Playing Beethoven increases your EV's range
New study finds drivers listening to classical music go further in an EV. Harder-core tunes? You know the score…What you listen to behind the wheel has long been linked with driving behaviour and now a new study conducted by Kia and a British university has proved it can also affect driving range with electric cars.
As part of the experiment, participants with no experience of driving electric vehicles were asked to pilot a Kia EV6 along a 29km route that covered all driving conditions while listening to a predetermined playlist.
Wearing medical-grade wearable devices to record their biometric measurements, the human guinea pigs were subjected to Tycho – Awake, Adele – Hello, The Weeknd – Blinding Lights, Anna Meredith – Nautilus, Kanye West – Fade, and Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op.125.
The result is the majority of participants were found to drive up to four times more efficiently when listening to Beethoven.
Worst for efficiency was when participants listened to The Weeknd, which made most drivers twice as inefficient.
Finally, it was found that Adele triggered a mixture of driving responses that were affected by the song's building crescendos.
The study, carried out by Kia and the University of Salford's School of Science, Engineering and Environment, was overseen by Dr Duncan Williams, who is an expert in acoustics, noise, psychoacoustics and sound science.
“What we found from only two days of testing was that music really can have a dramatic influence on the real-world driving range of an electric vehicle,” said Williams.
"Different songs resulted in varying electrodermal activity and blood volume increase for each of the participants. This had a knock-on effect on driving style, and ultimately influenced the real-world driving range of the EV6.
"In short: if you want to go further, listen to the likes of Beethoven and other relaxing classical music. If you’re not worried about range dropping a little more quickly, by all means, put on some more high-tempo tracks.”
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