Roadside loadshedding
The term Range Anxiety has become the catchall phrase for those who are opposed to electric cars. It's the excuse used by many to dismiss ownership of an EV but with all the options and technology on hand to assist in charging your car, its falls by the wayside. Your EV is exactly the same as your smartphone, you wouldn't leave the house with your phone on 21% so why would your car be any different.
Related: Should I buy an electric car?
Electric cars are smart, smarter than you may think and are designed to protect themselves from a full battery discharge. If you did in fact leave your house on 21% battery, the vehicle would alert you multiple times and attempt to direct you to the nearest charging station. If you were to ignore the warnings and continue driving it will eventually go into limp mode to protect itself.
So what happens?
The question of what happens if you don't charge your EV and then foolishly ignore the multiple and insistent warnings is quite simple then. The vehicle will protect itself by shutting down, how it does this though is quite interesting
In the interests of mechanical sciences we decided to find out what happens when an EV runs out of juice. This test was done so that you don't have to, so please don't try this yourself.
We decided to deplete the charge in our test unit to a range of 10Km, this was more difficult than you can imagine as the vehicle continued to chime and flash warning lights until we reached the parking area where the charging station was.
We then proceeded to drive in circles, depleting the range until the dash read --.--. Surprisingly the vehicle did not stop but continued on for another few kilometres and then went into a power reserve mode cutting output and speed to about 40km an hour.
We can only estimate at this point because we chose to stay relatively close to the charge station, but we continued on for another 4-5 kilometres before the car shut off and rolled to a stop, displaying a "Battery depleted, Recharge now" on the dashboard. There were no fireworks, no massive failure, just silence.We pushed the car over to the charge station, plugged in and went to go get some coffee. Returning an hour later, we jumped in, started up and drove off.
The bright side
Let's be honest and say that no one in their right mind would sit and listen to a car bing, chime and flash warning lights for 45 minutes and would long before that have found a charging station and with that being said no self-respecting EV owner would drive their car with that little charge remaining.The upside here is that if you did manage to deplete your charge and found yourself stranded, most of the manufacturers that sell an EV in South Africa offer some form of roadside assistance to come and give you a small roadside top up charge or a rollback service that can get you to a charge station.
