Range Experiences

AmyS

New Member
Joined
Jan 20, 2023
Messages
4
Cars
Lucid Air
When I started my trip this morning, my car range said I would make it home with 90 miles to spare on arrival. The range suddenly started dropping I was losing a mile a minute on my drive so I decided to start looking for EV charge points, I made three different stops off the highway and all three EV ChargePoint were not functioning. I am now stranded in 20° weather freezing to death waiting on AAA to tow my brand new car home. Do not trust the range estimator on the Lucid. It is not accurate and it has a very poor learning mechanism. It also does not warn you in enough time to find a proper charger and the charge stations in the NAV system are all incorrect many of them that are showing up our lockdown for employee or private use only and are a waste of your time.
 
When I started my trip this morning, my car range said I would make it home with 90 miles to spare on arrival. The range suddenly started dropping I was losing a mile a minute on my drive so I decided to start looking for EV charge points, I made three different stops off the highway and all three EV ChargePoint were not functioning. I am now stranded in 20° weather freezing to death waiting on AAA to tow my brand new car home. Do not trust the range estimator on the Lucid. It is not accurate and it has a very poor learning mechanism. It also does not warn you in enough time to find a proper charger and the charge stations in the NAV system are all incorrect many of them that are showing up our lockdown for employee or private use only and are a waste of your time.
I definitely wouldn't trust the range on an EV car in cold weather - especially if it was that cold. And especially if it was brand new to me - as I wouldn't know how the car behaves in every situation yet. Definitely good advice. It's unfortunate you had to deal with this!
 
I would not ever trust lucid range. I drive between UCSD and UCLA for work. Lucid Air Touring barely gives me 300 - 340 miles. Time test. I also have Tesla S purchased same day as Lucid gives me 380 miles same route same driver. My EQS450 gives 280-290 miles on the same route. My charging at AMERICA CHARGER is a nightmare ( I have to call them every time I need a charge, there is authentication problem continued for 2 months). Tesla charging is not a problem at all. Paseo DelNorte is a good charging station on my route. Tesla is more dependable with miles range, charging.
 
Use SOC. If you know SOC and your general efficiency under the conditions (temperature, highway vs. city, etc.) you can calculate a pretty good range estimate. Of course, the OP was not in a position to do that since her car was brand new to her so she had no experiential knowledge.

Also, EVs do best when they are between 20% and 80% charged. So it is a good practice to try to charge before you drop below 20%. That will also provide a nice buffer if you miscalculate.
 
Use SOC. If you know SOC and your general efficiency under the conditions (temperature, highway vs. city, etc.) you can calculate a pretty good range estimate. Of course, the OP was not in a position to do that since her car was brand new to her so she had no experiential knowledge.

Also, EVs do best when they are between 20% and 80% charged. So it is a good practice to try to charge before you drop below 20%. That will also provide a nice buffer if you miscalculate.
Honest question... What do you mean by they 'do best' in that range?
 
Honest question... What do you mean by they 'do best' in that range?
From JD Powers:

The 80/20 Rule for Battery Electric Vehicles

Like smartphone batteries, an EV's battery will last longer if you prevent it from charging 100 percent or running it down to zero. To extend your EV battery's life, remember the 80/20 rule, which means not charging past 80 percent and not letting it drop below 20 percent.

Many EVs allow the driver to use an app or the car's touchscreen to tell it to stop charging when it achieves a certain charge level. Using the 80/20 rule, if your battery can provide 250 miles of range on a full charge, charging to 80 percent will still give you 150 miles of range before you deplete it to 20-percent full. You will have to decide if starting your trip with a battery that's not full makes sense based on how far you are going and your driving patterns. If you manage it properly, you can extend the life of your EV's battery.

The 80/20 rule does have exceptions, however. EV drivers should consult their owner's manual for charging information on their specific car. Tesla, for example, recommends charging the battery in its rear-wheel-drive vehicles to 100 percent, even for daily driving.

 
So the batteries last longer but no better performance or anything like that?
 
So the batteries last longer but no better performance or anything like that?
Generally correct. When you get to 100% regeneration stops working. I don't know but I suspect that Lucid has programmed the car so that as you get closer and closer to zero, it will start cutting performance to save battery life. But the idea is primarily to save battery life.

