Electric Cars and Driving Range: Here’s What to Know
How far can an electric car really go on a full charge? What can you do to make it go farther? We answer these and other questions that EV buyers might ask.
7 min
Many people considering an electric vehicle are turned off by their prices or the paucity of public charging stations. But the biggest roadblock often is “range anxiety”—the fear of getting stuck on a desolate road with a dead battery.
All EVs carry window stickers stating how far they should go on a full charge. Yet these range estimates—overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency and touted in carmakers’ ads—can be wrong in either direction: either overstating or understating the distance that can be driven, sometimes by 25% or more.
How can that be? Below are questions and answers about how driving ranges are calculated, what factors affect the range, and things EV owners can do to go farther on a charge.
How far will an electric vehicle go on a full battery?
The distance, according to EPA testing, ranges from 516 miles for the 2023 Lucid Air Grand Touring with 19-inch wheels to 100 miles for the 2023 Mazda MX-30.
Most EVs are in the 200-to-300-mile range. While that is less than the distance that many gasoline-engine cars can go on a full tank, it makes them suitable for most people’s daily driving and medium-size trips. Yet it can complicate longer journeys, especially since public chargers can be far apart, occupied or out of service. Plus, it takes many times longer to charge an EV than to fill a tank with gas.
How accurate are the EPA range estimates?
Testing by Car and Driver magazine found that few vehicles go as far as the EPA stickers say. On average, the distance was 12.5% shorter, according to the peer-reviewed study distributed by SAE International, formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers.
In some cases, the estimates were further off: The driving range of Teslas fell below their EPA estimate by 26% on average, the greatest shortfall of any EV brand the magazine tested. Separately, federal prosecutors have sought information about the driving range of Teslas, The Wall Street Journal reported. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The study also said Ford’s F-150 Lightning pickup truck went 230 miles compared with the EPA’s 300-mile estimate, while the Chevrolet Bolt EV went 220 miles versus the EPA’s 259.
A GM spokesman said that “actual range may vary based on several factors, including things like temperature, terrain/road type, battery age, loading, use and maintenance.” Ford said in a statement that “the EPA [figure] is a standard. Real-world range is affected by many factors, including driving style, weather, temperature and if the battery has been preconditioned.”
Meanwhile, testing by the car-shopping site Edmunds found that most vehicles beat their EPA estimates. It said the Ford Lightning went 332 miles on a charge, while the Chevy Bolt went 265 miles.
That is confusing. How can the test results vary so much?
Driving range depends largely on the mixture of highway and city roads used for testing. Unlike gasoline-powered cars, EVs are more efficient in stop-and-go driving because slowing down recharges their batteries through a process called regenerative braking. Conversely, traveling at a high speed can eat up a battery’s power faster, while many gas-engine cars meet or exceed their EPA highway miles-per-gallon figure.
What types of driving situations do the various tests use?
Car and Driver uses only highway driving to see how far an EV will go at a steady 75 mph before running out of juice. Edmunds uses a mix of 60% city driving and 40% highway. The EPA test, performed on a treadmill, simulates a mixture of 55% highway driving and 45% city streets.
What’s the reasoning behind the different testing methods?
Edmunds believes the high proportion of city driving it uses is more representative of typical EV owners, says Jonathan Elfalan, Edmunds’s director of vehicle testing. “Most of the driving [in an EV] isn’t going to be road-tripping but driving around town,” he says.
Car and Driver, conversely, says its all-highway testing is deliberately more taxing than the EPA method. High-speed interstate driving “really isn’t covered by the EPA’s methodology,” says Dave VanderWerp, the magazine’s testing director. “Even for people driving modest highway commutes, we think they’d want to know that their car could get 20%-30% less range than stated on the window sticker.”
What does the EPA say about the accuracy of its range figures?
The agency declined to make a representative available to comment, but said in a statement: “Just like there are variations in EPA’s fuel-economy label [for gas-engine cars] and people’s actual experience on the road for a given make and model of cars/SUVs, BEV [battery electric vehicle] range can exceed or fall short of the label value.”
