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Winter conditions can reduce the range of a battery electric vehicle by up to 40%, participants in the Optimise Prime EV trial have reported.
The Ofgem-funded programme is the world’s largest commercial EV project and aims to discover how the UK’s electricity infrastructure will cope with the mass adoption of EVs, as well as how businesses can accelerate their transition.
It features three fleet partners – Royal Mail, Centrica and Uber – who each have different operating modes, as well as Hitachi and electricity distribution networks UK Power Network and Scottish and Southern Electricity networks.
James Rooney, fleet engineer at Centrica, said: “In 2014, we took on some Nissan eNV200s and they were a really good van in the summer, not so good in the winter.