Also, as you get over 80% the charge rate on a fast charger drops quickly.
 
Well it looks like I'll be replacing my batteries before most of you just because of the amount of miles that I have to drive. I will have to regularly charge over 80% close to 100 or I'm going to be stopping way too often during the work week
 
Well it looks like I'll be replacing my batteries before most of you just because of the amount of miles that I have to drive. I will have to regularly charge over 80% close to 100 or I'm going to be stopping way too often during the work week

The good news is that you may still have more than 70% capacity after 8 years which in most of the US is the warranty period.
 
Do not trust the range estimator on the Lucid. It is not accurate and it has a very poor learning mechanism.

This is definitely something Lucid needs to address, and soon. After almost eight years of driving EVs, I've learned the "tricks of the trade" in figuring out what my real range is for a given driving situation -- and it's never anywhere close to EPA range. But if EVs are going to move beyond early adopters who will put up with this, the manufacturers need to get a whole lot more accurate with their range estimates.

I would not ever trust lucid range. I drive between UCSD and UCLA for work. Lucid Air Touring barely gives me 300 - 340 miles. Time test. I also have Tesla S purchased same day as Lucid gives me 380 miles same route same driver.

This surprises me. We owned a 2015 Model S P90D for six years and now have a 2021 Model S Plaid in addition to our Air Dream P.

Some time ago I worked out my own range test method: drive the cars on the same stretch of Alligator Alley (a flat, straight, lightly-traveled stretch of Interstate 75 through the Everglades) with the cruise control set on 82 (a true 80mph in all three cars according to my radar GPS), on a dry, temperate day (mid- to upper-80s) with A/C and music running. Set the car range display to read out miles remaining and measure true distance traveled using the highway mile makers.

Using this method, our 2015 Model S got around 63% of its indicated range; our 2021 Model S gets around 72-73% of indicated range; and our Air Dream gets around 78-79% of indicated range.
 
My charging at AMERICA CHARGER is a nightmare . . . .

Electrify America?

And you say you bought a Model S on the same day you bought a Lucid Air and that you also own an EQS. That's quite a collection of new EV sedans to buy for one household.

You can get labeled as a "Verified Owner" of a Lucid on this forum. Why don't you have a chat with a moderator about how to do it?
 
Electrify America?

And you say you bought a Model S on the same day you bought a Lucid Air and that you also own an EQS. That's quite a collection of new EV sedans to buy for one household.

You can get labeled as a "Verified Owner" of a Lucid on this forum. Why don't you have a chat with a moderator about how to do it?
Looks like he might be a troll, eh?
 
Well it looks like I'll be replacing my batteries before most of you just because of the amount of miles that I have to drive. I will have to regularly charge over 80% close to 100 or I'm going to be stopping way too often during the work week

I wouldn't get too worried about this.

The Amsterdam Airport bought a large fleet of early Tesla Model S's for their taxi service. The cars were driven all day long and routinely recharged up to 100%. As some of the cars neared 200,000km on their odometers, they experienced less than 10% loss of charge capacity.

It was the first of many reports that EV batteries were lasting longer than engineering models had predicted. Subsequent studies have indicated a reverse hockey-stick curve on EV battery degradation: a fairly rapid degradation in the first year or two or service and then a near-flattening of the degradation curve beyond that, settling in around the 7% range of charge capacity loss.

Try not to abuse your battery pack, but don't drive yourself crazy with worry about using it for your needs.
 
Well, I'm going to blow through that 100,000 mile threshold waaaay before 8 years lol
At some point the economics might justify purchasing a replacement battery pack. If we assume that most folks drive a car 100K miles, and lets say you normally in the ICE world did 150K miles, that is less than four years. At that point a new battery pack might be a better buy than a new car. But...who knows what the world will look like in four years.
 
