Electric cars being much, much heavier than petrol cars do have a disadvantage going uphill.

I'd still reckon that range estimates should ignore these extreme edge cases, though.

> Electric cars being much, much heavier than petrol cars

This is one of those comments that continues to come up but has never added up. Certainly if you are comparing a Tesla compared to a compact or a Euro version of a compact. Absolutely there is a weight difference. The problem is if you did a like for like comparison..a Model Y is the same Weight as an X3. A Model 3 is a couple hundred pounds heavier than a Toyota Camry.

Comes mostly from comparing interiors in my experience. A camry has a full interior and is still ~400lbs lighter. If you compare minimal interior to minimal interior you're getting into Dacia with extra dynamat territory (can't think of a largeish stock ICE with good sound deadening and minimal interior) which is safe <1500kg. A Jogger is apparently 1261 kg kerb.

Difference between a petrol and electric Volvo XC40 is about 200KGs, so not insignificant but not as much as it's sometimes portrayed. EVs built from the ground-up may be able to knock a few of those KGs off too as they won't have structures designed for ICE components.

According to carsized.com an ICE Volvo XC40 (not sure whether that's a plug-in hybrid, probably not) weighs 1580 kg, while the BEV one weighs 2040 kg. That's a difference of almost 500 kg. The BEV weighs almost 30% more, that seems pretty significant to me.

Batteries are heavy!

https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/volvo-xc40-2017-suv...

> much, much heavier

Stop that. 10 - 15% doesn’t constitute “much, much”.

IMO it does, that’s the difference between a sedan and an SUV for a lot of brands.

You’re right but the difference isn’t as big as from the advertised 270 to 90-120. Also electric cars suffer from battery degradation which hampers the range quite a bit.

I don't think batteries degrade that much that fast. I would imagine it's akin to gas cars, where you lose about 10% or so in efficiency after you put on a lot of miles, like 100k. (My EV6 seems to be as efficient as when I bought it in 2022, but my driving style is all over the place, so it's hard to measure from one charge to the next if I'm feeling a bit spirited in my driving that day)

Are you sure about that? If you go only uphill in a gas car you will use a lot more fuel per km, just like an EV.