What should an EV shopper do with these contradictory range estimates?
Pick the one based on the testing method that you think matches how you generally will drive, highway versus city. When shopping for a car, be sure to compare apples to apples—don’t, for instance, compare the EPA range estimate for one vehicle with the Edmunds one for another. And view all these figures with skepticism. The estimates are just that.
Since range is so important to many EV buyers, why don’t carmakers simply add more batteries to provide greater driving distance?
Batteries are heavy and are the most expensive component in an EV, making up some 30% of the overall vehicle cost. Adding more could cut into a vehicle’s profit margin while the added weight means yet more battery power would be used to move the car.
But battery costs have declined over the past 10 years and are expected to continue to fall, while new battery technologies likely will increase their storage capacity. Already, some of the newest EV models can store more power at similar sticker prices to older ones.
What can an EV owner do to increase driving range?
The easiest thing is to slow down. High speeds eat up battery life faster. Traveling at 80 miles an hour instead of 65 can cut the driving range by 17%, according to testing by Geotab, a Canadian transportation-data company. And though a primal appeal of EVs is their zippy takeoff, hard acceleration depletes a battery much quicker than gentle acceleration.
Does cold weather lower the driving range?
It does, and sometimes by a great amount. The batteries are used to heat the car’s interior—there is no engine creating heat as a byproduct as in a gasoline car. And many EVs also use electricity to heat the batteries themselves, since cold can deteriorate the chemical reaction that produces power.
Testing by Consumer Reports found that driving in 15- to-20-degrees Fahrenheit weather at 70 mph can reduce range by about 25% compared to similar-speed driving in 65 degrees.
A series of short cold-weather trips degraded the range even more. Consumer Reports drove two EVs 40 miles each in 20-degree air, then cooled them off before starting again on another 40-mile drive. The cold car interiors were warmed by the heater at the start of each of three such drives. The result: range dropped by about 50%.
Does air conditioning degrade range?
Testing by Consumer Reports and others has found that using the AC has a much lower impact on battery range than cold weather, though that effect seems to increase in heat above 85 degrees.
I don’t want to freeze or bake in my car to get more mileage. What can I do?
“Precondition” your EV before driving off, says Alex Knizek, manager of automotive testing and insights at Consumer Reports. In other words, chill or heat it while it is still plugged in to a charger at home or work rather than using battery power on the road to do so. In the winter, turn on the seat heaters, which many EVs have, so you be comfortable even if you keep the cabin temperature lower. In the summer, try to park in the shade.
What about the impact from driving in a mountainous area?
Going up hills takes more power, so yes, it drains the battery faster, though EVs have an advantage over gas vehicles in that braking on the downside of hills returns juice to the batteries with regenerative braking.
Are there other factors that can affect range?
Tires play a role. Beefy all-terrain tires can eat up more electricity than standard ones, as can larger-diameter ones. And underinflated tires create more rolling resistance, and so help drain the batteries.
Most EVs give the remaining driving range on a dashboard screen. Are these projections accurate?
The meters are supposed to take into account your speed, outside temperature and other factors to keep you apprised in real time of how much farther you can travel. But EV owners and car-magazine testers complain that these “distance to empty” gauges can suddenly drop precipitously if you go from urban driving to a high-speed highway, or enter mountainous territory.
So be careful about overly relying on these gauges and take advantage of opportunities to top off your battery during a multihour trip. These stops could be as short as 10 or 15 minutes during a bathroom or coffee break, if you can find a high-powered DC charger.
Before embarking on a long trip, what should an EV owner do?
Fully charge the car at home before departing. This sounds obvious but can be controversial, since many experts say that routinely charging past 80% of a battery’s capacity can shorten its life. But they also say that charging to 100% occasionally won’t do damage. Moreover, plan your charging stops in advance to ease the I-might-run-out panic.
So battery life is an issue with EVs, just as with smartphones?