This is in an article from Cars.com:

“Every electric vehicle loses range differently, including cars of the same brand or year,” said Recurrent CEO Scott Case. “The good news, however, is that several early EV models show us that batteries last longer than people expect. Across all of the EV models that we track in the US, there is a noticeable S curve in the data, where cars lose a few percentage points of range from their original EPA estimate relatively quickly, generally in the first two years, then range loss levels off for the next several years as the battery stabilizes. After five years, it is common to see a 5-10% drop in range. Some vehicle models follow a fairly linear 1.5-2.0% per year, while most others drop 2-3% in the first couple of years before leveling to 1% per year. In the Tesla Model S, for example, we see that many lose less than 5% of range from 50,000 to 200,000 miles."


As you see in the studies, Teslas fare particularly well in terms of battery life. And remember who the Chief Engineer of the Model S was . . . Lucid's Peter Rawlinson.

Honestly, I really think worrying about battery replacement is premature at this point, especially with newer EVs that have very sophisticated battery management systems.
 
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I would like to point out that there has been an update since the original post and range is accurately calculated or underestimated if you input your destination in the navigation. The remaining range on the main screen when navigation is not activated is the EPA range. If you would like your Air to match EPA range please follow the instructions below which all EV manufacturers are required to follow. There is no Lucid trickery here on stated range but they could do better at conveying actual range when navigation is not engaged.

Range Testing for Electric Vehicles​

An all-electric vehicle (EV) produces no smog-forming or greenhouse gas emissions from its tailpipe. For EVs, vehicle testing provides important label information, such as fuel economy and range.

For EV range testing:
  1. A vehicle with a fully charged battery is driven continuously over the EPA city cycle until the battery is depleted and the vehicle can drive no further. The distance driven is recorded. This is repeated, again starting with a full charge, over the EPA highway cycle, again recording the distance driven when the battery is depleted. This “single cycle” test consists of multiple repeat drives of the city or highway cycle.
  2. Automakers also have the option of doing a multi-cycle test, which consists of four city cycles, two highway cycles, and two constant speed cycles.*
  3. All testing is done in a laboratory on a dynamometer.
  4. The city and highway driving ranges determined from this testing are adjusted to account for real-world factors that are not represented on the laboratory test procedures. These factors include such things the impact of air conditioning, of cold temperatures, and of high speed and aggressive driving behavior. Although the regulations allow some optional approaches, the most common approach is to use a factor of 0.7 to adjust all the test parameters, including range. For example: An EV achieves 200 miles on the highway laboratory test. Real-world highway driving range → 200 x 0.7 = 140 miles to account for aggressive driving and HVAC use.
  5. The adjusted city and highway range values are weighted together by 55% and 45%, respectively, to determine the combined city and highway driving range that appears on the EPA fuel economy label. For example: Assume an adjusted city range of 168 miles and an adjusted highway range of 140 (from example above). The official combined range value → (0.55 x 168) + (0.45 x 140) = 155 miles (values are rounded to the nearest whole number)."

More details can be found here on testing procedures:

 
Well it looks like I'll be replacing my batteries before most of you just because of the amount of miles that I have to drive. I will have to regularly charge over 80% close to 100 or I'm going to be stopping way too often during the work week
Do not charge over 80% too often. The battery will degrade faster. If you use lucid navigation the soc and range it estimates seem to be conservative since .55 software update
 
Do not charge over 80% too often. The battery will degrade faster. If you use lucid navigation the soc and range it estimates seem to be conservative since .55 software update

This is generally true. But I would add three things to consider.

First, much of the damage from full charging comes from the buildup of dendrites. But they don't form instantly, so a lot of the degradation from full charging can be avoided by charging up to that level only when you're going to start driving immediately, such as on a road trip.

Second, DC fast charging is more stressful for the battery pack than Level 2 charging at home. Even though Lucid buyers get a period of free DC fast charging, it would be better to use that only on road trips if you have the ability to charge at home.

Third -- and this one is really opaque -- a Lucid engineer said in an interview that the 118-kWh battery pack has no buffer, as the pack is robust enough to take full charging. This squares with earlier press releases from Lucid which said that the Samsung batteries used in the 118-kWh pack were developed in consultation with Lucid to enable them to tolerate repeated DC fast charging and full charging. (No such claims were made about the LG Chem batteries used in the 112-kWh pack.) Exactly what is different about the Samsung batteries was left unclear, and I have difficulty imagining that a battery chemistry or structure that would bring such advantages would not spread to other battery lines, especially within Samsung.
 
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