Range Anxiety Isn't Purely a Charging Problem, It's an Electric Vehicle Design Problem
Stephan Ng
Oct 2, 2025
Range anxiety isn't purely a charging problem; it's an electric vehicle design problem.
I started Moon Five three and a half years ago with the intention of bringing electric vehicle charging to more renters, which I began with my plug-in hybrid, a 2014 Chevy Volt. I had heard about range anxiety, but had never really experienced it myself; after all, I could drive on gas after my small battery ran out. Recently, however, I leased an all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 5, and I suddenly became concerned about range. It almost felt irrational, but it gave me anxiety. Why? I asked myself why, when I had a maximum range of 400+ miles on a full charge, I was suddenly worried about range.
After some probing, I believe I've discovered the reason. Having a "miles gauge" that shows the number of miles remaining, fondly referred to as the "guess-o-meter" by influencers in the space, is a poor design choice. Someone in engineering decided that "more information is better" and added a ticking clock that counts down until you're stranded.
But do you know what has already solved this problem? Apple.
In 2017, they released the iPhone X without a battery indicator on the top. The reality is that they could fit it, but my guess is that it didn't help anyone's anxiety to see a countdown until they lost communication with the world. As an iPhone user, you can still go into a menu to easily access the percentage, but it's not visible during the vast majority of your usage.
That's not to mention that electric vehicle energy consumption is significantly harder to predict than iPhone usage. Sure, spending hours watching YouTube heavily impacts the rate of battery drain, but with vehicles, you need to calculate for passenger consumption, the speed of the car, variations on breaking regeneration, if there are hills, etc. All of this only serves to reinforce the name "guess-o-meter". The unfortunate reality is that that is the best you can do with a gauge measuring remaining mileage.
What compounds the unfortunate reality is that by adding this simple number, automotive players have turned the average EV driver into unwilling physicists, whereas gas drivers just get in and go. When you drive electric, you need to factor in speed, hills, and the cold outside, among other things, rather than the binary choice of "Do I need to charge soon?".
As someone who studied physics in college, what bothers me is that gas drivers deal with the exact same effects! If a car has some x amount of drag, drag doesn't care if you're electric or gas, it cares about the shape of your vehicle and how it parts the air. If is going up a hill, the gas vehicle will also have a large increase in fuel consumption to increase the potential energy of the vehicle. But no one notices because all they care about is if the red "empty" line is illuminated. EVs of course lose efficiency as well, but your result is a rapidly accelerating countdown, making it an easy conversation topic.
