I always had an eye on my projected range in my Golf. I knew that with steady A-road driving in summer I might get 430 miles from a tank, and once or twice I even got over 450. But if I was growling through bad traffic that would drop considerably and I'd be lucky to get 400 miles. In winter it would drop to around 380 miles.
It was also very prone to over-optimistic estimates when the tank was quite full, if I'd been driving economically - far more so than the MG4. I saw a projected range of 550 miles once, but of course I knew that was fiction. The thing is, though, that VW never advertised the car as having any particular range between fill-ups. They advertised mpg, and everybody knows that's also fiction, as Andy says it's merely useful to compare cars, because all the fictions are worked out the same way.
If we treated EVs the same way, we'd be moaning that the car was advertised as doing 3.8 miles/KWh and we're only getting 3.3! And we'd know that that's because these figures as about as reliable as manufacturers' mpg claims, and we've only got our own right feet to blame anyway.
I suppose the fixation on range is because battery capacity has historically not matched what a petrol car could do on a tank of petrol, but this is becoming no longer the case. In my memory my first Fiesta could only go about 250 miles on a tank of petrol, and there are plenty EVs that will do that and more.
