EV Range Test Results

Before we get started, we want to let you know that the Talking Cars team is going to

be in New York City for this year's New York Auto Show and we want to meet up with you,

our fans of the podcast.

We'll be at the Canucks Sports Bar in Manhattan on Wednesday, April 1st at 5pm.

Come in for a bite.

We'll be talking about what we saw at the show and handing out some groovy Consumer

Reports swag.

So, if you're in the neighborhood, stop by because we'd love to talk cars with you.

And now on to the episode.

Welcome back to the Talking Cars podcast.

I'm Alex Isaac.

I'm Michael Croson.

And I'm Avery Wishigrad.

And Avery, welcome to the podcast.

You may have seen him before on one of our end of year shows, but you are an automotive

engineer here at CR on the testing team.

And today we are talking about our EV range test and the results from the most recent

kind of season of testing.

We do this over the summer as we'll talk about, but both of you guys contribute and kind of

run this test and collect a lot of the data and analyze it and everything.

So, it's awesome to have you both here.

So, we're going to go through the results.

We have them posted on our website so you can go find all the nitty gritty details,

but essentially we ran a bunch of EVs through our tests this year.

So, Mike, let's start with you.

Tell us a little bit about what this test actually is and how we conduct it.

Yeah, so it is a real world highway range test for these electric vehicles.

And we conduct it at 70 miles an hour out on highways in Connecticut.

And we have test parameters and conditions set up that we try to basically be as fair

as we can to every different car.

You know, we can't test them all on the same day.

So, we have a weather range or temperature range, I should say.

You know, we don't run in the rain and things like that.

And all of our drivers are trained to in both the data collection side,

but also just how we operate the vehicle so we can be as even across the board in our testing.

Right.

And we just want to see how far will these cars go on the highway

on a single charge at 70 miles an hour.

Right, right.

And I mean, why?

Why are we doing this, right?

I mean, this is a lot of work, right, to drive what amounts to hours.

Yeah, I mean, some people spend their summer at the beach.

We spend them in electric vehicles on the highway.

So, the why is if you own an electric vehicle or you're thinking of an electric vehicle,

when you're driving to and from work, you know, you're sort of within your little bubble, right?

You have your maybe your home charging infrastructure,

you know the places where you can charge on the road where you go.

But if you're thinking about doing a road trip in one, you're away from home,

it'd be nice to know how far the car will go, what you can expect.

It would be nice to know how the vehicle behaves as it gets low on state of charge

because you don't know necessarily where you're going to be able to charge.

You're out on the road, you know, you're hopefully not using your phone,

you're using the native nav.

You have a co-pilot who's trying to find that charging location.

It's just a nice to be able to kind of have an understanding of what this car is going to do.

Yeah, you know, that if you have an EV with 300 miles of range,

it becomes somewhat of a convenience during the week, right?

Or, you know, you're commuting, maybe you don't have to charge it every single day.

But when you're going on that long trip to an unfamiliar place,

that's when you really need to know, we feel, how far your car is going to be able to go.

You might push to a lower SOC on a road trip than you do in your average day-to-day,

which may or may not be a good idea.

You know, at least if you know I'm headed home and it usually takes me 12% to get there.

I'm very comfortable pushing that car on the way home.

As it turns out, I'm actually very comfortable pushing a car now,

really low anyway, having done all of this.

And spoiler alert, that depends what car you're in.

It sure does.

What brand you're in, especially.

Right, right.

So a little bit more on how we do this, right?

Because there are some other, you know, outlets or whatever that are doing tests.

And, you know, it helps that we buy all the cars, right?

Because we can be a little bit more choosy on the day and be a little bit more consistent.

But how about getting them down to their low SOC, right?

That can be a little bit of a sketchy endeavor at times, right?

So how do we go about that?

So we're out on the highway and we are just sort of monitoring.

And of course the car has its SOC, it has its range.

Some do, some don't.

It depends on the vehicle.

But as a driver, especially after doing this many, many times,

you get pretty good at sort of sensing how a car is going to do towards the end.

But there are surprises that do come up.

I think Avery's going to tell us about one.

Yeah, because ultimately, I mean in this story,

I've driven these cars, you've driven them.

Avery's driven them.

Mike Quincy's driven them.

Joe's driven them.

We have a bunch of people that drive them.

But from, you know, we're the people sending other people out to do this test.

We don't want people dying on the side of the highway.

The cars dying.

Or the people too, for that matter.

But the cars, right.

