Want to know if an electric car will work for you? There’s an app for that…

Making the move to a full electric car is the biggest change to motoring most of us will experience, so it’s obvious there will be questions to ask and things to learn.

One of the biggest concerns many drivers have about transitioning to an electric car is how it will fit within their specific driving requirements.

Will the range be enough? How much power will I use? Can I charge it near where I live and drive?

If this sounds like you, Mercedes-Benz has a unique solution to help.

EQ Ready is a smartphone app that monitors your driving behaviour over a week of use and reveals what the equivalent energy use and charging requirements would have been if your car was electric.

You start selecting an electric Mercedes-Benz to ‘simulate’ and by noting what your current car is, so that a reasonable comparison can be made.

We chose the Mercedes-Benz EQC and compared it to my 2019 Peugeot 308 hatch.

Once set up, you simply start the simulation and forget about it.

The app runs in the background and records your trips and driving telemetry. It’s close, but not totally accurate, as some route summaries were seemingly calculated based on waypoint data, but the general summary of behaviour was correct.

It noted the various common trips I took, and how much of the simulated EQC’s energy was used.

You start the simulation with a full charge, and the data gathered gradually subtracts your EV driving range to the point where you are reminded to add in a ‘charge’.

There’s the option to simulate a home charge or high-speed public charge so you can see how well your rest time will replenish the EV’s power reserves.

My week included a longer drive for some filming and photography work, and so ended with an average of around 44km travelled each day.

I could learn to be a little more efficient, as energy use was an average of 24.5kWh/100km, but if I was using an EQC rather than my (already very efficient) Peugeot, I would have saved 140kg of carbon dioxide emissions. That's despite the Benz weighing more than TWICE what the Pug does (2522kg vs 1122kg).

The app shows you which public chargers you drove past and also how long you would have needed to charge to manage your regular driving.

You can even plan a journey and see how each EV model will perform and how many charging stations you’ll pass on the way.

For example, a run from my home to Howqua in the Victorian High Country will use 75 per cent of the EQC’s battery (a total of 60.4kWh consumption) and leave me with 69km remaining range.

I’ll pass a total of 14 charging bays on the way there, so there is plenty of opportunity to top the car up on the way.

While the EQ Ready app is geared to promote Mercedes-Benz products, it can provide a decent insight into what your proposed electric-car use looks like.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to see just how much ‘energy’ you use and what your daily range requirements are.