QOTW: What should be the minimum range for an electric car?

[directhex]

Battery swap is a complete dead end.

Renault developed it, the company in charge of the stations went bust from low use.

Tesla developed it, they had an active user base of about zero.

Cross-manufacturer battery swap is... how the hell would that even work? Standardizing the platform of every car in the world, from small hatchbacks to large SUVs?

What we have are plugs. Today, the fastest charge rate is from a Tesla Supercharger at 120kW peak (about 6 miles of range per minute charging), or 50kW peak for other cars (2.5 miles of range per minute charging). The standards allow for higher, and Porsche has a couple of prototype 350kW chargers in the wild (17.5 miles per minute) - although no cars can charge that quickly yet. In 20 minutes you can put 120 miles of range into a Tesla, and if your car doesn't come with complimentary charging, it'll cost you £8. Charging on the go at high speed is more expensive than charging slowly at home.

[Saracen]

If main roads came with a fast charging wireless system built in to them, then even a 100m is generous, only need enough to get you in and out of housing estates or local routes.

If timnpe travel were a reality, someone from the 45th century could nip back and give us better battery technology. In anything resembling short-term, I'd bet that's more likely.

Even if you restrict that to motorways, it's what, thousands of miles of roads to be dug up. Then double it because you need at least one charge lane in each direction. And motorways alone won't be enough. I spend far more time on the A1 than any motorway.

Then, picture the astronomical cost, and the massive disruption to traffic flows for years.

In 50 or 100 years, maybe. But in the next 5m 7 or 10? Not a prayer.

For electric cars to be viable to users other than city dwellers or second cars for local use only, we neeed a solution that can be implemented in, say, 5 years and without putting the country in debt for generations to pay for it.

What will it be? Dunno. Maybe a modular battery system where a car has two two compartnents, one for 150 miles or range that is car-standard, and a second or second and third) for "rental". On a long run, you can swap out the 2nd/3rd cartridge like we swap for petrol today.

Or something totally different.

But charging infrastructure in thousands and thousands of miles of roads? Not in my lifetime

[shbris]

My girlfriends parents live 435km away, so a range of 434km would be absolutely ideal

[Output]

But charging infrastructure in thousands and thousands of miles of roads? Not in my lifetime

I'm generally not a car person, but I have to agree - it might happen in one or two places as a proof of concept, but I honestly can't see it being even remotely viable financially to actually implement on all of those roads.

Charging stations at petrol stations seems a lot more like a realistic solution, but I'm unaware of the cost as to whether it would realistically be applicable to all or whether it would need to be limited to ones in certain areas such as motorways to be financially viable.

Put together with the time it could take to charge it, and it seems realistically that the minimum range for an electric car would need to be very generous - but I still couldn't suggest what an optimal number would be to cover enough of the various usage cases.

I very much like the idea of electric cars, but I still think it is going to be many years before it gets to a point that it is seen as mainstream, accessible and suitable to most people, with that time meaning that putting in the resources to properly support it is then viable.

[cheesemp]

For me 50 miles on the coldest day of winter, with the heaters on the car, doing 70Mph on the motorway (for half the journey) when the car is 5 years old. If I could guaranty that i'd have a leaf/zoe now as my wife has a big car for longer journeys. I suspect a higher capacity leaf (30Kwh) would do but they are currently ~£17000 - The 24Kwh leafs are only £10000 but I just can't be sure I could do my commute with one when the car gets old. Just hoping the price drops some more when the new generation comes out.

Also someone needs to tell Renault that £80 battery hire on a £6000 car is just crazy when they only replace it at 75% capacity!

[tonyd2233]

250 miles - I need to be able to drive to Manchester and back on a single charge, or one way to London or Edinburgh with the ability to recharge when I get there... So you can probably work out where I live from that :-)

[madmaca]

As an EV owner, I'm happy with the range that the new 40kw EVs seems to be coming out with. Around 200 miles. But as others have said, it's all relative to the charging infrastructure. If there was EV charging at every petrol station that was quick (30mins or less) and as cheap as petrol in terms of miles added, then it wouldn't be a problem. I think all these people quoting 400+miles need to be a little bit more realistic. Do you start every journey with a full tank of petrol/diesel? No, so stopping on the way to most places is a necessity...

[DanceswithUnix]

Do you start every journey with a full tank of petrol/diesel? No, so stopping on the way to most places is a necessity...

I start *some* journeys with a full tank, I will have filled up the evening before and driven straight home from a petrol station under a mile away. That's the problem, my typical journey (14 mile commute) could easily be done even in something low range like an i3, it is the non typical but still important journeys that need good range.