So, you know, you want to be able to pull off the highway safely.

Right.

So theoretically, we're leaving a little bit on the table.

But the idea is we drive the car to an indicated zero SOC and zero range.

And they generally happen pretty close to about a mile or so from each other.

Sometimes you'll hit one just before the other kind of thing.

They don't necessarily both take over at the same time.

So but that comes into play, right?

So it's a stretch of highway that we're very familiar with.

Actually mapped all of the exits.

You're like, this is an exit you don't want to get off.

This is a good exit.

There's shade here, you know, to park the car.

Because we're doing this the summer.

It could be 85 degrees and sunny.

And you've been in a car all day and you're already kind of tired.

And a lot of these EVs have the glass roof.

So like you've had the sun beating down on you and things like that.

Right.

And we're trying to control for the fact that, you know,

ultimately the car has to sit for a little bit before we bring it back to the track.

We're trying to not sit there with the AC on.

Right.

So we shade, get inside and try to keep things as consistent.

And we do tow the car back again because we don't want the car

grinding to a halt on the side of the highway.

So we pull off at zero.

We have a tow company that is on call.

They know we're out there.

And we've gotten all of us as drivers have gotten pretty good at

knowing where we're going to end.

But they pick us up, bring us back to the track.

And then we do finish the test here on the track.

So it's a controlled environment.

So when the car does grind to a halt, it's a safe way in a controlled way to finish the test.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Avery, another kind of some of the feedback we hear and totally we recognize this too is that

while it's natural to compare what we're doing to the EPA in terms of the numbers we get,

how is this different than what the EPA is doing?

Because it is quite different.

Yeah.

So the EPA's range testing requirements are basically laboratory tests.

There's set dynamometer cycles that manufacturers run.

Their target for reporting is 55% city, 45% highway.

And there's several different methods where manufacturers can report that.

There's a five cycle test method.

It can be substituted with the two cycle test method.

But the point is this is a laboratory test and it's reported by the manufacturers.

With the EPA basically reserving the right to confirm or deny.

Self certification.

Right, self certification.

And because of that, manufacturers, some, their EPA range is lower than it actually is.

Others, it's higher than it actually is.

Which isn't unexpected, right?

Because we're doing real world.

That's laboratory.

There's two different methods, as you pointed out, which are going to yield potentially

different results, even if you put the same card through them.

And maybe counterintuitively, if you're used to a gas car, as EVs are generally less

efficient on the highway.

That's right.

Take a combined cycle and then all of a sudden you're comparing it to just going 70 non-stop.

All else the same.

You would expect that car to actually do worse in that situation, right?

Worse in terms of less range, less efficient.

Yeah.

And I think generally that's true, but there are some cars where they do better.

Again, it varies and we'll get into that.

Yeah, yeah.

So speaking of that, well, before we get into the trends, and you know, this is going to be us

going full nerd on EVs and the results.

And of course, we can't cover everything.

So you're going to be able to find even more of that on our website.

But before we get to some of the trends and some of the observations,

Mike, if you could tell us, and Avery, just some of the test conditions, right?

How do we control this?

You know, of course, we've mentioned temperature ranges and things like that.

Climate use is an obvious one, but we go further than that and we really try to

make sure that the cars are as comparable as we can, right?

Yeah. So you mentioned earlier that we buy and we own all these cars,

which is great because we can choose when to do them.

And famously, Consumer Reports, when we test cars, we put 2000 braking miles before we begin any

testing.

And we have a similar situation here with these EVs.

And of course, we're testing these cars as part of the regular test program too.

So we wait till they have at least 2500 miles of driving on them.

And then we cap that at 9000 miles.

We want to have a narrow window because as an EV ages, a couple of things happen.

The tires get worn down and that changes efficiency.

But also, there's the more charging cycles that have happened out of battery.

The batteries can degrade over time.

So we have this mileage window where we test the vehicles.

We want some charged cycles through that battery.

Correct. Yeah, we don't want a brand new car, you know, straight off the lot and go do the test.

And then our temperature range is 70 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

So we need to monitor that.

And, you know, depending on when you're doing it, late in the season,

like temperatures do start to kind of drop in the afternoon.

And so we've had some close calls on that.

But yeah, you know, this is this is one in particular where we get, you know,

yeah, just getting in front of some of the criticism, right?

Ultimately, we want to do this test in one day.

And if we're talking about, I don't know,

Silverado EV where we got 450 hours, hours and hours.

