Electric Cars performance

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Electric cars are by and large ridiculously fast with pretty poor range, especially the news trucks if they are going truck like things such as towing and hauling. Wouldn’t making them a bit slower increase range and/or reduce battery size and charging time/cost?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

No

A gasoline or diesel engine has efficiency that varies wildly across the range. You get peak efficiency right around peak torque but it falls off as you head higher towards peak power. Punching it and revving up to 5k to get going is going to burn through more fuel to get you up to 70 mph to merge onto the highway than a steady acceleration at 3k rpm. Your engine might be 30% efficient at 3k rpm but only 25% at 5k rpm, while that only looks like 5 percent its really 5 percentage points and a 17% reduction in efficiency.

Electric motors don’t really care. Electric motors can be in excess of 90% efficiency, you may have a bit more or less losses at a specific speed but you’re going to be looking at 85%+ efficiency across the whole range, and when the car comes to a stop the electric motor gets to recoup a large percentage of the kinetic energy

Unfortunately Electric Cars are a basic physics problem. A car with X weight, Y rolling resistance, and Z air resistance requires energy E to move 100 miles at 70 mph. The efficiency of the electric motor only matter a little big, the biggest challenge for the range of electric vehicles is that a gallon of gasoline holds about 15x the energy as a gallon of lithium ion batteries so even if the car is 1/5th as efficient you still need 3x the volume of the best batteries to get the same energy to work with.

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