2022 Volvo XC40 Recharge Review: The Little EV That Could (for a Price)
Auto123 reviews the 2022 Volvo XC40 Recharge.
There was frankly no better time to try out an EV than in the dead of winter, with temperatures plunging to uncommon depths and couple of snowfalls thrown in for good measure. Enjoying an all-electric sparkplug like the Volvo XC40 Recharge in mild and dry spring or summer weather is easy, after all.
Optimal Conditions, they call them. Frankly we can learn a lot of what we need to learn about a vehicle’s performance and capabilities in good times from manufacturers’ specs, which deal with numbers recorded in Optimal Conditions.
January in Canada in the middle of an extended cold snap with lots of snow and ice about does not deliver Optimal Conditions. And so it was in decidedly un-optimal conditions that I took possession of the 2022 XC40 Recharge (in its top-of-the-line Ultimate trim) to discover that the estimated range I was being granted was not in the same area code as the official 359 km. With charge listed at 72 percent, I had 170 km at my disposal. OK.
I won’t belabour the point, because all EVs are affected by extreme cold to some degree. It’s just that this SUV looked to me like it was more affected than others. Extrapolate from that charge percentage to a full charge and it works out to about a 240 km range. That’s a loss of about 35 percent of range due to the cold. And that was with the Ultimate trim, which actually includes a heat pump, the job of which is to minimize range loss in the cold. Something to consider if you live in an area where extreme cold is a regular visitor…
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