So we need to give ourselves enough room to actually complete the test.

So one thing to point out about that temperature range is that's the temperature at our track,

right? We have a weather station at our track.

It's very accurate.

And that's where we're measuring the temperature.

So it is possible, theoretically, that 50 miles away when we're on our route,

the temperature is a few degrees different.

But we don't have an accurate way to measure that.

So this is at our track.

And yeah, it's more about being consistent, right?

Yep, exactly.

Yep.

And wind matters, you know, because you're essentially fighting wind resistance as you're

driving, so maximum of 15 miles per hour measured at the track.

We check it when we start, when we end, as long as we were, you know,

overall within that range, it is a good test.

And then we want a clear, so ideally no cloud or partially cloud.

We don't want total cloud cover because sun load matters when it comes to the climate systems.

And then no rain because, I mean, yeah, okay, you're running windshield wipers and things,

but it's really the water that the tires are evacuating on the roadway.

That's a lot of, we all know water is heavy.

So that's a lot of effort that happens.

That would greatly reduce.

And you're running wipers at that point and things.

And would have an effect.

Right, absolutely.

And I'll say the route that we use is quite flat in terms of elevation gain over the distance.

But Avery, we also adjust the settings on a lot of these cars right in terms of what you're able

to use, not use, we talk to climate, but even beyond that.

Yeah, so a lot of these EVs now, they'll have different drive modes.

So if there is an eco drive mode, we'll use that.

If there is an eco climate mode, we'll use that as long as it's still able to maintain

the 72 degrees that we want.

And we do that because we, after talking and surveying and doing user studies,

frankly, on people who own these cars and really live with them,

they tend to do that when they're trying to squeak out extra rain.

So we want this to be representative.

Yep, yep.

And one way that this differs from our gas mileage on all the gas cars that we do,

we run those with no climate control on when we're testing miles per gallon.

But on these EVs, the climate system is working because it is part of the battery

conditioning system and cooling system and things like that.

So the system's already on.

Plus when we're doing fuels, and I drive fuels a lot,

on the highway, you're in the car for 45 minutes.

This is hours and hours and hours.

It would be a long, terrible day, you know, if it was 90 degrees outside with the glass roof.

And I wouldn't recommend anybody drive their EV with their climate off

to get that last little bit either.

I know we did a cold weather test without climate on, and that was terrible as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

Yeah, another thing is we use adaptive cruise control.

Yes.

We try to control our speed, not just with the car speedometer,

but we confirm with GPS as well, because some cars, their speedometer may be off by

a percentage point or two.

So ACC with the closest following distance.

And then drivers do have the option to use lane centering if they'd like.

I know some people do.

Some people don't.

It's kind of up to the driver at that point.

Right, right.

Yeah, so all of this in the name, I mean, even down to making sure headlights are in

auto if the car is assigned shade, keep it closed, right?

Things like that.

So really making sure that these, oh, and I'd be remiss not mentioned tire pressure.

Tire pressure.

We do alignments before.

Every car is charged overnight in the climate control garage.

And then we precondition the cars before we head out.

If the vehicle can be preconditioned, there's a, we can set a schedule.

We do that if not, as the tester, we know that ahead of time.

You just turn the car on, you set your climate control, and you just let the car run while

it's still plugged in to cool the cabin, just kind of precondition the battery.

That way we're as close across the board as we can.

You know, it's car to car and test to test.

Sounds like a lot when we lay it all out like that.

I mean, when we're doing this, we have that clipboard with all the parameters and all the

things we're writing down, and it is quite a lot, but I think it's what needs to happen

exactly to do an accurate test for sure.

So Aubrey, why don't you start walking us through some of the trends?

This is the, I think, third or fourth year that we've been doing this and refining things

over time, but this past year in particular, some of the trends that we noticed.

Yeah, so in general, what we find is some of the German brands like BMW and Mercedes

tend to go significantly past their EPA rating.

Other German brands like Audi are sometimes close to EPA or maybe slightly under.

The majority of the Altiums from GM, and that includes like the Acura ZDX, the Honda Prologue,

Cadillac Lyric and all those, those tend to be fairly close to the EPA range.

Tesla, again, very close to EPA in general.

And then surprisingly, some of these, you know, EV only startups like Rivian and Lucid,

at least in our testing, they underperform.

So I know the R1S dual max that we tested this year, it's got an EPA range of 410,

and our test result was what, 358?

Yep, some, yeah, their abouts.

Yeah.

