Every EV Range Number You Read Is on a Different Scale. We Fixed That.
Range is the first number anyone checks, and it is the number the industry reports least honestly. Not because anyone is lying. Because America, Europe and China each measure it with a different laboratory test, and the results are not remotely comparable.
A car rated 500 miles in China would be rated about 355 miles if you shipped it to a US lab. Same car, same battery, same tires. The gap is the test, not the engineering.
So we rebuilt our EV range chart from the ground up. It now holds 178 vehicles across 49 brands and three continents, and it puts every one of them on a single comparable scale.
How we got 178 cars onto one scale
The US test is by far the harshest. Under EPA rules an automaker must either run a five-cycle test that includes cold weather, air conditioning and hard acceleration, or take its two-cycle lab result and multiply it by 0.7 before printing it on the window sticker. Europe and China apply no such haircut.
To bridge that, we compared cars rated under more than one standard, matching generation, battery and wheels wherever possible. Against Europe’s WLTP figure an EPA rating lands at roughly 80%. Against China’s CLTC figure, roughly 71%. Those are the two factors the chart applies, and it marks every converted number with a striped bar so you always know which figures are real ratings and which are our estimates.
Five things we found while rebuilding it
- Tesla discontinued the Model S and Model X. Announced in January 2026, production confirmed over on 1 April with roughly 600 cars left, and the final Model S left the line on 11 May. Fourteen years after the Model S rewrote what an electric car could be, Tesla’s US lineup is the Model 3, Model Y and Cybertruck.
- A work truck now has the second-longest range in America. The Chevrolet Silverado EV Work Truck Max Range is EPA-rated 493 miles, behind only the 512-mile Lucid Air. Worth knowing: the 478-mile figure advertised on the retail trims is a GM estimate, not an EPA rating.
- The 1,000 km barrier fell to cheap batteries, not exotic ones. The Denza Z9 GT EV is rated 1,036 km CLTC, and it does it with conventional lithium iron phosphate in a very large pack. As of now no all-solid-state car is verified to be in ordinary customer hands anywhere in the world. CATL’s chairman put the technology at “level 4” of 9 in June and pushed mass adoption beyond 2030.
- Some of the biggest range numbers in America are not EPA ratings at all. The Cadillac Escalade IQ, the GMC Hummer EV SUV and the Sierra EV Max Range all sit above the EPA’s light-duty weight ceiling, so they are never certified. Their headline figures are manufacturer estimates. We show them in gray, because a Cadillac-estimated 465 miles is not the same kind of number as an EPA-certified 512.
- The federal tax credit died and prices went down. The $7,500 clean vehicle credit ended on 30 September 2025. Cox Automotive put the average new-EV transaction price at $59,125 that October and $54,508 by March 2026, a drop of about 8%. Prices have since rebounded to $56,126.
Four brands also left. Ford cancelled the F-150 Lightning after the Novelis supplier fire. Honda ends the Prologue after this model year and has no replacement. Polestar was denied authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule and cannot sell here from 2027. Audi’s Q8 e-tron is finished.
What the chart does now
- Switch between US equivalent and as rated to see either one honest ranking or each car’s official home-market number.
- Sort by range, efficiency in miles per kWh, price, or price per mile of range.
- Filter by market and by body style, or search 49 brands.
- Tap any car for its battery, efficiency, price and a link to the source.
- Switch miles to kilometres, and use the whole thing properly on a phone.
Corrections welcome
Fact-checking this rebuild against primary sources caught eight errors before publication, including three in our own draft. Every EPA figure now comes from the EPA certification database rather than press coverage, European figures from manufacturer configurators, and Chinese figures from manufacturer specifications and MIIT filings.
If you spot something wrong, tell us. The chart gets corrected and dated rather than quietly rewritten, and the methodology is published on the page so you can check our working.