Depends on how the vehicle is designed. I don't know about the Rav4, but I am familiar with the Chevy Volt. From what I understand, because of the way Chevy designed them, even the original Volts still have 100% of their original battery range.
What Chevy did was never allow you to use 100% of the battery's capacity. They always maintained the battery somewhere between 10-20% SoC and 80-90% SoC. The system is designed to never allowed it to fully charge, or fully discharge. This not only extended the battery life significantly, but allowed a buffer so that as the battery ages you lose the buffer rather than the core range. I'm sure eventually they will run out of buffer and then the owners will start to see a drop in range, but even on the 10 year old vehicles that's not happening yet. I just wish that Chevy's marketing and sales folks were 1/2 as good as their engineers. >> 42 Miles EV range and 3 full size back row seats. (compared to Prius >> Prime range of only 25 mi.) Her daily average mileage is on the order of 35 >> mi+. > > That 20% doesn't seem like much of a range buffer. Seems to me she's likely > to run short in cold weather, and probably on hot summer days when whe wants > aircon. > > The range will fall as the battery ages, too. At 80% battery capacity, it > won't be enough no matter what the conditions are. > _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