Yeah, kind of interesting.

I mean, you know, using the different cycles, right, could possibly be a reason

that you might see some brands overperform and obviously different specs on these vehicles,

right, in terms of tires and things like that.

But yeah, Mike, any other trend, big trends that we saw?

I think, I mean, I think I already nailed those, but a couple of things to think about.

Talking about the Altium vehicles, we've tested those over a couple of years now.

Basically, last year was the first time we saw, I think it was the Blazer and the Lyric,

and then we've had some of the other cars now.

The earlier Altium, so the Lyric, the Blazer, the ZDX, were all difficult to recover.

And by that, I mean, when we run them till they stop moving, and the car is essentially

dead where it stands, the way we recover all the cars is we have a couple of vehicles here,

summary V, we used a hybrid F-150 for a while as well.

But they have a 240 charging plug or a plug in the back of the vehicle in the bed.

So we can plug a, essentially a home charger into it, put a little bit of charge in the vehicle

enough for it to power back up and move the vehicle off the track.

So we can plug it into a wall charger where we then can measure how much electricity is being

used to charge the vehicle back, and that goes into our efficiency calculations.

But these early Altiums, I would say most vehicles, 15 minutes plugged into the back of

a Cybertruck or a Silverado EV, charging at about three kilowatts, give or take, is enough to just

move it at a slow speed back to where you can plug it. But these early Altiums, they wouldn't

even power, they were totally dead. Even the first one, I went out there with a jump box,

thinking the 12 volt battery had died, and that wasn't the case. They take, in some cases, hours.

You have to get them up to about 15, 16, 17% in a very kind of car-to-car

before you could put them in gear and actually let them move. So that was unexpected,

and it was only sort of those early Altiums that did it. When we tested the Silverado EV,

it was about 15 minutes, and then that thing was able to move. So I mean, I was, you know,

it's already a long day in that car because you've gone 400 something miles. You're like,

now it's going to be like hours to recover this thing. You're setting yourself up mentally for

a long day, and then like 15 minutes in, it's like, I think I can move this car. It was able

to move it, and everything was fine. So the Equinox EV have that too? Well, the Equinox EV,

we had a different experience with. That's right. I drove that. Yeah. So I think this is where you

tell that story. Yeah. So when I drove the Equinox EV, I had done the range testing several times

already, and we had done other Altiums already, and they had all behaved similarly.

Identically, basically. And I think one of the things is, as you get low in your SOC and range,

especially for us running this test, because we know we're going to zero, we're trying to gauge

where we're going to get off the highway, you know, we basically have like a little cheat sheet of

how far it is between exit to exit, and these Altiums will change over at the end, and they

just say low, and you kind of lose the last little bit of that sort of gauge that you have.

I think at 15 miles of indicated range, it just disappears and says low. So where you've thought

you had 15 miles, now you think you have 15, but you're not sure because it just says low.

And again, in the past, we found that you have at least 50. You can go 15 and you'll probably

still be safe. So in this case, with the Equinox EV, and this was a 2024 model, I believe they've

updated a little bit since. So maybe it's maybe the behaviors changed, maybe they addressed whatever

issue I encountered, but right around 2% SoC, and again, don't know what the range was because it

just said low, I just rapidly started losing power, and I was not able to maintain 70 miles an hour.

So I basically had the accelerator pinned, I was losing speed, I was going up a very slight

incline on 395 on the highway we test on, and I just had to pull over to the shoulder, and,

you know, pedal pinned to the floor, I pull over, and I just rolled to a stop.

I think you were the only one that this has happened to. Everybody else is successful.

So once it came to a stop, where it said 2% SoC, maybe 30 seconds earlier,

it just said zero, zero range, zero everything, and I couldn't actually turn the car on. So

the way these LTMs, the way the high voltage battery switched when you when you press the

brake pedal, that's when the high voltage battery switches on. There's no power button. So every

time I tried to press the brake pedal, the screens would flash and then go black.

And getting this back to the track was kind of a nightmare.

It was terrible. So it was very hot out. It was like 985 something like high 80s that day.

Didn't have any water. I'm just stranded on a sunny portion of the highway.

This is why we try to avoid this exactly case in point.

And of course, the car doesn't have AC, it's completely dead. So I'm standing outside,

I'm up on the embankment tow truck came in about 45 minutes, I think. And we can't get the car out

of park, right? Because you can't turn it on. And this is an electronically shifted transmission.