[Rad77]

Well, curently I have three cars older than 1 years, one being 40 years and ALL are on original engjne, transmission, etc. Sure, an occasional component goes. I had to replace an akternator about two years ago. But nothing of the order of magnitude you suggest, with new engine and transmission. Of course, it does depend on average annual mileage .... which is another factor in the overall viability of electric cars.

I have one car, 12 years old with nearly 140k on the clock. Nothing major replaced yet but expecting that there will be a big bill fairly soon (clutch is certainly on borrowed time). However we seem to be in a minority who don't feel nervous about getting a car through an MoT - when I look at my neighbour's cars, many are replacing (with new) every few years (on leases/finance I guess) and a lot of people seem to get very nervous about owning a car older than about 5 years - they seem to assume that it is just days away from some kind of catastrophic failure (my mum and my girlfriend fall into this category, any small rattle seems to be taken as a sign that the engine is about to drop out... although to be fair, that did happen to me once in a clapped out Peugeot 405 - well the gearbox mounting bolts sheared and the housing fell off the back of the engine block).

However I have heard some real horror stories about the cost of replacing injectors in german cars, one guy that I work with has recently paid a bill that was many thousands of pounds and approx 75% of the resale value of the (7yr old) car.

The point being that if you keep a car for a long time then you will eventually have to replace some parts and the cost of IC vs battery powered looks fairly similar to me (assuming a replacement refurb battery will only be a few grand in ten years time). Hybrids would potentially be the most costly over time, as they have everything and the kitchen sink onboard.

[DanceswithUnix]

Hybrids would potentially be the most costly over time, as they have everything and the kitchen sink onboard.

Not really, Stop-Start on normal petrol cars means having electric powered aircon and power steering etc that can be powered by an over sized battery that is charged when you engine break using a stupidly complicated charging system. So already you kind of have regenerative breaking when you take your foot off the loud pedal just not when using the actual brakes.

Mild hybrid just means having a motor/generator rather than an alternator so not that much more complex, plug in hybrid is an extra battery pack and charge controller.

So modern IC cars are just all horribly complex, hybrid or not. The draw for me on electric cars is that it simplifies things a lot.

[Ttaskmaster]

Basically, tot up the mileage a taxi or a bus does - Vehicles like those will be more of a governing factor, I reckon. If they do 400 miles a day on a single charge, that's what people will probably want in the end. Not because they need it, but because they can and it makes their life easier.

Hydrogen is the only way forward, waiting around for your car to be charged will become a joke, even a quick charge will be 30mins. Run out of fuel fill up carry on works. Charging cars still burns away fossil fuels.

As I understand it (which probably isn't as much as most people), the process getting the hydrogen into usable form at the fuel pump is also quite nasty on the environment?
Plus, I understand you're sat on a highly pressurised tank of explody hydrogen, which people aren't so keen on...

My girlfriends parents live 435km away, so a range of 434km would be absolutely ideal

Until you break down and are now forced to walk a whole kilometre to the destinaton, with her ragging on you all the way and whining about how her stupid impractical shoes are hurting her feet, how you're walking too fast, how it's all your fault, how you're so mean to her sister, how cats are better than dogs, yadda yadda yadda.....

[keithwalton]

I have a solution in mind to the recharging issue but it will take some time to firm out the details of how viable it is.

But the solution is to change the balance of the hybrid energy store.

Most already have a super capacitor for storing energy from regenerative braking etc as super caps can store energy rapidly but they cant store very much or for long.
Prototype (LMP) race cars have developed various types of KERS technologies for this purpose.

My idea is to exchange some of the battery capacity for supercap (or other rapid energy store) and then you have the option to charge this up in seconds. The energy can then be used to slowly recharge the normal vehicle batteries whilst motoring the vehicle along.
That way you can park up anywhere and the vehicle will continue to charge its batteries without being plugged in.

It would mean the range of the vehicle would be small ~50 miles would be enough for an urban dweller and when it needs to go on long journeys it just needs to be able to get between charge points on motorways if charging the supercap only takes a minute.

There are a few issues but they're the same with most electric cars.
The voltages required will be high the car will have to be well protected from becoming live and an electrical risk.
The charging stations will require a good connection to the national grid as they'll be pulling some serious juice, but they too could be running on super caps as a buffer. Replace the underground fuel tanks with caps and you'll have plenty of capacity.
Some energy will be lost as heat in the transfer but that's a small price to pay for recharging in minutes

The earlier post about peak charging rates sound good but they're only a peak rate with a battery which is applicable only when they're flat as a pancake and it rapidly degrades. 50kw per hour would recharge most small cars in under and hour but in reality it takes several hours.