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Gel and lithium-ion tech could enable 1000-mile EV range on one charge
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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I wish people would stop obsessing so much over range. Once we have decent charging infrastructure in place and people overcome all the FUD, this will simply cease to be relevant.
Some people don't want to feel like they have to stop every hour for 15-20 minutes. If I'm going on a long road trip I'm fine driving 300-400 miles without stopping. I'm probably a minority but I'm sure I'm not the only one.
You're certainly not the only one but you're also being grossly irresponsible. Sufficient breaks are essential for staying attentive. Not stopping for five or six hours is just asking for disaster. Just think about what you're going to feel like if you killed someone because you fell asleep at the wheel.
Edit: and as per usual, lots of downvotes but no counterargument
Gonna upvote you, anyone who isnt taking regular breaks on long trips is asking for trouble. This is true of anything we do. No one here is going to argue we should work for 5-8 hours without a break.
They only make driving lessons 45 minutes because any longer and you start to lose concentration.
Truck drivers have to take breaks every 4.5 hours for 45 minutes.
When studying they recommend a 15 minute break every 45 minutes
When learning in school lessons are 45 minutes to an hour due to concentration lapsing and you get a break in the middle of the day.
If you are being downvoted its only by people who dont think about what you are saying or they think they are superhuman and the normal limitations of human beings dont apply to them.
Is this a specific state requirement? I ask because that's not what the FMCSA says. It's 30 minute break every 8 hours (USA) and it can be any activity including including work (except driving) that would satisfy the requirement. Source, am a truck driver and https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations see 30-minute driving break section.
I’m most familiar (although casually) either UK/EU rules, and this page has an excellent breakdown of what’s considered the bare minimum this side of the pond for safety.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/drivers-hours-goods-vehicles/1-eu-and-aetr-rules-on-drivers-hours
Personally I prefer to have a 20-30 min break every 2 hours which leaves me feeling sufficiently refreshed, and conveniently works perfectly for changing a 64kWh EV enough to do the next leg at the same ratio. I honestly believe switching to an EV has forced me to become a safer driver with regard to taking breaks.
I think most of the regulations for truckers here in the US were made in mind with how long the distance is between everything.
As far as driving my EV goes, ideally I would like to get 3-4 driving hours in before recharges, but only when the drive is longer than 6 hours total. I'd rather just get there sooner. I currently drive a Bolt EUV and it's an hour charging for every 2-3 driving. Longer road trips take some planning especially when driving across middle America where the charging network isn't that great yet. Meals are easy, but in between meals planning an hour long stop can be challenging.
Sorry im in the UK and was going off the uk and eu laws.
30 minutes every 8 hours must be tough. Do you do back to back periods of 8 hours?
I was just thinking that if its 8 hours then a break but your shift is done, then the break is just the end of your shift.
All of our driving has to be completed in 14 hours (11 hours driving total). When I drove over the road (not home every night) I usually tried to aim for a leg stretch every 4 hours. I'd usually walk around the rig and check things out for leg stretchers. For the 30 min break I would find a rest area or a truck stop and have a proper meal and I usually took longer than 30 for that break unless the place was boring. When i would take breaks were usually determined by location along the route.
You’re not the only one. Most people try to make as much distance as possible between stops.
If there are reliable and fast chargers every 50 miles you’ll have several choices in that 300-400 mile range and we already have plenty of cars capable of that. The goal is not to have everyone stop at every charger. But to allow more people to drive how they are most comfortable and maybe even enable more cars to road trip.
We need more data for everyone to see.
We need to see what the average vehicle owner does with their vehicles.
Because the people who use their cars they most need the best experience, but they used the vehicle differently than the majority of people.
Evs need to be released on different models for different styles.
If you only travel with people that need constant breaks, then there no reason needing a 15 to 20 minute break frequently can't be made to work with a lower range vehicle if you only need to do long trips a few times a year or less. The savings of having that vehicle the rest of the time should be made to more than offset any special needs that aren't needed often.
There's other options to explore as well. Like it's easy to find example of vehicles with multiple gas tanks. If you need an extended battery there should be a trailer like attachment that extends the range of your vehicle. Make towing something get you better range because the thing you added towing is extra "fuel"
I'm sure there are technical problems that will need to be addressed or solved and it might require car companies to change designs about to make it seams but it's very doable
Yea....no. Most of the USA is rural areas, range is a huge deal.
Exactly. Ideally in cities and surrounding suburbs we would want public transportation and no cars. Cars should really be reserved for the more rural places anyway.
Then you need to figure out the range issue.
Let's take the absolute worst case I could find for North America: in Quebec between Matagami and Radisson there is a 620km (390mi) distance between gas stations. This exceeds the range of many ICE cars, but let's continue. It gets real cold up there, and there's a few days out of the year where it's well below 0F. To account for the cold, let's increase that distance by 40% to get to about 550mi.
There is one EV on the market right now with a 516mi range, the Lucid Air. So it can't quite make it under the absolute worst case conditions that, even up there, will only happen for portions of the year. Many ICE cars would also fail to make it.
This problem is completely overblown. The 1,994 combined population of those two Canadian towns will have to wait. Literally everyone else in North America will be fine if we just get our charging infrastructure better.
Oh, and ICE cars lose gas mileage in cold weather as well. 15% lower at only 20F. So ICE cars that could barely make that trip under warmer conditions probably couldn't under the extreme cold of this exceptional situation.
Gas cans do exist. You can't carry a substation with you.
Great, that will help you drive right past the point.
You just need a charging station every hundred kilometres or so, that's perfectly doable even in sparsely populated areas. In fact, this kind of infrastructure is far easier to roll out than gas stations.
