The 200k Tesla Roadster is expected to have 600 mile range. What ICE car exceeds that? Most ICE are at about ~450 mile range, Model S is at 400 now. There's going to be a lot of battery improvements over the next couple decades pushing EV range far past ICE.
Gasoline has more than 10x the energy density of Li-ion batteries, with relative efficiency taken into account. I don't expect to see BEV exceeding ICE in range anytime soon.
Long haul trucks can do 2000 miles no problem, and extending the range is just a matter of adding more tanks. For now, there is no real competition over range in ICE cars, but if that becomes a thing, you can't win with batteries.
The only batteries that could compete would be lithium-air, and they are still in research phase, with no large scale commercial use in sight yet.
Energy density is just part of the equation. EV's also can use regenerative braking and recharge when going downhill. That's how Tesla's achieve their mileage. Electric engines are substantially more compact and lighter than similarly powered ICE's, giving more mass and volume budget to add extra batteries.
In the specific case of trucks, in most places you can't demand a driver to do a 2000 mile leg on a single stretch and, with the required pause to rest, it's also easy to recharge. A limit of 700 miles should be considered a reasonable target for truck range on a single charge.
Airplanes are probably the place where internal combustion (or not quite internal, but still combustion, as turboprop and jets are not ICE's) will have a significant share for a long time. Even there, short haul small planes are already electrifying.
My mid-2010s Subaru SUV has ~550 mile range, and fill-ups take ~5 minutes.
Semis can have 2000+ mile ranges.
I am also excited to see battery densities increase, but so far the way we're getting comparable range in EVs is by allocating a greater proportion of weight to fuel. And recharging is still relatively slow.
Right; see my other comment about recent experiences with a long drive in a Tesla Model S.
nothing beats the distance over time you can get with a gas vehicle, given also how quickly you can add range.
Many years ago, we used to drive from the midwest to California every year, which was two 800 mile days. We covered that 800 miles in about 13 hours, which is an average of 60 miles per hour.
A few weeks ago, we drove 800 miles in our Tesla, and did it in 16.5 hours, which is a little less than 50 miles per hour.
I know not all EVs are Tesla, but it's interesting to see where charging is going (others will follow suit).
Supercharging v3 gives you 1,000 miles of range per hour of charge (approx. if you're in the 20-80% SOC range I think). If you take a 6 min bathroom (or other) break every 100 miles (roughly every couple of hours), you can replenish those 100 miles during that break.
Personally, I find superchargers "too quick", as I tend to stop for lunch with my family when I supercharge, and I find myself having to rush to finish lunch so I can get the car out of the charger for someone else to be able to use it. I wish there was an option to say "charge slower and give that juice to the other guy" (many/most current supercharger "pods" have to share the current flow with another car).
> Personally, I find superchargers "too quick", as I tend to stop for lunch with my family when I supercharge, and I find myself having to rush to finish lunch so I can get the car out…
Pumping gas, I usually do not have time to even squeegee all the windows; I've never wanted to stop for lunch while getting gas.
The routine is different. You fill the tank, then park and get lunch. If you recharge while parked, the recharge time should approximate the duration of your lunch stop. Abundance of chargers may remove the urge to take the car out of the recharger before you finish lunch.
I don't think particulates was an issue (but I couldbe wrong). The main issue was Nitrogen Oxide emissions.
Basically, when not in emissions testing mode, the engine was running at higher temperatures which improves fuel efficiency but generates more NO from atmospheric Nitrogen. Also, the vehicles had insufficently sized or simply missing diesel exhaust fluid (mostly urea and blue coloring) resevoirs, so not enough was injected to react with the NO to hit targets; injecting DEF into the engine also reduces fuel efficiency. There was also something about not properly cycling the special catalytic converter for NO, which would probably show an efficiency difference on long trips.
I sold back my VW diesel and stopped paying attention, it would be interesting to see what the measured real life fuel efficiency is before and after the changes required by regulators.
When it was new (3 - 5 years old) my Dodge 2500 turbo diesel with a 120 liter fuel tank (31.7 US gallons) went 1,000km (620 miles) per tank. That's highway miles of course but 1,000km per tank is not exactly mind blowing it works out to 23.5 Imperial mpg or 18 US mpg.
An old cow-orker of mine said his old VW Rabbit diesel manual trans did 80 Imperial mpg (66 US mpg) on the highway. I have no way to verify that could be 10% BS. I've seen 50 US mpg stated (60 Imperial mpg). But who know synthetic oil, slim tires, highway miles, slow speeds all that may get it to the 70s mpg.
It's a PHEV, but my Ford C-Max Energi will do over 600 miles on the 14 gallon tank in long distance driving (full charge gets you 20ish miles of stop and go, or 5 miles of highway, so basically doesn't matter). I'd guess the HEV version should do better, as it has less battery weight, but is otherwise pretty similar AFAIK.
Many cars have 16-20 gallon tanks, so a 14 gallon is fairly small (although 600+ miles is plenty)
Off course, and actually more than the trunk, rear seats and even passenger seat in that case, but you absolutely cannot do that to a meaningful usefulness with extra batteries.
The VW Jetta TDI I bought in 1999 got over 50mpg on the highway (mid-40s city) and had a 14.5 gallon tank. The longest I ever got it was ~700 miles at an average of 52mpg.
And then the EV has to stop and charge for a couple hours. The ICE stops for gas for 10min. Also, check out records like the cross-country NY to LA cannonball run. Cars used there add additional gas tanks to extend range. I'd bet by the time you added enough fuel to a car to equate the weight of an EV battery the range would be significantly higher than that of the EV
The EV does not have to stop and charge for a couple of hours. Tesla's V3 superchargers charge at a rate of 1000 miles per hour. Those aren't widespread yet, but the common V2 superchargers provide about 560 miles per hour of charge.
