Autonomy problems in transport
Anyone who has driven an electric vehicle may have suffered anxiety when the remaining range indicator drops drastic and uncontrollably, with no clear relationship between the distance actually traveled and that before announced.
Sure, you will have lived with anguish the unsettling sensation of not reaching your destination and see yourself on the side of the road.
The use of the electric battery is highly dependent on the driving form, thus it is difficult to make an accurate estimate of the remaining journey.
In any case, I have tried to drive in different ways, now more aggressive and then more calm, with or without eco options, taking advantage of slopes and braking or without braking, and the system car behavior prediction is scarce reliable.
This predictive system can work much better, I would even say that it could be very accurate, given that electrical and electronic systems are high monitorable, and that it is not so difficult for the system to assimilate some driving patterns, so we have to assume that other interests predominate, perhaps related to the need to justify the autonomy data announced in the commercial campaign and stamped on the vehicle’s spec sheet. We hope that the standardization of metrics used in the approval of electric cars will tend to solve this problem.
But, even if we had a fair predictive system, we would not solve the real problem behind it: the autonomy that batteries can offer is still low, and the charging time is too high compared to what we know with combustion vehicles.
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About the oversizing of the private vehicle
Some years ago, I asked a friend, who knows a lot about vehicle mechanics, what he thought of the Extended Range Electric Vehicle.
My friend started ranting and blabbering on about the conceptual error of hybrid vehicles, which I knew had him enraged, hence he ignored the question about the certainly different concept I asked, which I took as a diplomatic way of saying absurd idea, guy, or perhaps the mere mention of a combustion engine associated with an electric vehicle altered it in such a way that it no longer paid attention to the substance of the matter.
Hybrid vehicles represent a great tribute to inefficiency, which can only exist by the immense lack of synchrony between the urgent needs to change the energy model of mobility and the poor existing electricity supply infrastructure.
Photo by Barbara Krysztofiak on Unsplash
We want to carry the house on our backs.
And this is how we get into an insane spiral. The more needs the transport has to cover, the more luggage we have to load, which requires more power or redundancy, which forces us to add more engine weight or more engines, which further burdens the vehicle. To an endpoint of equilibrium at which the transport weighs 15 or 20 times more than the passenger.
Photo by A R on Unsplash
And so it is!
If it’s not enough absurd of having created dependencies on vehicles weighing a mean of 2,870 pounds — driven most of the time by a single person — with the hybrids, we append another traction motor.
Thus, the hybrid vehicle that transports us weighs an average of 3,670 pounds (3,980 pounds if plug-in hybrids), almost 30% overweight! Which implies higher energy costs.
The hybrid car concept could be understood in the initial evolution stage of transport electrification but not now when the change is urgent and massively raised. The answer can not be: because there is no infrastructure, so heavy hybrids for everyone.
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Extended Range Electric Vehicle
Primitive reasoning is very logical. Imagine that we go by electric car and, aware that we cannot trust the indicators and also aware that there is not enough developed infrastructure to load on our route and that the loading times are much longer than the refueling times of fuel, we think of an artisanal solution: we take a generator in the trunk and connect it to the battery so that it starts when the level drops below 30% charge, for example, and warns us to moderate driving still more, if necessary.
Well, at least this can prevent us from getting stuck on the road and having to call the crane.
In short, a pure electric traction vehicle equipped with a booster combustion engine manages to reduce the risk of running out of energy with a much lower overweight than hybrids, which is more reasonable.
These vehicles are on the market under the name Extended Range Electric Vehicle (E-REV). They incorporate a light combustion engine, fully integrated into the vehicle system, which no serves to traction the vehicle but to charge the batteries when it reaches a certain least electric charge threshold.
The E-REV is still a conceptual mistake but a little less profound than the hybrid car. In any case, it seems an obvious proposition in the context of the narrow circumstances of electric vehicle-oriented infrastructure.
Thanks for reading.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Krzysztof Niewolny on Unsplash