Every one of the 15 electric cars driven to a standstill in the AUTOBEST 2026 ECOBEST Challenge kept moving after its dashboard showed empty, averaging 16 km (10 miles) beyond the point where the car told its driver the battery was done. The spread between the best and worst performers was wide: the Leapmotor B10 went 32 km (19.9 miles) past empty, the Tesla Model Y Long Range 31 km (19.3 miles), and the Xpeng P7+ just 1 km (0.6 miles).
The test was run by car journalists in convoy near Milan, Italy, on a set route mixing city streets, country roads and highways, with a lead car setting the pace and drivers swapping cars every 30 km (19 miles) to even out driving styles. The final stretch took place at Quattroruote's Vairano proving ground, where each driver continued until the car could no longer move under its own power.
How the cars were run down
Only the driver was aboard each car, all vehicles ran in their standard rather than Eco mode with climate control on and tyres at recommended pressures, and ambient temperatures ranged from 20 to 25 degrees Celsius. A Zeekr 7GT served as the support vehicle, using its vehicle-to-load function to draw power from its own pack and get stopped cars moving again, which removed the need for a dedicated EV assistance van.
The measurement was deliberately narrow: the distance between the moment the dashboard showed either zero remaining range or 0% charge and the moment the car stopped. AUTOBEST's results table does not give the usable energy left in each pack at that point, nor the speed each car held afterwards, so the 32-to-1 gap between the Leapmotor and the Xpeng does not mean the Leapmotor had 32 times the reserve.
Why an EV can keep going at zero
When an EV reports empty, it means the driver has used the range the car promised, not that the pack is physically flat. All EVs carry a buffer: as state of charge falls, cell voltage drops, and before it gets low enough to damage the cells the car cuts power to the motor, leaving some charge in the pack permanently.
The two numbers a driver sees do not have to agree. A car can show 0% charge while still predicting some remaining range, and in one range test a Tesla Model 3 still displayed 3.2 km (2 miles) of range when state of charge hit 0%, then travelled another 50 km (31 miles).
That matters for anyone planning a charging stop on a thin margin. The practical lesson from the group test is that the distance between the empty warning and a dead car varies enormously by model, so the reserve a driver is quietly relying on is a property of their specific car rather than a rule of EV design. The Model Y's 31 km cushion and the Xpeng's 1 km sit at opposite ends of the same promise.
What the test does not settle
Because the run was a single convoy test on Italian roads in mild weather, it does not establish how much reserve a given model would have in cold conditions, at sustained motorway speed or with a full load aboard, none of which the published results isolate. Nor does it rank the cars on total range: the Xpeng P7+ can travel further on a full charge than the Model Y yet stopped almost immediately after showing empty, which is the finding InsideEVs singled out as the most revealing of the exercise.
