 20 kW at freeway speeds, then it's easy to see that it'll drive for 4 hours.
The problem with this is that destinations are a fixed distance away, whereas their time distance is not fixed. In most journeys people want to reach a specific place rather than drive for a given amount of time.
I understand all this but the most important question for me is definitely still "how much distance can I cover on a charge"? That's why I prefer kWh/100km.
Directly reporting required power is still comparable among vehicles: 55kW vs 49kW, eg
Which is definitely less intuitive because it hasn't been introduced to the public, but is interchangeable in the same quirky way we already compare MPG (Distance/Volume) with lt/100KM (Volume/Distance)