I explained this in my other comment but I'll paste it here:
The thing is that ICE vehicles are so inefficient to begin with, but a towed trailer needs the same amount of energy regardless of what is towing it.
Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.
An ICE vehicle isn't less efficient because the frame itself takes more energy to move, it's less efficient because the engine burns off a high percentage of its energy as waste heat.
But that will be true regardless of what the load is. If the ICE truck takes 5 units of energy to pull itself compared with 1 unit for the electric truck, that implies that the the truck chassis only actually requires 1 unit to move, but the ICE engine burns off 80% of its energy as waste heat. The engine is only 20% efficient.
Now if you start pulling a trailer, you have (in total) 2 units of energy worth of load. But if the ICE engine is still only 20% efficient, then it will take 10 units to pull both, rather than 6.
I can believe that this effect is real (electric cars suffering more range loss when towing), but it seems to require an explanation beyond this one.
It is more complicated with ICE though because the efficiency changes with load amount, and what power output an ICE is most efficient in can be designed with towing in mind. Ive seen 90s trucks that got 18 MPG empty on a good day, but then when loaded with twice or more the vehicle's curb weight on a trailer merely drop to 17 MPG.
Generally this is only true for ICE with an abundance of extra power to start with, but that is basically every truck and most other cars for the last 25 years.
It's the effeciency curve. ICEs are more efficient with heavier loads - more fuel goes to useful work.
There's also that electric cars have a marginally better drag coefficients for a few reasons - ICE vehicles have a bot less incentive and they need to use more air for cooling - so the drag from a trailer will be worse, as a percentage extra, on the average electric vehicle.
ICE are most efficient in terms of energy in -> rotation energy out near their peak torque output for a ton of reasons:
* cylinder filling is more efficient at maximum output request (on naturally aspirated engines operating in vacuum, due to less simple pumping loss, on turbocharged or supercharged engines, due to less wasted energy producing charge air and generally more optimized air/exhaust exchange). in short, air gets into the cylinder more efficiently in the first place at high torque requests
* combustion is more complete at high cylinder filling; not only does more air get into the cylinder, but it also burns more completely
* friction losses matter less at higher torque, especially on larger engines
Almost every ICE complexity advancement over the years is to hack around these basic properties: VVL and VVT to optimize pumping, direct injection, stratified injection, and dynamic compression hackery to get around cylinder filling efficiency, and cylinder deactivation / variable displacement to avoid friction and pumping loss from unnecessary engine size. but while ICE engines have made huge strides, they're still more efficient when they're loaded.
And note that this is efficiency, not absolute consumption - of course you'll consume more at higher load still, but the ratio is better. Combine this with the aerodynamics of most ICE pickup trucks and you have a scenario where ICE trucks frequently lose very little fuel economy / actual consumption when towing a trailer.
Efficient in this situation means units of fuel per units of work.
Of course an ICE uses more fuel in absolute terms on a higher load than a lower one. But the proportion of fuel wasted compared to fuel turned into propulsion improves as load is increased (at least up to a point, maybe not all the way to absolute maximum load).
Electric systems also have efficiency curves, but they are less drastic within the primary load range.
The range on my diesel truck drops in half when I pull my trailer. Roughly similar to an EV towing. It also happens in winter (not quite as big a drop). Thats what most folks care about. But people like to overstate it as a dramatic downside of EVs.
But the range on the Cybertruck is starting much lower, so that halving is a lot more painful.
I frequently tow between Washington and Montana, and I only have to fill up the F-350 once or twice when loaded. You would need to recharge a loaded Cybertruck 5+ times on that same route. My 11 hour drive just turned into a 15 hour drive in ideal conditions. And I don't think there are the latest superchargers available on most of the route, so the time spent charging is likely much higher.
Don't get me wrong, I like EVs and have a Model 3 as my daily driver. But I would never get rid of the gasser given today's battery tech with the number of roadtrips we take.
I think what it actually says is that EV has short ranges.
If a car held gas worth of 750mi of driving and towing would reduce it to 500mi, and your actual driving distance was significantly less than both, the difference would be unnoticed.
If a car held gas worth of just 500mi with extremely well optimized aero and driveline loss minimization and highly efficient regen, and a towed trailer would absolutely ruin that, and your driving distance was too close to the diminished range, you will notice that.
If your EV held like 12500kWh of charge for like 3000 miles of range, and it was mostly for Costco runs, towing range penalties will not be among your top concerns.
This would only make sense if the EV efficiency gain were due to lightness of the vehicle or better aerodynamics. It's definitely not the first, and don't imagine the second is a big factor but maybe I'm wrong. I'd even expect EV to help here because a heavy trailer takes more energy to get moving that can be partially recouped when regen-braking.
