General 500e Claimed Range

[DaveH77]

As an 'outsider looking in'

The UK usually get models 6 to 9 months after Europe..

Any chance that issues were found early on and the Battery is being 'saved' by software keeping the extremes of charge unavailable.

Thinking to hassles my wife had with phone charging.. is there a difference in our Charging network..?

Most respondents are not long term forum posters..so may not remember all of the
'I can only get 32 litres in my 38 litre FIAT tank' threads.

I think that may be right, I made a similar comment above. Interesting that the UK models are about 85% of the European ones, as if Fiat have restricted the maximum charge. Tesla allows you to set your own limit and charge to 100% for the odd longer journey, but I don’t think you can with the Fiat, so it is much harder to protect the battery against constant full charging.

But, if they have done this, then the claim of 200+ miles is now completely false and they shouldn’t still be making it!

I’ll keep watching new review videos and see if the European ones start to show a reduced range at full charge… I would expect to see around 260km in ‘Range’ or ‘Sherpa’ modes, rather than the 320 or so I have seen on European reviews so far…

 

[vexorg]

If you do 55 miles a day, and you have the ability to charge at home, then to charge the car with a real world 100+ mile range every night is no hardship and certainly easier than making a special trip to the petrol station.

That's in an ideal world, and there's no hardship in filling up as I pass them on the way to work.

The flaw in that is if something happens and I cant charge that night, or forget, or there's a power cut, or there's a fault in the charger, or need to go somewhere else that night, then it's getting borderline for the next day. It's almost living hand to mouth on the charging, compared to having a massive window of time to fill up, two weeks of not worrying/caring, then a week to fill up whenever.

If you’re the only electric car in the street the local substation is not going to burst into flames just yet, but if more and more people bought electric cars in your street, behind the scenes the supply to your street would get upgraded. This is happening every day and people don’t know it’s going on because they are not disturbed by it.

I work in the power sector, albeit the transmission side, but see enough of the distribution side to know that they are far from coping if EVs take off.

 

[TrevC]

Some observations on some of the above. The WLTP range can only normally be achieved in warm weather with town driving. Same for all EVs. A more realistic range figure can be gleaned from ev-database.uk, which quotes 155m for the 42kWh version.
It hasn't got an 87kW battery, it comes with either 23.7kWh or 42kWh batteries. 87kW is probably the motor power. Kilowatts are units of power, kilowatt hours are units of energy.
Since the Zoe 50kWh was launched, Renault have ditched the battery lease system, so any that are for sale with a lease are used 40kWh or older.
Sorry if I come across as pedantic!

 

[MrJamal]

Hello,

I also have a 500e 42kw La Prima, i dont think i saw a 320km range on it when fully charged. Will check today and post a picture later on with the displayed range at 100%.
I think they cheat on wltp and use the whole 100% of 42kw but the end user will get 37kw of the battery.

The car is quite new now but soon we will see more data on it, as people will start testing the features more. My problem with Fiat is that they don't mention anything about charging the car to 100%, from the owners manual i read they even encourage you to top it up often. It may be that they have a charge limitation inside the software and when it shows 100% on dashboard it will be around 90-95% in real capacity.

They do mention not to let it discharge too much ( i tend to plug it in at around 40%) and also to avoid fast charging if possible as it will add premature wear to the batttery pack.

They advertise it with 460km wltp city driving, but i doubt you can reach 300km in real world conditions. Btw, the wltp is in sherpa mode (who uses that?) and in ideal weather conditions with everything turned off.

I drive it normally as i would drive my other cars, ac and everything turned on and normal mode, not even "range" with one pedal driving.

 

[chris3234]

Hello,

I also have a 500e 42kw La Prima, i dont think i saw a 320km range on it when fully charged. Will check today and post a picture later on with the displayed range at 100%.
I think they cheat on wltp and use the whole 100% of 42kw but the end user will get 37kw of the battery.

The car is quite new now but soon we will see more data on it, as people will start testing the features more. My problem with Fiat is that they don't mention anything about charging the car to 100%, from the owners manual i read they even encourage you to top it up often. It may be that they have a charge limitation inside the software and when it shows 100% on dashboard it will be around 90-95% in real capacity.

They do mention not to let it discharge too much ( i tend to plug it in at around 40%) and also to avoid fast charging if possible as it will add premature wear to the batttery pack.

They advertise it with 460km wltp city driving, but i doubt you can reach 300km in real world conditions. Btw, the wltp is in sherpa mode (who uses that?) and in ideal weather conditions with everything turned off.