The "miles per hour" charging rate is very misleading. Yes if you wanted to charge a bunch of Teslas to 20% capacity and swap them out after a few minutes each you'd get 1000 "miles charged per hour" But as the battery fills on each car, that rate drops substantially.
If only gas stations marketed their pumps like that. 10 gallons of gas can come out in 1.5 minutes in a Prius resulting in a fill rate of (500 miles range * 40 fill-ups per hour) = 20k mph! We won't consider the time it takes for the next user to get in and put the hose in because Tesla doesn't either.
I am a fan of EV vehicles as well but the long range fill up story is still not good.
You can charge at that full rate to about 80% battery capacity. And none of that matters because 99% of charging is done at home at night. I guarantee the average EV owner spends less time inconvenienced charging their car than the average ICE vehicle owner spends standing at a filthy, toxic gas pump. The only time an EV owner thinks about charging is on a road trip.
I don't know why there is some immune response when pointing out anything negative about an EV at the moment. I just said that the "1000 miles per hour" charge rate is disingenuous at best.
Also it is not true that the supercharger v3 charges at full rate until 80% [1]. The curve drops off quite a bit shortly after 20%. The other points you made, well I never disagreed with that. There are a lot of benefits to an EV, but one clear downside (at the moment) is the long trip charging. This is just a fact and not an indictment about EVs in general
Your average gas pump seems to pump about 38l/min [0]. Using a rather inefficient car with an usage of 10l/100km, you get an added range of 22800 km/h, or 14250 miles/h. So, still a factor 14 to go.
> And then the EV has to stop and charge for a couple hours.
Also, it isn't a couple of hours at all. 10% to 90% charge in model 3 takes about 50 minutes using a V2 supercharger (the most ubiquitous one) and about 40 mins using a V3 supercharger.
And both take much faster to get to lower percentages, due to the charge rate curve looking more like a log(1/x) graph, with rapid charge rate at the beginning that slows down the more your car is charged.
Again, the charge time is non-linear. You can get from 0 to 50% in just 20 mins. And also, if you are doing a long drive, won't you be stopping for 20-30 mins at least every 200-300 miles (roughly every 3 hours)? Just for bathroom breaks, to get some food, to stand up and stretch, etc.? Imo, this doesn't seem that bad at all.
I had the same kind of anxiety over charging too, but since getting an EV and doing multiple cross-state road trips in it and with just tons of daily usage, I found that worry to be unfounded.
Not at all, I recently completed a road trip from Chicago to Blue Ridge, Georgia with a full car (5 people, including me) in a Hyundai Sonata. It was an 11 hour drive. On the way there we stopped exactly once, and on the way back we stopped twice.
If we did this in a Tesla, we would've had to stop far more times, or each stop would have to have been much longer. That's not great.
Unless someone recently started doing it again trucks don't come with dual tanks anymore and haven't since the OEMs refreshed their designs in the mid to late 1990s.
We made a recent long trip with our Tesla Model S, which has about a 325 mile max range. There were plenty of superchargers, but it takes time.
You also end up stopping a lot more than once every 300 miles, because the rate of charge up to 90% is very fast, but the last 10% is very slow. We usually ran down to between 50 and 100 miles of range, and charged it up to about 290-300 miles, which took between 15 and 20 minutes.
It's not terrible, but compared to a gas engine, it's a good bit slower over time.
On the upside, it forces you to have a more 'easy going' drive.
Speaking as a child subjected to routine 2 hour road trips each way (often coming back the next day, once in a while the same day) and occasionally much longer road trips:
Stop the damned car and let your family out for fuck's sake.
Just because you can drive >4 hours nonstop doesn't mean you should drive 4 hours nonstop (I did on a solo road trip earlier this year. I forgot a piece of equipment and didn't realize until I was 5 miles out of town, so I had to 'make up time'. It was still a mistake.) Complaining that you can't drive 6 hours nonstop is some form of insanity that I am not qualified to diagnose.
Do you find lasting an entire Boston-SF flight without getting out of your seat "some form of insanity"? Because that's basically the same sort of situation as the 6 hour nonstop drive (although the car seats are probably more comfortable than airline seats).
Seriously?? You call that torture? The spoiled lives we lead here in the west truly makes us not realize hard realities. I can promise you that torture is way more unpleasant than sitting in the airline seat with your nice noise cancelling headphones and watching a netflix show on an ipad. Even as a over 6 feet person I did way more unpleasant stuff in the army compared to sitting a few hours in an airplane seat.
Calm down now, it's called hyperbole. You will encounter it a lot, especially online, so don't take everything you read literally.
Also, we are talking 6 hours, not "a few". And depending on your height, seat recline, and problems with lower back pain, you can bet for some people, 6 hours unable to stand up can be quite painful. Not, "bamboo shoots under your fingernails painful" but not something anyone would want to go through.
For me, the claustrophobia of not being able to stand up would be quite terrible.
If I'm traveling with someone, I'll stop every 2/3 hours. But if I'm by myself (and was still in my 20s)? I'm going to optimize every second (Gatorade bottles FTW). No reason other than to say I did...
Done that plenty myself, but eventually I figured out that being sedentary that long starts to affect my alertness.
Getting out of the car and getting the blood pumping makes me much more alert for the next hour or two. At first I didn't want to think about that meant about how alert I wasn't for the previous hour. Now it's kind of hard to ignore.
You see so many people in interesting jobs that have an origin story of something that happened to them, a friend, a sibling or neighbor when they were a kid. I just write software, so my stories are perhaps a bit less compelling than the oncologist down the block.
