We regularly do road trips of 200+ miles, and we get 350 miles on a full tank of gas. At the beginning of the trip, the GPS will say something like "250 miles to your destination" and the car will say "180 miles left"
I regularly pull off the highway to fill up with around "20 miles" left, when there are ~90 miles left in the trip (e.g. it was dead-on accurate for the last 160 miles), according to the GPS. I agree that it's spooky.
I think, when making estimates for "miles left", our car must be doing some calculation like (rolling estimate of mpg) * (gallons left).
It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us. There's certainly a bunch of tricks they could be pulling off.
The point is, from a driver's point of view, I have a trustworthy number. If they need to pull off some tricks to achieve that trustworthiness (e.g. low-balling total range), that's OK with me.
With EVs, "total range" is a marketing term, so they have a strong incentives to fib about it. Unfortunately, this makes the vehicles worse to operate.
“It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us.”
I am fairly confident that something similar is happening with my Honda. I thought I was going to run it dry, but then it just sat at 10 miles remaining for at least another 15-20 miles before I reached a station.
Most Honda models have a ridiculous reserve, something like 3.5 gallons. I still regret informing my mother of this fact...she never ran out of gas until I did.
> It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us.
This is quite likely. My car supposedly has an 11-gallon gas tank, and if I refuel right when I hit 0 miles remaining then it only takes 10 gallons of fuel to fill the tank.
I regularly pull off the highway to fill up with around "20 miles" left, when there are ~90 miles left in the trip (e.g. it was dead-on accurate for the last 160 miles), according to the GPS. I agree that it's spooky.
I think, when making estimates for "miles left", our car must be doing some calculation like (rolling estimate of mpg) * (gallons left).
It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us. There's certainly a bunch of tricks they could be pulling off.
The point is, from a driver's point of view, I have a trustworthy number. If they need to pull off some tricks to achieve that trustworthiness (e.g. low-balling total range), that's OK with me.
With EVs, "total range" is a marketing term, so they have a strong incentives to fib about it. Unfortunately, this makes the vehicles worse to operate.