Yes, an EV battery’s ability to fully charge will degrade with use and age, likely leading to shorter driving range. Living in a hot area also plays a role. The federal government requires an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on EV batteries for serious failure, while some EV makers go further and cover degradation of charging capacity. Replacing a bad battery costs many thousands of dollars.
What tools are available to map out charging stations?
Your EV likely provides software on the navigation screen as well as a phone app that show charging stations. Google and Apple maps provide a similar service, as do apps and websites of charging-station networks.
But always have a backup stop in mind—you might arrive at a charging station and find that cars are lined up waiting or that some of the chargers are broken. Damaged or dysfunctional chargers have been a continuing issue for the industry.
Any more tips?
Be sure to carry a portable charger with you—as a last resort you could plug it into any 120-volt outlet to get a dribble of juice.
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On Bastille Day, the scent of toasted bread, melting cheese, crêpes and velouté filled a heritage warehouse in Sydney’s Darlinghurst.
Inside Prim Haus, rooms had been transformed into an elegant interpretation of a contemporary French home. Cookware hung alongside market produce, appliances were placed within carefully composed domestic settings and live kitchens turned out French comfort food throughout the afternoon.
The occasion was La Maison de Tefal, an immersive celebration marking 70 years since a French engineer introduced an invention that would fundamentally change home cooking.
Tefal’s story began in 1956 with the commercial launch of what the company describes as the world’s first non-stick frying pan. Seven decades later, the business operates across cookware, kitchen appliances, garment care and floor care in more than 120 countries.
The scale of the modern brand is considerable, but its origins were remarkably domestic.
The invention that started in a French kitchen
In the early 1950s, French engineer Marc Grégoire began experimenting with polytetrafluoroethylene, better known as PTFE, after discovering its unusually effective non-stick properties.
The material was already known within industrial applications. Grégoire’s important contribution was developing a way to bond it securely to an aluminium disc.
According to the company’s history, a conversation with his wife inspired him to apply the process to cookware. The resulting pan allowed meat and eggs to be cooked using less fat, while making the surface considerably easier to clean.
Grégoire patented his non-stick frying-pan concept in 1954 and began selling the finished product in 1956. The new company’s name combined the French words for the two defining materials: Téflon and aluminium.
The attraction was immediate. This was innovation expressed through a simple, recognisable household problem. Food stuck to pans; the new Tefal pan was designed so it would not.
The idea quickly travelled beyond France. Tefal entered the United States in 1961, the same year the company established the production site at Rumilly, near the French Alps. Rumilly would become the centre of Tefal’s cookware expertise and develop an identity as the “frying pan capital of the world”.
The company says more than 35 million cookware items were manufactured at the Rumilly site in 2022. A local museum holds the 500 millionth pan produced by the factory, which came off the line in March 1994.
A Parisian home in the heart of Sydney
La Maison de Tefal translated that industrial history into a more intimate experience.
Held on 14 July, the anniversary used Bastille Day as both a cultural reference and a reminder that Tefal’s identity remains closely connected to French design and engineering.
Prim Haus was arranged as a sequence of domestic environments rather than a conventional product showroom. Guests moved through spaces devoted to cookware, kitchen appliances, garment care and floor care, with each collection presented within the rhythm of a modern home.
A French-market-inspired cooking area formed the social centre of the event. Live stations served croque-monsieur, crêpes and butternut velouté, demonstrating the products through food rather than static displays.
That distinction matters. Tefal’s most successful products have generally been those whose benefit can be understood almost immediately: a pan that releases food, a removable handle that saves cupboard space, an indicator showing when cookware has reached the correct temperature, or an appliance that automates part of a familiar cooking process.
Interactive demonstrations allowed guests to handle the products and see those functions in context. Heritage installations traced the brand’s development, while previews of newer releases connected its first frying pan with the much broader contemporary range.
The anniversary concluded with a champagne toast — an appropriately French punctuation mark for a company whose products have found their way into kitchens around the world.
Seventy years of practical invention
The non-stick frying pan established the operating principle Tefal continues to follow: find an everyday source of friction and develop a practical way to reduce it.
