Not getting extra range in town driving

[Johncc]

I've done a South Coast to London commute a number of times now but have failed to see any outstanding mileage increase in town driving compared to country and A roads.
My route is from Portsmouth area to Whitechapel 79 miles each way.
Generally around 3.5 Miles/KW (I use air con etc).
It takes around an hour to get to Wandsworth and then 2hrs to get to Whitechapel (due to the brilliant idea of restricting traffic to ring roads and then restricting the width from 2 lanes to 1 lane to allow social distancing for walkers).
My old Golf would do about 50mpg on open roads and 20 in town under these conditions so the results are good for the MG.
it's just that I read power usage for electric vehicles in town driving (MG quite a figure of 270+ miles range with town use) should be far better than open road driving.
In my experience to date the power use/range seems similar in both circumstances.
Last trip done the journey both ways with 23% power remaining so a good result nonetheless.

 

[Petriix]

In my experience the best economy is achieved when maintaining a constant low(ish) speed behind other traffic. 40-50mph on B roads is about as good as you can get. The stop/start of city driving is less efficient.

 

[EWD]

Agreed. I live in London and have found London stop start traffic isn't the greatest for efficiency. I get anywhere between 3.2 and 3.6 miles/KWh at the moment.

Unsurprisingly I get much better efficiency when cruising 30,40,50 mph than stop-start sub 20 mph London traffic.

 

[Kithmo]

Brochure says 276 miles urban which equates to 5.5 miles/kWh, quite difficult to achieve without hypermiling. (assuming 50.5 kWh usable battery)
4.5 miles/kWh is quite easily achieved just by driving steady and should get you about 227 miles.

 

[Adee]

I think if you drove around town with aircon/heating off and KERS set to 3 (so that you almost never need to brake) then you should (by the laws of physics) do somewhat better than when out on the open road (due to low wind drag). If you are in very slow London traffic the heating/aircon will tend to distort the economy figures (take the extreme example of getting nowhere and having the air-con on for an hour or so). The longer your trip in traffic with heating/aircon on, the more noticeable the reduction in "around-town" economy will be. Being honest, I'm a bit surprised that they didn't make the car more aerodynamic rather than styling it on a stretched SUV. It's pretty obvious from comparing the two figures that aero plays a big part in the range. That's why Teslas look like cheese-wedges