Correct. If you're wrong, you also couldn't pop the hatch to get out the tow aisle. You had to

like climb over the back, right? I think we were on the phone for that. You called me was like,

how do I open up the hatch? This thing should be dead. No, I was able. I was able to do it.

But in the end, the tow truck operator just ended up wrapping it around the wheels. Yep.

So I think we have a clip of this too, that we were about to.

Yeah. Yeah. So we had to drag the car up the flatbed in park and it's four wheel drive. So

all four wheels are stationary. It's digging into the ground. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the winch on this truck was struggling. It's like 5,000 pounds, something like that.

So eventually we get it on, you get it back to the track. I think did we use the Silverado EV?

Yeah, I hooked the Silverado pretty much pull it off, pull it off the back.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I mean, that's one of the benefits of doing a test like this, right,

is not only are we seeing the actual result in terms of the number, but I mean, the situation

you're describing is not something we were hoping and necessarily looking for. But the point is we

get to see a lot of the behavior of these vehicles along the way. You know, most of the test is

pretty unextraordinary during the 99%, but when you start to get low, it's what is the vehicle

going to do to inform the driver that they're getting low. Some of my personal favorite

implementations that I've seen over the years is, hey, you have X amount of miles of range left,

go any further and you're going to be too far to get to the closest public charger, right? I think

that's a nice integration. I think Tesla does a good job with that. Yeah, Tesla absolutely does a

good job. They basically say you're leaving for it as well. Sort of the range that you have to get

to charge yourself. Exactly. You know, are you really sure you want to continue? Yeah, exactly.

Others do none of that and you're pretty much in an

ovary situation where you just run out unexpectedly, right? Correct. Well, I got plenty of warnings,

but previously those warnings still allowed me to go off the highway. Yeah, the old things,

we'd always been able to go to zero and I drove the test of the Blazer and it sort of dropped

rapidly sort of what you experienced. But I mean, I went a mile and a half like after zero on the

highway because that's just where the next accident was and the Blazer was able to do it.

So, you know, that your experience was a little bit different. I mean, it was still

sort of overall the same. It's just that you got stranded on the highway. Well, right. I mean,

at 2% SOC, I completely lost power and that shouldn't happen until 0%. Right, right. Yeah,

I think just, you know, and at the vehicle level, thinking about some of the results that we saw

this year, this past year, on one hand, we tested the longest range we've ever seen, right, with the

Silverado EVS, right, and one of the shortest, the Fiat 500. I think in general, we're seeing

range increase, right? I mean, you see that if you just go look at EPA results, if you were to kind

of project and see the trend over time, but we're definitely seeing that here. Any other trends that

you guys are noticing or specific, you know, vehicles that had a surprising result? I mean,

I think, well, I think you sort of hit it there, ranges are increasing, which makes us doing this

test, you know, more difficult. If they were all the Fiat 500, it'd be kind of easy because you

could like be back by lunchtime. But range is sort of only half the story because you can fix range

with a massive battery pack, like the Silverado EV. But it's at the expense of size of the vehicle,

weight of the vehicle efficiency. And, you know, I think that's what's interesting about this test.

We can actually look at efficiency numbers, because in your average day to day, really

efficiency numbers, what matters, not your overall total range, because it kind of comes

down to what does it cost me to drive X number of miles, you know, daily, weekly, monthly,

whatever it is. So and the more efficient the vehicle with a better charging rate,

the more quickly you're going to add miles, a road trip and you're starting to use a public

charger. Because you have to charge a massive battery, even DC fast charging, like it's going

to take a while. Sure. And having been the one to drive the Silverado, I would have absolutely

welcomed an hour plus break to charge this if I, you know, would have like a maybe a cool place

to sit in the bathroom. Yeah, you're one of the the testers here who just kind of goes for the

long haul and no breaks. I tried to I have had to stop on a couple of occasions, but I sort of

just want to get it done. And I kind of think if I stop for 10 minutes, like I could be 10 minutes

closer to be done, especially with a car like that. And yeah, speaking of efficiency, I'm just

looking at our chart here. Model three is our highest efficiency we've ever recorded at 4.3

miles per kilowatt hour. That's really high. And we're using the vehicle monitor for the

efficiency itself. Yes, right. We also we somewhat confirm it, right? Because we track how many

kilowatt hours we put in the battery afterwards. So I guess in explaining that, you know, we have

when we are finished, we bring the vehicles back, we plug them back in the same charger

that we started with. So it's inside some troll temperature environment. And we can look at

