Range anxiety: I love this term! Unfortunately for me I can’t take any credit…so I have to congratulate General Motors for making it up and the Automotive Engineer magazine for a great description…

Range anxiety refers to the sensible reservations on the practicality of battery powered vehicles, i.e. will it get me to where I’m going and will I be able to get home?

And to my second question from the mini poll:

Would you be willing to drive cleaner cars that have a max driving range of 80 km?

A whole 55% of you have range anxiety and would want your eco car to travel more than 80km (OK I’ll stretch to 100km) before filling up or charging up.

Let’s go back to General Motors and have a look at why they believe the Chevrolet Volt has to be able to travel 40 miles (60km) before the range extending gasoline engine fires up to recharge the batteries. Well GM simply took the information supplied by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics on “how many miles one-way do you travel from home to work on a typical day?” and multiplied it by 2 to get the round trip back home. Thus finding that 78% of Americans commute 40 miles or less daily – and I’m guessing that the same percentage of Europeans and Asians would commute shorter distances.

Maybe I should have included a comments box with this question. I’m very curious to find out why 112 people out of 203 want their car to be able to drive long distances all the time.

Let me ask another question: If you could easily hire a long range car would you settle for a short range one for all other commutes?

But maybe I’m slipping into the mini poll’s question 3…

Sustainably yours,

Jonathan

P.S.  In case you missed the poll and Q1 analysis, here are the articles: Driving for Green: a mini poll & Driving for Green: Poll answers for Q1