This is a sponsored article from our partners at Sailun Tires.
Your electric vehicle’s tires will need to be replaced at some point, probably sooner than you think. Like most EV owners, you may be wondering if you should break with your EV manufacturer’s choice of rubber and go with an aftermarket, EV-specific tire like the ERange series from Sailun. The answer depends on a lot of things, but if your household is anything like ours, the overriding factor is always money.
If an EV tire like the ERange can actually increase your car’s range, that means you’re saving money. Why? Because more range from the same amount of energy means you’re more efficient and paying less for that electricity per mile. Over the course of many years and tens of thousands of miles, those savings add up.
We’ve now thoroughly tested ERange tires from Sailun on a 2013 Ford C-Max Energi in EV mode and have data to share regarding how much money they could save you over time on your EV.
Sailun claims from its own testing using a Tesla Model 3 that ERange tires can improve range by 7 percent. Our own real-world testing results are surprisingly close to the manufacturer’s. We found the range of our C-Max Energi increased 7.4 percent after installing ERange tires.
Check out ERange tires to save you money.
How much money you could save over, say, 50,000 miles of driving depends on how much energy costs. Most EV owners charge at home or a public high-speed charging station, and since it’s generally cheaper to charge at home, we’ll run the numbers using your own charger. The savings would be even higher, though, at a more expensive public charger.
For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re the owner of a Genesis G70 Electrified who lives in southern California. Your car has an EPA-rated range of 236 miles and the cost of electricity to your home is 28.8 cents per kilowatt hour (this was the average cost of electricity in Los Angeles for December 2023).
Figuring out how much energy your EV uses per mile is pretty easy. The EPA states the G70 Electrified uses 37 kilowatt hours of electricity for every 100 miles driven, so simple division tells us it uses .37 kWh of electricity per mile. If your electricity costs 28.8 cents per kWh, then it costs you just 10.656 cents to drive one mile in your G70 Electrified.
Now let’s multiply that over 50,000 miles, which is within the treadwear lifespan of a set of tires. If energy costs you 10.656 cents per mile, driving your Genesis 50,000 miles on stock tires would cost you $5,328 in electricity. This is a thought experiment so we’re not taking into account the fluctuating price of electricity over time, including the time of day you’re charging, but it gives us a general idea of cost we can use to compare with a set of EV-specific tires.
If a set of ERange tires can increase your EV’s range by 7.4 percent, your Genesis G70 Electrified’s range would increase from 236 miles to 253.5 miles. We need to calculate this EV’s new efficiency rating, and for that, we need to know the size of its battery pack. While Genesis states the battery pack’s usable capacity is 77.4 kWh, the EPA’s figures reveal that the battery's actual capacity is 87.32 kWh. If the G70 Electrified’s new range on ERange tires is 253.5 miles, dividing the former by the latter gets us a new, better efficiency figure of .34 kWh of electricity per mile. Again using an average cost for electricity of 28.8 cents per kWh, you would spend $4,896 on electricity to drive 50,000 miles on ERange tires.
Here's the math:
((killowatt hour per mile) * (50,000 miles)) * (cost of electricity per kilowatt hour) = cost of electricity to drive 50,000 miles
(.34*50,000) * .288 = 4,896
There you have it. Over the course of 50,000 miles of driving, the increased efficiency brought about by donning a set of ERange tires from Sailun would save this theoretical Los Angelite about $432.
If you want to apply this formula to your own situation, where you live and the cost of electricity there will be the most important factor. Utah has the cheapest electricity at 11 cents per kilowatt hour, so both your costs and your savings would be smaller there.
The point of this exercise, though, is to show that a few extra miles of range add up to real money over time. In this case, enough money to buy two shares of Tesla and still take your honey out for dinner at a reasonably priced restaurant.
