You Need Way Less Range Than You Think

Do you actually need 300 or 400 miles of EV range? Research says not really—and that means moving off gas may be easier than you think.

Slate Auto EV Truck

Photo by: Slate

Tim Levin

By: Tim Levin

Aug 15, 2025 at 3:57pm ET

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Data from Recurrent shows that EV drivers use just a small fraction of their EV's EPA range.
On average, EV drivers use 12.6% of their car's range, the firm found.
It means that switching to an EV may be easier and cheaper than most people think.

I don't want to tell anybody how to live their lives. But sometimes, the data is hard to ignore.

Even as consumers demand electric cars that can go 250, 300 or even 400 miles between charging sessions, research shows that they can usually make do with far less. Recurrent, a firm that tracks range and battery health in thousands of EVs, crunched the numbers and learned that electric car drivers only use a small fraction of their batteries each day.

The bottom line for the EV-hesitant: You probably need way less range than you think you do. And that means switching to an EV could be a lot easier and cheaper than buyers and the industry think.

"Data from over 40,000 EVs shows EV owners in the U.S. are leaving a lot of the range they pay for on the table," the firm said in a report released this week.

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Cars with an EPA-rated range of 350-375 miles—some of the rangiest in America—still only averaged 40.9 miles per day. Taking the weighted average across all EVs suggests that drivers tend to use 12.6% of their car's rated range daily, Recurrent found.

Here's how usage stacked up across vehicles with different ranges:

75-100 mile EVs: 22.8% of range used daily
300-325 mile EVs: 12.0% of range used daily
350-375 mile EVs: 11.3% of range used daily
375-400 mile EVs: 7.9% of range used daily

This tracks with what we know about how people drive more broadly. Government data shows that Americans travel around 40 miles daily on average. So the obsession with more and more EV range is less about what people do on a regular basis and more about "what if?" scenarios. "What if I want to take a cross-country road trip?" "What if I don't want to be limited by my car?"

Those are valid concerns, and there definitely are people who need a big ol' battery. Maybe they need to charge in public and don't want to sit at the Supercharger more frequently than they have to. Maybe they do actually take longer trips with some frequency. Maybe they live in a place where fast-charging infrastructure still isn't great or widespread. (And perhaps a lot of these EV owners studied are taking longer trips in a gas car they also own; the average U.S. household has roughly two vehicles.)