In 1996, the company introduced Ingenio, a modular cookware system built around removable handles. Pans could be stacked more efficiently and moved from cooktop to oven, table and refrigerator without the fixed handle of conventional cookware.
The concept anticipated the pressures that would reshape urban kitchens. As apartments became more compact and storage more valuable, cookware needed to occupy less room and serve more than one function.
Around the beginning of the following decade, Tefal introduced its heat-indicator technology, now known as Thermo-Signal. The circular marker changes appearance when the pan reaches its recommended cooking temperature, turning a technical question into a visual prompt.
In 2006, Tefal expanded the possibilities of countertop cooking with ActiFry. The appliance circulated hot air around food and used little or no added oil, helping establish a product category that would eventually become one of the most competitive areas of the global appliance market.
Innovation also moved beyond cooking. The Freemove cordless steam iron arrived in 2012, removing the cord from the active ironing movement while retaining a powered base.
The company’s current portfolio now extends across multicookers, grills, air fryers, blenders, ice-cream makers, garment steamers, irons and floor-care products. Although the categories are diverse, the common proposition remains convenience grounded in engineering.
The next generation of non-stick cookware
For its 70th year, Tefal has returned to the product that created the brand.
The new Excellence+ cookware range introduces what the company calls FusionCore technology. Tefal describes it as its most durable non-stick coating to date, designed to withstand intensive use and scratching.
As with any durability claim, consumers should follow the manufacturer’s care instructions and consider the applicable warranty rather than interpreting promotional language as a guarantee against every form of damage. But the focus on longer-lasting coatings reflects an important change in buyer expectations.
Convenience is no longer enough on its own. Modern households are increasingly concerned with how long products remain useful, whether they can be repaired and what happens when they reach the end of their working life.
Tefal has responded in several ways. Its Renew cookware uses recycled aluminium and a ceramic non-stick coating, while Groupe SEB has expanded cookware recycling initiatives in international markets. For many small domestic appliances, the group also promotes a 15-year repairability commitment based on parts availability and access to authorised repairers.
The details and warranty periods vary by product and country, so Australian buyers should check the conditions attached to an individual appliance. Nevertheless, repairability represents a meaningful shift from the assumption that a failed countertop appliance should simply be discarded.
From French manufacturer to global household group
Tefal joined Groupe SEB in 1968, giving the company greater international distribution and the resources to expand beyond cookware.
Founded in 1857 and headquartered in France, Groupe SEB has grown into a global small-appliance and cookware business with more than 30 brands. Its portfolio includes All-Clad, Krups, Moulinex, Rowenta, Lagostina and WMF, with operations extending across more than 150 countries.
Within that group, Tefal remains one of the flagship names — and one of the clearest examples of how a single invention can become the foundation for an international consumer brand.
Its longevity has not come from making everyday objects more complicated. The strongest Tefal products do the opposite. They take a small uncertainty, inconvenience or frustration and design it out of the task.
That was the value of Marc Grégoire’s original frying pan. It did not ask people to change what they cooked. It made the existing process easier, more predictable and less difficult to clean afterwards.
Seventy years later, that deceptively modest principle continues to guide the company.
La Maison de Tefal celebrated the products, the French heritage and the anniversary itself. Yet the larger story was visible at every cooking station and demonstration: innovation becomes lasting only when people can use it without having to think about the technology underneath.
For Tefal, the next 70 years will be shaped by new materials, smarter appliances, changing homes and greater expectations around durability. Its challenge will be to keep evolving without losing sight of the insight that started everything — that the most valuable household inventions often solve the most ordinary problems.
Tefal at a glance
- Founded: France, 1956
- Founder: Engineer Marc Grégoire
- Original innovation: Commercialisation of the first non-stick frying pan
- Manufacturing heritage: Rumilly, France
- Notable innovations: Ingenio, Thermo-Signal, ActiFry and Freemove
- Latest cookware development: Excellence+ with FusionCore technology
- Parent company: Groupe SEB
- International presence: More than 120 countries
- Australian website: Tefal Australia
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