Rented a Chrysler Pacifica PHEV minivan. I’ve been charging up daily to drive family around town. Battery drains insanely fasts like 20% within a mile. Wondering if it’s this specific vehicle/brand, overused rental car or reality of EVs. It says 31 miles of range but in no way is that realistic. What do you think?
How cold is the winter you’re driving in?
PHEVs or early BEVs (no hybrid) with smaller capacity battery packs will get hit by winter much harder if it’s really cold and you’re spending energy to initially heat up the vehicle after every time it gets “cold-soaked”. The vehicle has a certain amount of material and space it needs to heat up from an ambient cold temperature and that requires a certain amount of energy over a fairly short amount of time.
Arbitrary example: let’s say it takes 5 kWh to heat up the vehicle from 0 F to a comfortable 70 F. In a 16 kWh battery, that’s going to be a massive percentage of the capacity and the miles in that fairly short amount of time and you’re not going to have much usable range if you started at 31 miles and about a third of it is gone to warm up the vehicle. If you have a battery capacity of 60 kWh and normally 250 miles of range though which is more in line with battery electric vehicles sold today, that 5 kWh would be a small dip relative to the overall range and would still be fine for most trips.
Overused rental car is possible as a factor as well.