Is it just that these EV trucks don't have multiple gears to tune themselves for towing? Like how many EV cars are geared for city speeds but suffer on the highway. I know dual-motor ones have different ratios, but that's still 2 speeds vs 6-10. Edit: Could also be about engine tuning.
The second is in fact a big factor. The vast majority of a car's drag is aerodynamic drag since it grows quadratically with speed; rolling resistance and stuff are much smaller at highway speeds. In order to compensate for the tiny capacity of batteries, EVs try really hard to squeeze out better efficiency in aerodynamics and other sources. That's why EVs have flush door handles and stuff.
That would explain it if it's large. But if this matters so much, why don't the diesel trucks make all the same resistance/aerodynamics improvements? The only EV-specific advantage there is not needing air intake... again I have to say, intake drag doesn't sound huge but maybe I'm wrong.
The large fleet operators do care about this and do go out of their way to improve aero. Look at a UPS 18-wheeler and you'll see trailer skirts, no bug deflectors, window buffeters, etc.
Ironically, the private owner/operators are most often the ones installing accessories to make their trucks look cool and sacrificing immensely for it.
1. No real market pressure — if you cared about fuel burn rate you wouldn't be looking into buying a truck in the first place. EVs on the other hand live or die by their battery range.
2. When optimizing, you want to start with the biggest problem and work your way down. ICEs are so laughably inefficient that improving aerodynamics just won't have that much of an impact.
A large amount of the energy of an ICE is wasted as heat and noise. Some of that is a constant factor that isn't sensitive to load. So when increase load, it doesn't make as much of a difference to energy used.
By contract in EVs, much more of the energy is going towards moving the vehicle and therefore both weight and air resistance greatly affect the amount of energy use.
The heat and noise do scale with how much gasoline you burn. That's part of the whole ICE being less efficient than battery in terms of input chemical energy vs output mechanical energy. It cancels out when you're calculating regular vs towing range. The engine is the same efficiency either way.
That's part of the answer, but the other part is that towing is going to reduce range significantly regardless of your fuel. With a gas or diesel vehicle that's not a big deal, because you can fill back up in 5 minutes or less. With an EV, it takes 20+, and the fast charging locations are less plentiful than gas stations. If you're not towing, that doesn't matter too much, but when you have to charge 2-3 times as often due to towing, it becomes a real issue.
Fast charger stations also rarely make allowances for cars with trailers. You often have to detach the trailer in order to get into the charging bay or park across multiple.
The efficiency is usually defined as the energy the car can use to move itself over the energy going in (electrical, or chemical for gas). If an ICE is 20% efficient then using 5 units means you get one unit out. Towing a trailer that doubles the load means you need 2 units out, which means you need 10 units in. So you get half the range either way.
The engine doesn't get more efficient just because you hook a trailer to it: it's still 20% efficient regardless.
I think you're missing the cost of ownership in your efficiency calculation. EV's without incentives cost a lot compared to ICE so much so that the savings don't equate usually until I hear year 4 of ownership. Now that's getting better I mean look at the new Bolt or Ford Fathom 30k Retail usually (which I think is where there's a lot of room in small midsize trucks and EV's)
So the EV still beats the ICE vehicle threefold (2 units vs 6 units), it just _feels_ worse (half as efficient as without a trailer) so you declare it _is_ worse.
With that type of reasoning, let me guess, the competitor you work for is General Motors?
IMO it is worse. And I thought I said where i worked in my original comment. You just can't get the range to work on EV's and towing (my personal opinion) large pickups have big gas tanks and it's quick and easy to fill up. It's all about ergonomics. Yes an EV with a full battery vs a ICE with a full tank EV will always be more 'efficient' but day to day it doesn't add up.
Ergonomics and ease of use are why people get cars. Ergnomics right now to me are reason why EV's in America don't sell well. Infrastructure. If every apartment complex and shopping mall had chargers or we had a novel way to charge a battery like an ICE engine then yeah it will take off. Culturally though I think we just love gas stations, emissions and pollusion.
EV beats ICE in isolation but without just as much charging stations as petrol stations the advantage is theoretical. Also you need faster charging too (I heard BYD latest tech can do this, can Tesla just license?)
A federal law could easily fix this though, but you would need an administration that cares about climate change or at least about EV
I think the whole thing about climate is kind of disingenuous but that's another topic. Mining the minerals for EV's is utter strip mining and terrible. China is selling it's future away. Look at the story of Mountain Pass Mine in California and do 20-50x that in China at less efficiency.
