Most want 400km from an electric car

Most want 400km from an electric car
Almost two weeks ago I wrote about a study by Deloitte about how South Africans feel about advanced technology in vehicles. The report I linked to stated that 55% of consumers questioned wanted a 400km plus range in an electric car. I concluded from that, despite the lack of information to back my hypothesis up, that 45% of motorists would be satisfied with shorter range electric vehicles.

Today I found an article on the same study at IOL which revealed a few more statistics from the study.

A Deloitte Global Automotive Consumer Study found that 54 percent of consumers wanted a minimum distance of 400km from a fully charged vehicle, 24 percent chose 240km to 320km, and 22 percent 80km to 160km.

This indicates that almost a quarter of respondents to the survey would be content with the range offered by the two electric vehicles currently available in South Africa, the Nissan Leaf with a maximum range of 135km and the BMW i3 that can go 160km on a single charge. That's pretty significant. About the same amount of those questioned would be happy with 240km to 320km, electric vehicles with this range should be here in the next year or so. The next generation Nissan Leaf reportedly will have over a 300km range and likewise the Tesla Model 3 which will arrive at some point after it's worldwide release later this year.

Other new details in this article refer to autonomous driving.

The study found that 47 percent of South African consumers wanted limited self-driving technology, while only 39 percent were interested in full self-driving vehicles.

Personally I think it's going to be longer than many people are predicting before there are truly fully autonomous vehicles on the roads. Not only has the technology have to be 100% safe and reliable, traffic regulations and insurance policies will also have to change to incorporate self driving vehicles. I think in South Africa and indeed many developing countries the challenges for autonomous vehicles will be even greater with unpaved roads, pot holes and general lack of obedience when it comes to the rules of the road being some of the obstacles to overcome.

I'm all for any autonomous features that will help make the roads a safer place and I think we will see more and more autonomy added gradually, eventually one day the autonomy will take over all the driving responsibilities.