Optimizing Your EV's Efficiency Is Easier Than You Think video

Charge up your cheap skate. We're here with the Hyundai ionic 61 of the most energy efficient EVs that you can buy today. And we're here with some tips to help you maximize the range and efficiency of your electric car. Now, generally speaking, most electric cars are more energy efficient and cheaper to than their combustion powered counterparts. But last I check, electricity ain't free. So maximizing every mile that you get out of the kilowatt hours in this battery is one of the best ways to save money in the long term. Now, as a nice bonus, most of these tips also apply to hybrid plug in hybrid and combustion cars. The contact patch where the rubber literally meets the road is arguably the most important driver of a car's performance and efficiency. And despite decades of airless tire hype, the humble pneumatic tires, which you'll find on pretty much every automobile built in the last 140 years. Now, your tire pressure is going to determine the shape of the contact patch and how the tire deforms under load, which is why you want to make sure you have the right amount of pressure for your vehicle in there, too low pressure means that you have an increased contact patch, which increases friction and heat. It will be costing you money when it comes time to charge your vehicle and when it comes time to replace those tires. Now you can find the proper inflation number for your vehicle. Usually in the door jam or in the owner's manual, you'll often find a different number for the front tires versus the rear. Make sure you match those when you're airing up. Now, many premium and luxury vehicles are now coming with so called tire pressure monitoring systems which can alert you if your tire pressure gets too low. But I find that their accuracy can vary and some of them don't even notify you until you're already well below spec at which point. Well, it's too late. So I recommend doing regular manual checks with an accurate tire pressure gauge. I do these checks around every other week. But if you're lazy and you've learned that you can trust your tire pressure system, you can probably stretch that out to around a month, paying particular attention to the changing of the seasons or after a wild shift in the temperature for maximum convenience. I keep a small 12 volt air pump in my garage and in my roadside kit so I can top up whenever I need to. Now, blasting the AC on a hot day feels great, but it's not the most efficient way to use your EV systems. A study by AAA back in 2019 showed that air conditioner can cause as much as a 17% hit on your evs efficiency. The heater is worse. That same showed it was around 41%. Now. Technology and climate control in the evs has come a long way since then. But adjusting the way that you use the climate controls in your car is one of the best ways to maximize your range and you can get started on that before you even hit the road. Many evs such as this one feature, a scheduling system that allow you to schedule charging and preconditioning of the cabin temperature before you leave and while you're still plugged in at the house, so you set the time that you want to leave and what temperature you want the car to be at and it will precondition the cabin to that temperature using energy from the grid. That way when you hit the road, your air conditioner or heater don't have to work as hard to get the car to the temperature that you're comfortable at and that saves you range and efficiency on the road. Of course, you can also pull off a similar effect with low tech tricks like parking in the shade on a sunny day or using a window shade if you have to park in the sun, almost every feature of the regenerative braking system that recaptures energy that would be lost when you down to heat and puts that energy back in the battery. So obviously, the most efficient way to drive your is to do maximum region all the time. Right. Well, not always. Now, most EVs have some sort of a way to adjust the amount of regenerative braking that you get. This vehicle features a one pedal driving mode, which we've talked about in a previous video, you can find link down below and when I lift off the accelerator, it's going to give me maximum regeneration, slowing the car down to a stop. I find that's best in urban environments where you got a lot of stop and go traffic where you're going to be speeding up and slowing down and speeding up and slowing down a lot. You're going to recapture a lot of that energy, but no regenerative braking system is 100% efficient, which is why for longer highway drives, I prefer almost no region. I like to take the energy that I put into moving the vehicle and just hang on to it for coasting for long periods of time at steady speeds. Now, fortunately, a lot of evs give you very easy ways to change your regenerative braking mode in the Hyundai. Here, I can just use the paddle shifters to drop down to zero region and now I can just coast down this hill easily using almost no energy. Now, if your vehicle doesn't feed your paddles, well, then they often feature an automatic mode that you can put the vehicle in that will automatically adjust the regenerative braking for the conditions that you currently are driving in. So check your manual and see which is the best way to do it for your car. Now, the last two factors we're going to talk about when it comes to ev efficiency are acceleration and speed. Now, when you're in the city and there's a lot of traffic doing hard starts is often counterproductive. Not only because you waste energy getting up to speed quickly, but also because you're going to waste a lot of that energy when you have to slam on your brakes through the traffic. So Jackrabbit up to 50 MPH just to have to come to a stop at a stop sign soon is a 12 punch of inefficiency. I like to say, treat the accelerator pedal like an egg that you don't want to crack. And that's going to smooth out your driving and allow you to waste less energy on acceleration. But also to recoup more of that energy when it comes time to slow down. Now, on the highway, the air around your vehicle becomes the enemy of efficiency. There's a reason why Hyundai's engineers designed the ionic six here to be shaped like a dolphin. And that is because aerodynamic wind resistance are one of the biggest contributors to efficiency. Once you get up the highway speeds, the way that it works is that air resistance increases exponentially. So going twice as fast means that you're actually encountering four times as much air resistance, which means that every mile per hour you add to the speedometer costs you more energy than the last one just to maintain that speed. And so slowing down maybe 5 to 10 MPH on your regular commute can actually end up saving you a whole lot of energy in the long run and a whole lot of money. Many evs also feature multiple drive modes and you want to find the drive mode that's going to get you the best energy efficiency in this vehicle. It's eco mode and that's going to adjust the accelerator pedal so that it's a bit smoother on the input so that it actually accomplishes a lot of what we just talked about automatically eco mode also adjusts the way that the climate control systems work so that they're more energy efficient. And on this dual motor model, it actually deactivates the front motor when I don't need the accelerated capabilities so that I waste less energy when I'm cruising and actually get more range out of my battery. You want to check the specifics of your to see how the drive modes work and which one's best for efficiency. So quick lightning round of things we don't have time to cover today. Ditch the roof rack when you're not using it, take all the unnecessary stuff out of your trunk to light weight, your car, use the onboard or third party navigation software to plan more energy efficient trips. You can learn about those tips and more over on our full guide on how to maximize your electric car on cnet.com.