What is the lowest charge you drive to?

[mrg9999]

I drove from Rugby starting at 74% and arrive back in Surrey with 8% using ABRP. The previous 2.5 years I've nearly always charged at 30% or minimum 20%.
I'm charging overnight to 80%

What minimums do you use?

 

[Gadget Geek]

Normally around 20% I'll be looking for a charger. If I'm on the homeward stretch, I have driven down to 4%, but I usually look to get home with 10% left.

 

[Pete G]

We live off grid and 38 kilometres from our nearest town that has charging facilities. So we don't let the battery go below 100 kilometres range if we can help it. As we are on solar power and not grid we like to keep enough charge in the car for a trip to town and back if we need it.

 

[davclopo]

Yesterday I arrived at the charging point with 1%. Challenging... anxiety... I hope it will be once in a life time experience

 

[mystreet]

In our ZS mk 1, got the GOM down to ---.drove about 5 miles to home on that.

 

[W12Lad]

I did just over a mile on 0% last summer in my standard range.

 

[JohnV6]

I normally recharge around 40% when on short runs. On long runs I am fpr 20%.
The lowest I hit was 9%

 

[salty]

4% for me. And it was squeaky bum time, then.
No lower than 10% from then, on.

 

[Data]

I usually don't go under 40% in normal daily driving in my LR Trophy but on a road trip I use as much range as possible without going under 20%. That can change a little depending on exactly where I am headed!

 

[Rob24]

I've gone as low as 1% once and 2% a few times. The milage does not show below 10 and I have driven it for 5 miles home while it displayed nothing.
I normally go from 80% to 20%, the only difference to this is an exception.
Rob

 

[hmadsen]

I usually don't go under 40% in normal daily driving in my LR Trophy but on a road trip I use as much range as possible without going under 20%. That can change a little depending on exactly where I am headed!

It's not "dangerous" to go, even below 10% if you know the distance to a supercharger and know it is in range.

Only caveat is, if the temperature is low and the battery is not very warm, then i would not go below 15%, my wife has one time been in a situation where she was 5 miles from home, the SoC was 11% and the car suddenly refused to go above 50 on the motorway with a posted speed of 70. (She was, but a mile from the end of the motorway anyway, so not a huge deal)

This was a miserable -5c day and the battery was probably not very warm, so a bit of an extreme situation, she might have been better off just doing a bit of battery heating, i bet the car would not have done this if the battery was a bit warmer, even if she would have had a few % less on the SoC

 

[Data]

It's not "dangerous" to go, even below 10% if you know the distance to a supercharger and know it is in range.

Only caveat is, if the temperature is low and the battery is not very warm, then i would not go below 15%, my wife has one time been in a situation where she was 5 miles from home, the SoC was 11% and the car suddenly refused to go above 50 on the motorway with a posted speed of 70. (She was, but a mile from the end of the motorway anyway, so not a huge deal)

This was a miserable -5c day and the battery was probably not very warm, so a bit of an extreme situation, she might have been better off just doing a bit of battery heating, i bet the car would not have done this if the battery was a bit warmer, even if she would have had a few % less on the SoC

Yes indeed. I would add that similar symptoms to your wife's experience can also come about due to the cars HV battery being out of balance. Not just cold conditions. This has happened to my niece recently while driving her ID3. The car was suddenly restricting power on the motorway. She knew she had around 14% charge left but within the space of a mile of driving the soc dropped to 7%. Luckily a charging hub was within range. Her dealer said to balance the battery & it would fix the issue. It did. Turns out she'd not balanced the battery in over a year.

 

[hmadsen]

Yes indeed. I would add that similar symptoms to your wife's experience can also come about due to the cars HV battery being out of balance. Not just cold conditions. This has happened to my niece recently while driving her ID3. The car was suddenly restricting power on the motorway. She knew she had around 14% charge left but within the space of a mile of driving the soc dropped to 7%. Luckily a charging hub was within range. Her dealer said to balance the battery & it would fix the issue. It did. Turns out she'd not balanced the battery in over a year.

Yeah, the sudden drop in SoC is also something my wife has experienced in the ZS EV.

One day she drove from home to her work and parked up, when she came back the SoC had dropped almost 10% and suddenly her situation went from "I will arrive at home with about 12% SoC" to "I really dont want to risk it, arriving with only 2% SoC"

She went to a DC charger and charged the car for less than 5 minutes to put about 10% extra on the car, but when she came home she arrived with, i think 15% so in reality she could have easily done the trip without charging, the guess-o-meter was just wildly inaccurate for some reason.

In that situation we charged the car to 100% and it was on there for many hours from 99% until 100% so batteries were probably not very balanced.

We rarely charge to 100%, this being a car with NMC batteries and her daily commute used 25-30% usually. She would drive it for 2 days, charge to 80% and then another 2 days and so on, to be nice to the batteries.