I'd rather not refuel in -20F weather on a single trip. Add in a trailer and a road trip becomes a charging trip with intermittent driving.
Yep. People in the city, EVs are fine. For those of us who haul or have to drive farther than 20 miles it becomes an issue. It's not there just yet for us. I'm still holding out for hydrogen ICE motors.
Where do you get the idea from that an EV only has 20 miles of range? Have you ever even seen an EV let some driven one?
Uhh where did I say that they only had 20 mile range? I said for those of us who have a drive that's farther than 20miles one way. Most of people who travel usually do 45-60 miles just going to and from work daily. Then you add in errands, the range needs to be better.
I agree that increased range would be better - I’ve had cars (diesel) that could get nearly 600 miles on one tank and that allows you to do a lot more wandering though the countryside that is just not possible in an ev in the rural US. But it’s way more than 20 miles. Did you mean 200 miles?
I’m currently on a road trip in my 2021 EV and it can definitely be made to work, but it is definitely limiting on any spontaneous side excursions you find, which can be a pretty big bummer.
Double the range would definitely be appreciated for my use cases.
Not to be a dick but do you realize how rural rural America is?
They have electricity there, don't they?
Wait you think digging a hole and putting in a few tanks to store gas is harder than having substations near by to power super charge stations?
The answer is no, no it is not easier or cheaper.
I drive 82 miles a day on average according to my tracking, but that frequently involves days of 400+ miles. And since I drive in hill country and require air conditioning most of the years I know the range estimates are wildly optimistic versus real-world performance.
And charging a car isn't like filling up with gas. It's not a 3-minute stop. If a car can get me as far as I'm willing to drive in a day, then an overnight charge seems like an option.
But even then, since I'm a renter and always will be because of the shit going on with housing I can't get a fast charger.
All of this is to say that it's not 1 issue. It's all of them. Range, charging speeds, and availability of chargers ALL have to be addressed and essentially 100% reliable before I can risk owning an all-electric vehicle.
I think part of the range anxiety thing is that buyers think of their worst trip, target than the average trip.
On average, Canadians commute 8.7km to work. Those who commute for more than 60 minutes are averaging 40km. For these trips, drivers don't need charging infrastructure beyond what they have at home. (And yes, public transit would be an even better option)
There are always outliers, and every time this comes up, people talk about how far they drive on road trips and vacations. Those are not normal use, and they should probably be handled by renting an ICE car.
Or just getting on a plane to go somewhere far, rather than spending three days of your already limited vacation driving past corn.
What FUD I’ve seen the word a couple times today.
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
Energy density is the key component. It'd mean less weight for the same range so even if you make a 200 mile range vehicle instead of a 1000 mile range vehicle, the much smaller battery and lighter weight of the vehicle would make a huge difference, plus it'd be cheaper to make in general.
I live in an apartment complex with no chargers. It doesn't matter how much the infrastructure is, if I have to sit once a week to charge my car at a Denny's, then I'm not interested.
Now, if you say I only need to do that once a month.... Hmmm... I'm listening....
That's not how this stuff works. I never sit in my car waiting for it to charge. Sometimes I'll charge while shopping. Plug in the car, do your weekly grocery shopping come back, drive off. When you use a level 2 (shower) charger, you leave the car and come back after a couple of hours. It obviously depends on the available infrastructure in the places you normally go to. Takes a bit of planning and a bit of forethought. But it's really not rocket science.
Ya, probably better in your neck of the words. Probably better once there is better infrastructure for me
I'm somewhere in the middle. I've thought about getting an EV my case is a 2012 Camry... And it's still doing fine, but it is getting up there in the years.
I don't drive much at all three days since I work from home.
When I do drive it's roughly 150 miles to my parents or my grand parents. It looks like without installing something at their houses I could charge up 120 miles in a 24 hour period with the car entirely on the charger (but sometimes I want to go drive around and see friends or things and that's time the car is not charging so ... 120 miles might be an over estimate in some cases). That's a bit uncomfortable especially when the cold weather makes the range drop so the "320" miles total becomes closer to "270". Then there's the whole thing where batteries lose capacity over time...
That means I'm going to potentially need to plan for stopping at a charger. There really aren't that many chargers available between, e.g. where my parents live in Marietta Ohio, and where I live in Akron Ohio. When looking at a map (provided by Ford for the Mustang Mach-e I was looking at) there were maybe a dozen charging locations with pretty much 1-3 chargers each ... That's compared to a dozen busy gas stations I've encountered with ~8 pumps each.
I'd probably be fine but ... I think I'd be better off waiting a couple of years and seeing if the 600 mile EV range becomes a reality. At that point all of my regular trips are accounted for and I'm okay looking for charging on the odd times I go on a large trip.
Alternatively, maybe there will be more chargers by that point (or charging will be faster) and I'll feel more comfortable that I'll be able to find a charger when I need it.
I don't want my long 2 1/2 hour trip to turn into a 3+ hour trip on the way back ... or turn into a particularly dangerous or sketchy situation because the charger I need is being used by someone else/down for maintenance/broken and it's very cold outside.
I live in California, so the infrastructure is likely more built up here, but I regularly make trips from the SF Bay Area all the way to San Diego or Las Vegas just fine. On a shorter 2.5 hour trip, I could see it being annoying, but a couple charge stops on an 8 hour trip offer a nice time to take a break to grab a quick bite and carry on. Just my two cents.
I've thought about that too, but the stretch of road there is basically an interstate through the country side the majority of the route. There's very little in terms of interesting cuisine or places to really walk around.