Many people are hesitant about EV ownership citing poor range and long charging times as the main reasons. But what if an electric car could travel 1,000 miles in a single day? Surely that should alleviate those worries, right?
In his newest video, Engineering Explained‘s Jason Fenske attempts to do exactly that by taking on the lengthy trip in his Tesla Model 3.
He began his experiment by first conducting a Twitter poll asking what was the maximum distance people would be willing to drive in a day. Of the 165,000 people that responded, 91 percent said they would not go further than 1,000 miles (1,609 km), and 59 percent said they wouldn’t even go more than 500 miles (805 km).
Fenske then figured that 1,000 miles would be his goal since his data suggested that the majority wouldn’t even want to cover half that distance. At an average speed of 59 mph (95 km/h), his trip took 16 hours and 30 minutes in total. 14 hours and 6 minutes were spent actually driving, while 2 hours and 24 minutes were spent charging, which meant that charging accounted for about one out of every five minutes of driving.
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The charging in total cost around $89, and he calculated that a gas car getting 30 mpg would cost about $100. However, 30 mpg is quite generous for a gas car with as much power as the Model 3, so figuring more like 20 mpg, that number came out to a much higher $200. That being said, an ICE-powered car would have likely gotten to the destination much quicker than the Tesla, as over the 6 stops made for charging, the average stop time was reported to be 24 minutes.
In the end, the Model 3 made it 973 miles in a day, and according to Fenske, he only stopped there because he had reached his hotel, although the car did have the range to go the full 1,000 miles.