Range anxiety – the fear of your car running out of juice before it reaches the destination – is stressful, and it is still part of the lives of electric car owners.
However, that is about to change at least for Ford, as the company has fitted the new Mustang Mach-E with the ‘Intelligent Range’ feature to help more accurately predict how much range drivers have left, becoming more precise over time
The Intelligent Range function can accurately estimate how much range the all-electric SUV has left, helping reduce anxiety about when and where customers can re-charge.
It will calculate range based on past driver behaviour and forecasted weather conditions – taking advantage of the cloud to predict how much energy will be used in future driving.
The vehicle battery system also reports how much energy is available, while the powertrain module tracks how much energy is being used.
Warmer or colder weather can also impact range, so Intelligent Range takes that into consideration too, updating estimated range along the way.
Since crowd-sourced data from other connected Ford electric vehicles who choose to share information on the road can improve estimates considerably, the all-electric Mustang Mach-Ecan track how much energy is used in different circumstances, including varying speed, terrain and climate conditions, so it can use fleet averages across all Mustang Mach-Es to improve range estimates – even for routes and conditions an individual customer has never driven before.
If range is impacted notably by any number of factors at the start of a trip, customers will receive a notification in their cluster highlighting the new range estimate and details about why the estimate has changed.
A future update will also allow the Mustang Mach-E to take more advantage of cloud-connected capabilities, enabling it to factor in real-time traffic conditions, road slope, the terrain and elevation of a given route, and even the temperature at their final destination.
The all-electric Mustang Mach-E – with a targeted pure-electric driving range of up to more than 595 km according to the World Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP) – is one of 18 new electrified vehicles the company is introducing to Europe before the end of 2021.