I drive it normally as i would drive my other cars, ac and everything turned on and normal mode, not even "range" with one pedal driving.

Well you best get used to driving them.like that as that what you need to do with electric cars they need to be driven very differently and with minimal electric loads to get best range from them that's what we all we have to do in a few years when they start getting forced down our throats

 

[MrJamal]

Hi,

Yeah, you're right, they need to be driven in a certain way to get the best possible range, but only if you care about that imho.

I for one, don't care so much about the range, as long as i can drive it the way i like to drive it and i get enough km (to my satisfaction) from one charge.

I think it all comes down to convenience, some will drive it on highway with 80km/h to get the best range, some will drive it with 120km/h and charge it when it needs to.

As long as you got a home or office wallbox i think you can drive it anyway you like and don't stress too much about the range, even in worst conditions you should have around 200km of real range and i think that value is more than enough for 99% of the owners.

Those are my thoughts

 

[MrJamal]

Update on range when 100% charged:

In normal mode it shows 260km
In sherpa it shows 300km

 

[FiatMatt94]

It's not just electric cars that do not achieve their claimed range nowadays, petrol & diesels don't do their claimed range either & have not done for some years, the problem is that nowadays manufactors use rolling roads & computers to work out their claimed mpg which is never accurate such as the Twinair engines which was way off it's claimed range. Back in the days when they made proper cars instead of these modern domestic appliances they were properly tested out on the open roads which was preety much accurate unlike the labs with the rolling roads like todays cars. I have a 18 plate 1.2 FIRE Panda which I got new it is the first & last new car I will buy as I'm not convinced at all on electric cars, there was a programme on channel 4 a while back with Guy Martin where he drove an electric car from Grimsby to John O'Groats & back 1,100 mile round trip & most of the chargers were not working, the trip took a lot longer than it would with petrol or diesel & cost a lot more. It just shows that the whole idea with electric cars & climate change is a load of old bulls**t along with the strain on the countrys infrastructure with these fridge freezers everywhere. Just wait until the goverment start losing taxes from petrol & diesel as most of what you pay for fuel is taxes , the tory government will only bump the taxes of electric cars just to line their own pockets, electric car owners won't be smiling then like they did with the recent fuel situation. :nerner:

 

[MrJamal]

I agree with you in some regards

If you would have asked me 5 years ago if i'm considering buying an EV, the answer would have been a hard NO. In fact, at the end of 2016 i bought a X5 M50d which is my main car even to this day. Does it achieve claimed fuel consumption ? No. Is it close to those values ? I would say that one can come pretty close to them when trying.

Fast forwarding to present day my opinion has changed regarding EVs, would i have one as my only car ? No. Are they close to declared consumptions and range ? No! Far from it, i think most cars do about 60% in real world of their wltp range.

Why i bought the Fiat 500e then ?

In my opinion, EVs are perfect for city usage (any small EV), IF you can charge them conveniently, home or workplace is the ideal situation. You get free parking, no taxes, the yearly insurance on my 500e is 110euros. Some hypermarkets offer free fast charging (22kw and 50kw) either free for everyone or you get coupons when buying from that hypermarket.
I get free charging at the office so the yearly running costs are close to nothing...

The problem (any car brand) with EVs for me in 2021 comes down to convenience.
The battery pack is affected by two major things : low temperature and highers speeds. That means when you drive the car legally on the highway at 130km/h the real world range will drop a lot. I dont want to drive 250km for example and then i have to stop and wait 30minutes for the car to charge, and that time could increase if the chargers are occupied by other cars, some of those may not even have higher charging power. Or what do you do if the charging station has a problem and all the charging points are down ?

I dont know about UK public station charging prices but in Romania we pay 2ron/kwh (1 euro = 5ron, price of diesel& petrol 1L/7ron) So besides the variable waiting time it's quite expensive to charge, taking into account the increased higway consumption also. So it's cheaper to have a combustion engine.

When will i consider having an EV as my only car ?

To put it simply : When i can get 400km range at 130km/h, with that range being charged in under 10minutes. So, perhaps in another 5 years or so we will have decently priced options.99% of combustion vehicles that are in use today can go 400km+ on a full tank at road legal speeds!

The technology is moving at a good pace, even now the 500e can charge at 85kw/h and there are other cars who can go at a much higher rate. The main problem is the real world range, we are not there yet.