Efficiency was brought up to explain the real problem, range. I didn't fill up between Reno and SF in my F350 towing a massive trailer and still had plenty of fuel to spare. A cybertruck would've barely made it past Sacramento with a much lighter load and would've taken much longer to fill up.
The topic is a now-discontinued EV truck, or two of them if you're counting the Lightning, and a real measured range drop when towing. And GM makes EV trucks too. So can we please make this honest and not a fanboy fight?
Once I discovered that the entire EV battery holds only 2 gallons-of-gas-worth of energy (roughly about 65kwh) , all of the range issues made a lot more sense.
I don’t think this is true at all. If towing the trailer doubles the energy required at the wheels (and both engines maintained the same efficiency under the additional load) then both ranges would be halved.
In practice, diesel engines can become more efficient under additional load, and it obviously varies between models but it’s not a 16% vs 50% difference like your example.
The reason EVs don’t tow well is they don’t have a high enough range to begin with. Diesels have nearly double the starting range of an equivalent EV, and storing additional fuel on board is an option.
The charging port is on the rear of the Cybertruck, which means if you have a trailer attached, you would have to find a charger with a long enough cable, or one that lets you pull all the way through.
If the charging port were on the front of the vehicle, you could pull straight in, but now your trailer is probably blocking traffic.
Of course you could disconnect and reconnect the trailer, which adds an extra 5-10 extra minutes to your 15-40 minute charge time depending on your battery level.
In Europe at least newer Tesla charging stations are drive through charging stations in pairs. Unless it is crowded, the trailer is parked in the charging spot behind you. Only if it is crowded do you have to disconnect.
Pulling a trailer with an EV is very common around here (Norway).
Aging Wheels on YouTube basically concluded that EV towing from a handling perspective is actually quite superior, but the charging and range is so much worse that depending on what you're doing it's likely a dealbreaker.
It is a reasonable take but it is not the _only_ one - I think it is arguably more reasonable to transition away from DST to ordinary "best TZ granularity approximation to zenith-occurs-at-noon" time once, and then stay (and manage) that time over the millenia to come.
But can we... uh... can we keep that as some kind of tertiary issue to solve later after we successfully stop screwing up the clocks twice every year? We don't really need to build a singular omnibus clock overhaul that will most assuredly never come to fruition, do we? :)
Because DST is the wrong time; if you look at the legal implementation of DST, most countries carve out exceptions for fields where lying about the time can obviously lead to death and destruction - navigation being perhaps the main one.
What everyone missed is that DST could itself lead to much greater loss of life than we might have lost had the use of DST been mandated all the way through to e.g. large naval, air or spacecraft.
And as research into DST continues, this seems to have been not merely an abstract possibility was missed, but _the actual outcome_. DST is quite literally killing people by the thousands.
In the short term perhaps, but I like to think that unlike ISPs, this kind service isn't bound by network effects. You can't just "generate your own internet"; like it or not you have to connect to something. With time though I think it'll increasingly be possible and cost-effective to generate inference locally.
So like electricity, where most people will probably just use the network, but a few will opt to invest upfront and generate their own.
And attacking them for burning coal is dumb, China burns coal because they have nothing else.
The US burns gas, because the US produces massive amounts of it as a byproduct of oil, there are a limited number of NG pipelines and LNG tankers and they cannot export all the gaas produced from oil drilling. SO they dump this natural gas into regional pipelines sometimes for near zero prices.
A business building EV's in the US would pay less for electricity than a business in China
Obviously protective measures for any country are done to make sure an economy doesn't become completely dependent on another's with strongly opposing values.
Europe's car manufacturers need to get their shit together, but not being able to buy any car whatsoever the moment China gets their own Donald Trump is worse than cars being slightly worse and a bit more expensive for a while.
>C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns.
huh, that's pretty bizarre, at least here in Australia (where in recent years immigration has exploded to 2x ~ 3x that of the USA), all the anti-immigration voters are sincerely hoping the guy who mows their lawn grew up across town where his wife's sister now lives.
the crackdowns are for the economic migrants just taking a lifestyle arbitrage
ultimately, immigration into large developed nations is an act of altruism, which, like most things in life, cannot scale indefinitely (much to the chagrin of business owners, women, arts students, etc.) - which is not nice, but is true.
For now. A limited run of Celestials until 2028 when Serpent Lake switches to Nvidia tiles, and a bit longer for the LTS combo (AMD style) IO+GPU die in lower end/embedded products.
Druid is still dead, consumer DGPUs are still, and workstation DGPUs also seems to be dead, and most of the Xe driver team for Windows was laid off, as well as most of the Xe chip design team.
Why?
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