how much electricity was used to charge the vehicle back up, not but only electricity,

but time that took to charge. So we can look at charging rate. And then we can calculate

an efficiency number based off of those numbers. Well, for the whole cycle to not just, you know,

including losses of charging and things like that. Because there are charging losses. So our

numbers don't always, you know, to like the the 10th always match, you know, because of charging

losses and things like that. And you'll see some cars, you know, there's no necessarily standard on

calculating that in the in vehicle display, right? So you'll see some where they seem to be taking

that into account, right? Those losses that we're talking about and others not. So it's quite

interesting. But you can find in the article on our site, there's a PDF you can download that gives

you more of the details and the efficiency is absolutely one of those. This is the first time

we're actually providing this next level of detail, right? Yeah, we know people want to see it.

People want to see it. Totally. And we're capturing it. So and to that point, just to get a little

in front of some of the criticisms that we've gotten over the years, right? We talked a little bit

about how it's different than the EPA itself, right? Can almost hear some of the questions

coming into our ears as we release this, right? But we do, when you look at the article or some

of the information, we compare it to the EPA's published number, right? In terms of that combined

number, you walked us through robbery. And the reason we do that is because that's the number

that most people are going to see when they're shopping for a car. That's what's on the window

sticker. It's what's on front and center on EPA site or even what the manufacturers tend to advertise,

right? But we do recognize that it's not necessarily apples to apples. So you can go on the EPA site.

And if you click the right buttons, you can essentially configure the information to say,

I'm only driving on the highway and therefore what would my range be granted still based on

laboratory testing. So it's still different in that way. But we recognize that that is

a difference. And they don't make it available for all the cars. And you kind of have to know

the cheat code to do it. But heard, it is now there in the PDF. You can kind of see what our

70 mile per hour range test is in comparison, at least when available from the EPA.

Yeah, I think there's a few cars that just not available, but the majority of them do have it.

Yeah. And also another one is because different automakers, as we talked about,

have a different strategy on how to handle the zero indicated miles, right? Some are like Tesla,

Rivian, Lucid. We see them zero is a lot closer to zero in a lot of cases than maybe some of these

other cars. That's why you see some of these German brands going much, much further than their

advertised range. That's why we take them on the track. That's why we don't want to say zero is

necessarily zero. So we're trying to exhaust the battery to really figure out and recognize the

fact that they have different strategies there. And we talked about temperature range with some

feedback we get all the time. That's kind of a wide range of temperatures, 70 to 90. Of course,

try to keep it as tight as we possibly can even within that, but we got to give ourselves some

room for the next Silverado UVU test. And we've done some testing even prior to this. We've done

some warm weather testing, cold weather testing. We kind of have an idea, the 70 to 90, although

while it's 20 degree range, that's sort of within the range of where these cars run. They run in the

upper 90s in terms of battery temperature and motor temperature. Like as you're running down the

highway, you know, with sort of a low load on them. So ambient being within that range, you're not

really expending a lot of energy, heating or cooling. We're just sort of floating there, you

know, if you, you know, unless you want to move us to like San Diego where it's just nice all the

time, you know, here in New England, it's cool in the morning and then it gets warm in the day.

But then if the sun kind of dips below trees and stuff, like it can drop off pretty quickly too,

especially like later in the year, like in September, or we'll get warm days, maybe in October,

where we can still kind of get some of these cars done.

Especially, you know, starting early in the morning with some of these longer RGBs, I mean,

it's still warming up. So a lot of times we have to wait to start the test until it hits 70.

Right, right. Exactly.

And it, you know, keeps going up and we've, we've have used close to the full range in several

tests. Yeah, absolutely.

But it's funny to bring that up about moving or different temperatures and such because,

yes, we're somewhat ideal temperature range, you know, where the cars are kind of happy.

And then we don't retest in the winter, but what we can do is we know the general trend,

right? We've done kind of, let's call them one-off experiments to say, okay, on average,

you're going to lose let's say 30% in this type of temperature, right? We can take

what we test in the summer and kind of apply that, that learning and say, okay, in the winter,

you'd see something roughly like this. Yeah, yeah.

All right, awesome. So you can go on to cr.org. You can look at the range test results. You

can see the graph with all the comparisons to EPA and then absolutely download that PDF and

look at all the details that are in there and all the historical cars. Absolutely.

So thank you guys for taking us through that. So we're going to move on to audience questions.

And remember, you can send us texts and video questions at talkingcarsaticloud.com.

