This Renault EV Averaged 8 Miles Per kWh At Highway Speeds

• Renault creates a test EV to break efficiency and range records.
• The Filante drove over 626 miles in under 10 hours, averaging a remarkable 8 miles/kWh.
• Renault says it will use what it learned with this one-off to make its future production EVs more efficient.

There’s still a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of electric vehicles. Every new generation of EVs gets incrementally better and goes a little bit further on one charge, and the new Gen 3 EVs show clear improvements. Renault created the Filante as a laboratory on wheels to see just how far an EV could go with today’s technology, using a battery pack that’s a similar size to what’s in a midsize electric model today.

The result is the streamlined Renault Filante demo car, which drove 626 miles (1,008 km) in under 10 hours, averaging a speed of over 63 mph (102 km/h). When it completed its record run, it still had 11% left in its battery, which Renault says means it could have achieved the same range at an even higher speed, 75 mph (120 km/h), or it could have gone even further at the same speed, almost reaching 680 miles (1,100 km).

The Filante recorded an average electricity consumption of just 7.8 kWh/100 km, which is just shy of 8 miles/kWh. That’s considerably better than even the most efficient of today’s production EVs, like the Mercedes-Benz CLA, Tesla Model 3 or the Lucid Air, which can’t do much better than 5 miles/kWh even with their 800-volt architecture.

The secret is a combination of its low-drag design, low weight of just 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg), and the use of very narrow tires. That’s how the Filante can stretch its 87-kilowatt-hour battery pack as far as it has. Renault’s production Scenic E-Tech electric crossover with the same battery is rated at around 380 miles (610 km) on the WLTP test cycle, which drops by around 30% if you do sustained high-speed driving.

It also has power-saving steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire systems and the tires were specially designed by Michelin to minimize rolling resistance and do their part to lower drag. Renault says that its goal with this study was to find ways to maximize EV range, and it hopes to implement what it learned here in its future production models.

It still has a long way to go to even come near what the Filante achieved (albeit around a closed test loop in sunny Morocco). Renault’s most efficient current EV, the characterful and rather good 5 E-Tech, can average around 4.3 miles/kWh in real-world driving. The smaller and lighter Twingo set to debut next year should do even better.