What Happens When Your Electric Car Runs Out of Battery?

More than any other concern folks may have about EVs, they want to know what happens when one runs out of battery. The simple answer is that it will stop moving. What people really want to know, though, is what happens after that. We decided to find out.

- By Words Scott Evans

If you read nothing else, read this: Don’t do it. If you have the range to reach a charger, no matter how slow, go there. If you do not have the range to reach a charger, pull over while you still have some battery left. Running an EV until it’s completely dead will only make your day worse and the recovery take longer. We’ll get to why, exactly, in just a bit.

The guinea pig here is a 2022 Rivian R1T, the first electric pickup truck to make it into mass production and a MotorTrend Truck of the Year winner. Its 135-kWh battery is officially good for 314 miles of range, though a recent over-the-air (OTA) software update unofficially increased that to 328 miles. A more recent OTA update also gave us the ability to set the charging limit as low as 50 percent, so keeping the battery drained before the big day was no hassle. The trick here would be to run out in a safe location. We planned to keep driving until the truck stopped moving, but we didn’t know exactly where that would be. Like gas-powered cars, some EVs have a little extra emergency range left after the gauge reaches zero.

With that in mind, we struck out for the Santa Clarita River Valley, an agricultural community north of Los Angeles with only a pair of slow Level 2 wall chargers available for EV drivers and no Level 3 DC fast chargers for 25 miles in any direction. Once we’d worn out the battery, we’d call Rivian Roadside Assistance and see what happened. Where would it tow us? How much would it cost? How long would it take to charge up enough to get home? We were going to find out.