And if we use your question on the show, we'll send you some swag, which is pretty cool.

So we have today Gene from New Jersey and he says, back in my day, yes, I know how that sounds.

Hex-serial lighting followed a fairly simple concept. Make it bright enough to see,

clear enough to understand, and not so bright that it felt like a welding arc aimed at your

retinas. But I find myself asking a few questions while squinting at oncoming traffic.

When did turn signals become a design accent instead of a signal?

Some are so small in daylight that I'm not sure if the vehicle is turning or just

blinking Morse code. Why are we stacking multiple headlamp elements vertically on lifted trucks?

I don't need to see the future, just the road. And what happened to good old fashioned separation

of brake lights and amber turn signals? Red for brake, amber for turn. It worked. It was clear.

No guessing required. Technology has given us impressive capability. My only hope is that

we continue applying it in ways that enhance safety rather than test everyone's night vision.

All right, Gene, thank you for that. So we looked into this and of course,

sharing some of these observations ourselves, driving these cars and just being in the world.

Being blinded by every oncoming car.

Avery, why don't you start and tell us a little bit about what we learned and some of

what Gene is observing. Yeah, so in the US, automotive lighting in general is covered under

the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108. It designates the size, color,

and operation basically of headlights, tail lights, turn signals and things like that.

In the US, both red and amber rear turn signals are allowed. While in other countries, it's

generally only amber. So it really just is up to the manufacturer. And some manufacturers that

are selling more cars in Europe, they might choose to just keep the amber turn signals here

because it's allowed. Sometimes it's more cost effective to integrate the brake lights, which

are already read into the turn signal. So they do that and maybe those aren't quite as visible.

There actually is some data that amber rear turn signals are safer for rear end collisions and

lane change collisions per some studies by the IIHS and NHTSA. So that's one part of it.

And then I know, Croson, you know a little bit more about maybe the headlight history.

Yeah, so I'll go back in the day with Gene here. For the longest time, there were basically two

headlights. You had round and you had square and they were sealed being glass headlight.

It didn't matter if you bought a Chevy, a Ford or whatever. Everybody had the same

Sylvania headlight in their car. And in, I'm going to say 1983, I forgot to put this in my notes

here, but I think it was 1983. Part of this, this 108 document that if you ever have trouble sleeping,

I suggest you bring this up on the government website and just start reading. There's a lot

there. It's kind of interesting, but you'll be asleep. They wanted to start moving away from

glass headlamps. And part of that was because they could now at this point, plastics and injection

molding and all this kind of stuff was becoming more readily available. It didn't happen in

1983, but that's when it first started talking about like, let's move away from these glass

headlamps. So we got to a point where we could manufacture plastic, Lexan, whatever headlamps.

And that opened up a whole new world of what they can do in terms of shape. So it was sort of the

arrow headlamp time. And they were able to change the way the front of cars look.

Certainly, I think for it was pedestrian safety, so you don't have glass out front,

but also now the car's more aerodynamic. And this is fuel economy is always a forefront in

what manufacturers do, right? A lot of things they do are for emissions and fuel economy and this

plays into that. And then they got into the point where like, hey, we can actually make these styling

elements and make these cars really stand out from one another. So like the Ford and Chevy

truck no longer have to have the same headlight in them, essentially. So I mean, the downsides are

it makes headlights more expensive because you have this custom one off headlight, essentially,

you're not just going to the auto parts store and just buying the bulb, which is the assembly kind

of all that kind of stuff. So it makes them more expensive, but they do work a lot better. And they

certainly look in general a lot better, although I kind of happen to like the older look of like

just around, you know, glass headlamp on the front of a pickup truck. Maybe I'm just too nostalgic

for that. But yeah, so they've definitely turned into a styling element and turn signals. But

even looking back way back in the day, Ford had the sequential turn signals in the rear of the

Mustang. And there were no really like electronics. It was like a little tumbler that had these

contacts that would rotate. Very mechanical. It was. Yes. Yeah. Of course, new cars have that now

too. It's all done with, you know, circuits and things like that. So they were always, I think,

trying to incorporate lighting. You know, it's a big element on the car. And cars have a lot of

people say cars have a face like the eyes are the or the become the headlight of the eyes and

the face and all that kind of stuff. And I think it works. And I'm going to call out Audi on this

one. Yeah, I think you would. From like 04, I'm going to say is when this showed up on the A8,

but it's when they went to the LED daytime running lights. And I'm a firm believer that those cool

looking, they look great. Those headlights are sort of what got Audi through the mid 2000s and why

they still exist and why they ever sold any cars. Because they had the best looking headlights. I

remember seeing them for the first time and it was like impressionable at the time. It just

blown away by the angel eyes. I think they might have been a little bit before that. But it's a

big styling thing. And it really sort of makes a car look premium in sort of a market like you,

oh, you've got the good option car because you have the cool headlight kind of thing.