 

[John202020]

By far the biggest obstacle for me is ( apart from purchase price) is the issue of no home charging availability or work so would be stuck with going somewhere to charge, if manufactures advise against fast charging then it could be some time taken from your day waiting?

 

[Most Easterly Pandas]

On an EV, turning the heater on will have a significant impact on range (a serious consideration for UK users); at least with an ICE vehicle, running the heater doesn't have much effect on range, as the heat would otherwise just be wasted.

No quite so.

It’ll firstly depend on the type of heater fitted. A resistive heating system will drink the power, however a decent air source heat pump setup will be a lot better. Not sure what the electric 500 has though.

Going back to the OP however I’d be willing to put good money on ambient air temp being what’s affecting the range.

No doubt the European vehicles were in an optimal 25c outside temperature, where as in the UK we’re about 10-15c currently.

As the temp reduces as will the range, and this is usage of heating etc aside, and nothing more than battery chemical reaction changes.

Personal experience with an EV for nearly 4 years, including through beast from the east is a range reduction of circa 25% from optimum summer temps in the UK to 0c winter.

Luckily my BEV has an air source heat pump heater, so heating only reduces range by about 3-5% even in the snow

 

[Most Easterly Pandas]

By far the biggest obstacle for me is ( apart from purchase price) is the issue of no home charging availability or work so would be stuck with going somewhere to charge, if manufactures advise against fast charging then it could be some time taken from your day waiting?

Fast charging is the usual destination charging method for most.

Early on manufactures tried to recommend against frequent rapid charging, but the test of time has shown this to not cause any real issues, especially not in newer BEVs with decent active thermal management of the battery.

 

[chris3234]

No quite so.

It’ll firstly depend on the type of heater fitted. A resistive heating system will drink the power, however a decent air source heat pump setup will be a lot better. Not sure what the electric 500 has though.

Going back to the OP however I’d be willing to put good money on ambient air temp being what’s affecting the range.

No doubt the European vehicles were in an optimal 25c outside temperature, where as in the UK we’re about 10-15c currently.

As the temp reduces as will the range, and this is usage of heating etc aside, and nothing more than battery chemical reaction changes.

Personal experience with an EV for nearly 4 years, including through beast from the east is a range reduction of circa 25% from optimum summer temps in the UK to 0c winter.

Luckily my BEV has an air source heat pump heater, so heating only reduces range by about 3-5% even in the snow

Until you get to winter when the airsource heat pump is nearly useless

 

[Most Easterly Pandas]

Until you get to winter when the airsource heat pump is nearly useless

Based on personal experience I take it. As I can assure you you either had a fault or weren’t using properly based on my first hand personal experience here in the UK

 

[vexorg]

I've found quite a few newer cars can get close to the claimed mpg if driven properly. Yeah, it makes for dull driving, but I always balance that with the saving.

I would always work out the exact mpg in my head when filling up. Even still do it though not so much on the accuracy since I've found the newer cars are very accurate for average mpg.

 

[varesecrazy]

Until you get to winter when the airsource heat pump is nearly useless

Weve just come back from a place with groundsource heating.. it was certainly 'adequate'..

But hardly the once every 20years cold that MEP referred to.

Having got used to Diesels ( the most 'fuel efficient' the majority of us will have experienced..) a poor heater is basically the standard.. but sit in it on a 2+ hour drive its still good enough..
Underfloor heating left a similar feeling.

 

[varesecrazy]

Interesting that there are a few variations in power..rating..output being offered here.

Would somebody care to enlighten me on 'Sherpa mode'.. (from the manual..?)
Im guessing its akin to my ECO button... stunts 'performance' for gain in range :shrug:

 

[RichardH13]

Sherpa is kind of a get me home mode when the range is tight for the journey left.

It switches everything off that you don't need and lowers the top speed, more extreme than ECO

 

[MrJamal]

I dont have the owners manual at home to give you an exact quote but from what i remember it switches climate off, limits speed to 80km/h and also limits throttle response. When you press the pedal the acceleration is reduced compared to normal driving mode.

 

[MrJamal]

Fast charging is the usual destination charging method for most.

Early on manufactures tried to recommend against frequent rapid charging, but the test of time has shown this to not cause any real issues, especially not in newer BEVs with decent active thermal management of the battery.

They still recommend not to use fast charging as a routine charging option. Its stated in the 2021 manual that will add premature wear to the battery pack. From what i’ve read in other forums its best to use a charger that its half in power as your battery. For example, a 42kw would charge with minimal wear at a 22kw speed or lower.