Head winds over 20 are disastrous and for electric vehicles, more so, or maybe the same..I know. Didn't fill up and ran into 25 mph headwinds and almost ran out of gas.
I drove for 6 hours on I 25 south from Denver to NM. The speed limit is 75 so I started my drive with 85 dialed into the cruise control. After I saw the first trooper I dialed back to 80 and the MPG increase was so dramatic I finished my trip at 80 MPH. Average MPG was 42+ and of course I never needed to stop for gas.
35m/s is close to 78.9 mph so adding driving into the wind at 85 mph would take over twice the horsepower just to over come wind resistance so somewhere around 75 horsepower. Mpg gets nasty really quick.
I got ~38 mpg (36 calc’d the old way) on 1,500 trip from no GA to so FL and back. Elevation drop and gain 1,200 ft. 70 mph mostly on cruise. Was a bit disappointed, but maybe my result was not so bad.
Net gain or drop in elevation? Hilly (mountainous), I think. Lots of battery regen on the down hills (wi more electric available for hybrid in the up hills)? 42+ sounds real good.
Yes, altitude/hills are a factor. The trip I make every few months is Denver to Breckinridge. On the 90 miles up I enjoy the power and drive 80+ mph which gives me 32mpg. Coming down I get 56mpg so the average is 44mpg. I am very happy with that mpg and the range of +400 miles means I never need to get gas in the mountains.
Unfortunately, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. Of the early electric converting people in California, I understand that 20 percent switched back to gasoline. Maybe this is why they banned future sales of gasoline powered cars. The attraction of cheap recharging has mostly evaporated already and local governments are starting to tax electricity used to recharge vehicles. The infrastructure is still a long way from making electric cars a convenient and economically viable alternative for most people.
Yup, people are realizing that if you want to park in your driveway or in front of your house or apartment then you're not charging causing range anxiety, promised range is WAY less than what people are seeing in the real world which is a whopping 30% less than advertised, we're now starting to see some of the charging stations that were new are broken and out of repair, the rates when charging away from home went from free to way more expensive than at home (typically more expensive than gasoline would have been), and there's more competition for charging spots and in fact its getting so bad that people are even shooting each other over them:
Not our experience at all in Oregon. Only one time and it was one out of 15 chargers and it was out for 1 day. We have owned a Model 3 for for 2 years and have traveled all over the state with absoultly no problems at Tesla charge stations. 51 new chargers just up and running on Interstate 5 above Calif. And Real world distance per charge..It all DEPENDS how you drive. I travel at or just under 70 and am getting to charging stations without any problems. The 353 miles per charge would only happen if you drove at 30 mph and at a constant speed. We usually go 100 to 150 miles between chargers so that the time to recharge is maybe 15 minutes. If you go from 100% charge to 10% it does take a long time to recharge. 90% and more of our charging is done at home....using our rates of .09 cents per kwh, it costs us around $7 to go 300 miles. Commercial charging stations, including Tesla, charge around 40 Cents per kwh...Big difference.
Could be region specific, but I was going by a recent study by Berkeley (a pro-EV liberal university) that found out of 656 public fast chargers in the bay area that only 72.5% were in working order. Popular youtuber did his cross country EV thing that I watched and he went to a hotel and found that most of the chargers were broken and the ones that weren't were occupied.