So and like you said, about the face of a car, right? That's the first thing people see when

a car is driving past them. So it just kind of became this arms race between a manufacturer

who can make the coolest looking headlights. And I mean, even today, you see like higher trim

levels of the same model will have upgraded headlights, like that's something that's premium

that people are willing to pay money for is like the better technology.

The Nissan Leaf, we'd borrowed one, that blue one had the really cool 3D tail lights and brake

lights. And then the one we bought just regular just had like regular kind of lane through that

with the LED tail lights on the higher trims and whatnot. But yeah, it's it's and now of course,

with the LEDs, right? And and everything you talked about, Mike, you just your options are

almost endless as long as you're within FM VSS, you know, standards, right? But we're seeing some

pretty crazy stuff. I mean, the I've said it to both of you guys before, but like the Palisade

really stands out to me, the new one, the front end, this these giant lighting elements are also

the turn signals. And it's got to be by surface area, I think I haven't got to be. But it's got

to be one of the biggest signals we've ever seen from the car. It's actually kind of crazy. You'd

see it almost looks like the old cornering light that you get on these cars like at night when

you turn it on, it just illuminates the whole side of your house. And I think talking about headlights

too, you know, the vertical stack and the Rivian comes to mind because it's a vertical

sort of light stack in the front. I think it would actually look better if it was maybe

horizontal, but it's what they chose to do. But the headlights on that thing, the automatic high

beams that's using, I don't know what they call it, but it's basically a matrix. And when you

drive it at night, you can see them working. When there's a car coming at you, it blacks out certain

areas to not blind and dazzle that driver. I think Tesla's got that too. Yeah. And there's a lot

where that is becoming more apparent. And because like Gene said, this welding arc that you're

looking at, and he's actually not wrong. We went from halogen lights to HIDs, which was actually

essentially a welding arc. There was a jumping a gap with electricity in the actual burners,

what they call the bulb, they call it a burner. So you were essentially looking at a welding arc

when, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, that's why they were so painful to look at.

Now they're basically all LED in most cases, but again, they're very bright. They have that really

white color to them, which causes a lot of dazzling. When we think about like old school

fog lights were sort of amber in color or even yellow, that doesn't reflect quite as much as the

bright, intense white. And that's another reason why it kind of hurts as well. Yeah, for sure.

So, and I think, you know, the last thing just on this is while

amazing styling elements, and you can do all these crazy things, what it doesn't do is make the car

cheaper or not expensive to repair or whatever, if you get an offender, bender or anything like

that, you know, these these lighting elements, I mean, some of these headlights can become

thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars, you know, gone are the days of all the sensors in

the front bumper, right? Like you just bump into another car, right? And there's modules in there,

and they require programming and they're encoded. And also, you don't believe this is how big they

are. You know, if you take a headlight assembly like out of the car or if you can replace one of

the boxes, like the size of this table versus padding and stuff, but it's like, there's no way

there's a headlight in there. But yeah, sure enough, that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. So, we feel

Eugene, there's a lot of crazy lighting elements out there and it can be difficult at night, but

as of now, you know, this is the direction things are going. But anyway, thank you for the question.

And as always, and just a reminder, please send us your questions talking cloud or talking cloud.

Talking clouds again, are you? Gene's talking to clouds, right? Yelling at clouds.

Send us your questions at talkingcarsaticloud.com. That's going to do it for our show. Thank you

guys for taking us through the EV range results. Check it out on cr.org and we'll see you next time.

EV Range Test Results

About this episode

electric vehicle highway range test

home charging infrastructure

SOC

EV range test

zero range

glass roof

towing

EPA range testing

dynamometer

self certification

real world testing

laboratory testing

combined cycle

test conditions for EV range

tire wear

charging cycles

battery degradation

Chevrolet Silverado EV

lane centering

tire pressure

preconditioning

BMW

Mercedes-Benz

Audi

General Motors

Cadillac Lyriq

Acura Zdx

Tesla

Lucid

Rivian

test cycles

battery pack size

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