I have a factory stated range of 150 miles. I've never gotten more than 130 miles on a full charge. And that's without running anything but the headlights and wipers in the rain, all the way to Zero because there were no operational charges on my trip (though Google said there were). My brother has a 300-mile range Tesla. He says he's doing good to get 200 miles out of it before he has to start looking for a plug in. The reason is that you don't ever want to get anywhere near 'Empty'. Because if you run out, you're in big trouble. So, you pretty much need to find a charge when you reach 20%. In short, a 300-mile range, even on a good run, is not going to be anywhere near 300 usable miles.
It is very much a 'horses for courses' type thing tho. When they're choosing a car, people effectively have four choices - Gas; EV's; Hybrids (Battery powered but charged/augmented by a petrol motor); and PHEV's, or
Plug-In Hybrid EV's (PHEV's), vehicles that can run for a while/shortish distance on dedicated EV power
and can be re-charged by 'plugging in', either to a standard home socket &/or charger for a slow charge (4-5 hours), or to a dedicated/commercial charger for a faster charge (30 mins -1 hour), with some 'Regenerative Braking' augmentation to the battery charging,
and they can also run entirely on gas,
and they can run on combined EV/Gas power too...
Now given that I live in Oz, where we have
LOTS of wide-open spaces and long distances between fuel stops, let alone charging stations for any EV's... Here in Oz, if people don't stick with the Gas option, it's generally been easier for people to buy pure EV's or Hybrid EV's than it has been to buy a PHEV (I believe, largely for very misguided political reasons, so I won't go there!
) However, this bit's important - I think PHEV's are a great idea
for Oz,
especially if (like many of us) you have Solar Panels on your roof and can do most of your charging from them; most of your 'daily driving' is within your PHEV's dedicated EV range; and yet you reasonably often want/need to travel our wide-open spaces at short notice & without necessarily extending your trip duration by queuing &/or waiting while your EV is on charge. I believe that many Ozzies fit those criteria reasonably well... The Child Bride & I certainly do, so for a while now we've owned a PHEV!
AND we live in the Hills where altho dedicated EV running can drain the battery rapidly, while it's not a 'get something for nothing' option, Regenerative Braking can provide a real battery boost to compensate for the higher demands. :thumbup:
Our Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (2nd Gen, with the 20kWh battery - I'll try to do the conversions for y'all, altho I do believe you lot use different 'range determination' criteria.
) came with a factory stated EV range of 52 miles & a combined gas/battery range of 500 miles, yet during our pre-purchase research and testing, we found that due to Regenerative Braking, many managed to average about 60 miles of dedicated EV range in the gently undulating plains of the City & nearby foothills. So we thought that'd comfortably cover our local/daily running up here in the Hills... And it has - better than '
just has' too!! Given that if we do need to go any further than into the local town of Mount Barker (usually not even weekly) we've got very little hill
climbing to do, but lots of hill
descents; and if we do need to go into the City, we've got about 25 miles of nothing but fairly good downhill grades to really boost the Regenerative Braking input; so we
REGULARLY get over 75 miles of dedicated EV range and have, more than once now (thru careful planning), managed just over 100 miles purely on EV. And yet because of the PHEV's 'best of all options' features, we can (and do) still drop everything at a moment's notice and head off to the other side of the country, over 1000 miles/12-14 or so hours of driving,
without any range or charging concerns and we still get better than the equivalent of about 50 mpg in what is really a fairly heavy vehicle.
Oh, and just as an added bonus, by charging during the day off our Solar installation, our 'marginal costs' (the 'extra' costs incurred after ignoring all the set-up & installation etc, which also provides/supports other things.
) are about $0.22 for around 4.5 hours plugged into a standard household power outlet that takes the car battery from 20% to 80% charge! So our usual daily running costs next to nothing for fuel (battery charging) and our longer car trips away are costing us significantly less in fuel costs too, due to the better combined mpg, especially if we plug in to a standard household socket for a few hours at either end! Now all I've gotta do is find an appropriate & approved '
Car to House' adaptor so that we can use the car battery to power the house overnight! :thumbup:
It's working for us!
hyea:
And back to the real topic of this thread tho, that Origin looks interesting for a 'local back-road & fire-trail puttering bike', but with a stated range of (here in Oz, anyway) of about 50 miles off the main drags & still only 80-ish miles on the black-top, it'd hafta be 'quite local'...
That's probably not too bad for me, with lotsa that sorta stuff just outside my front door; but for most of the people I know who still do that, they'd be stuffed before they even got off the Freeway! :banghead:
Still, I
HOPE these are just a '
proof of concept' type exercise for BRP, and as battery technology improves, they make sure that range improves!! As it is, I doubt that I'd willingly spend more than saaay $2500 on a bike with
that little range, and I really doubt they're gonna be that cheap new or even for a fair while second-hand! :shocked: To pay any more, I'd really like to see better than 250 miles of range, preferably 400; which is really only
just enough to allow for a good day of riding or an easy bush track weekend with a little safety margin. :lecturef_smilie:
Once I bowed to the inevitable, made the decision, & decided to sell it, it got snapped up pdq by a local Tourism Operator, despite it having done over 1,000,000 miles of largely off-road work (yeah, there's meant to be 6 zero's there! 
But they are large-ish capacity (not for a semi, but definitely for a vehicle that's usually rated for hauling less than 4 tonnes