I don’t know if this something that already done in the industry but I was thinking about it a lot in the last time and it doesn’t make sense why electric cars still have a small range if they can just connect motors to the wheel and recharge the battery.
(English is not my native language so I’m sorry for spelling/ grammar mistakes)
In: Engineering
No one has even uttered the word “fly-wheel” which is the technical term for what this person is asking. As for electric cars, Prius’ have one, they are more heavily evolved than normal cars to do smart battery charging. People who live in Prius love it because the car will automate the AC all night if you camp out in in charging itself but revving the engine once in a while.
This is already done and described in the alle electric FIA Formula E Championship as “Brake by wire”, you can use that Energy. Some electric cars can be driven using one pedal, althought this is in some cases not practical, for example in an Emergency braking situation you would need more braking force, as the motor (then used as a generator) can provide, especially at low speeds. Recuperation, which is the technical term for using kinetic energy to charge the battery in an electric vehicle is widly spread, and some hybrid cars actually only use this otherwise as heat lost energy while breaking for their battery to charge. But the usage of recuperation while not breaking is not helpful, because you would have to put more energy in the system to keep the car from slowing down. I hope this helped
The wheels are powered by the battery, and they are running with the best efficiency possible contemporary engineering and limited cost can achieve.
From there if you connect a generator to the wheels, sure it will generate the electricity out of it but the net power won’t change (remember the power is determined by the battery) and only reduces efficiency (generator takes energy from the wheel with less than 100% efficiency).
The only way this is going to yield some benefit is when breaking the vehicle. At least you can get some energy that would turn into mere heat dissipation within the contact with the ground otherwise.
This is done to an extent. Modern electric vehicles have regenerative braking, which means when braking to slow down instead of using brake pads that convert the kinetic energy into thermal energy it is converted to electrical energy to recharge the stored energy.
At times other than braking this makes no sense due to conservation of energy.
They can, in a sense. When coasting, my hybrid car reclaims kinetic energy from the rotating wheels (and heat energy from braking) to help charge the batteries. It’s not nearly enough to make up for the battery usage (i.e. no perpetual motion machine), but it helps!
Because that will slow down the car, requiring it to have to use more power to maintain the same speed, which would use up the exact same amount of power that you were able to generate by doing so in the first place.
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