It’s really the only reason I haven’t bought one, as I regularly travel across Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and especially in the wintertime I understand the range is even less because of the cold.
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>It’s really the only reason I haven’t bought one, as I regularly travel across Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and especially in the wintertime I understand the range is even less because of the cold.
Gasoline’s energy density is still [about an order of magnitude higher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Reference_Table) than the best practical battery’s energy density. That’s just about it. Batteries are hard, gasoline is easy.
Travelling whatever distance requires energy. In combustion engines, your energy is your fuel, stored in your fuel tank. In electric engines, your energy is electric charge, which is stored in your battery. Gasoline contains a lot of energy, meanwhile batteries seem to be more limited in their energy-to-volume/weight comparatively. So, as opposed to stacking additional batteries or increasing the weight of the car, they require refueling more frequently.
On the plus side, the energy->kinetic motion is a lot more efficient for an electric vehicle, something like ~85% to gas powered cars at ~50%. But yeah. Refuel/recharge differs.
Combination of fuel energy density and motor efficiency. Electric motors in vehicles are close to (some exceed) 95% efficiency. Gas engines are lucky to make 35%. So electric motors are way better at turning fuel into motion (rather than heat and noise).
And they need to be. To store the energy in 1 litre of petrol requires almost 10kWh of battery. Those 24kWh nissan leafs manage to go ~80 miles on the equivalent of about 2L of petrol.
Batteries are heavy and cost a lot of money. The weight is important because a heavier car use more power which require more battery to get the same range. So you can not just double the battery size of a 150 mile car, you need to more then double it. That makes the car quite heavy in the end which limits the cargo capacity and it might need to be classified in a heavier class, etc. You therefore end up with a big heavy car that costs a lot of money. You might be interested in it but most people are not. So it would not sell very well.
I have taken 500 mile trips in EV cars a number of times. This is however not such a big issue as you might imagine it. I do not know about Pennsylvania but generally fast chargers are frequent enough that you can stop anywhere you want to charge. If you do not want to stop at one fast charger you can easily drive to the next one or the next one after that. Look for fast chargers that are near a restaurant or shopping mall. You can start charging your car, go and get some lunch, and by the time you get back to the car it is charged enough to drive another few hours. For your trip I would plan two stops of about 10-15 minutes each. This gives you time to eat lunch and get some snack, as well as some rest on your trip.
Others have discussed the energy density issue between fuel and electricity.
To take it a step further. To increase the range the vehicle will require more batteries or to limit speeds (either by smaller motor or otherwise). Past a certain speed, a lot of a car’s energy is used to “push” away the air (called drag). The slower you drive a car, the less energy per mile it uses (broadly speaking).
More batteries means heavier cars which also means larger motors, larger vehicles and other compromises. This adds a fair amount of cost. Making the vehicle too costly means fewer interested buyers. So the car company has to pick a compromise between range and cost to maximize sales revenue/value.
Since every car model requires many millions of dollars of developing and testing to bring to market, not many car makers were interested in producing ultra high range models as it would very likely not sell well enough to recover the development cost. In that sense, it isn’t “difficult” from a technology perspective (ELI5) just that it didn’t make much sense from a profit perspective.
This might change as the market matures. Manufacturers might be willing to explore new market niches and technology development (more efficient motors, lighter and cheaper batteries) might change the equation.
It all has to do with energy density: how much energy is stored within a certain mass of your energy storage mechanism. Battery-powered electric vehicles have a rechargeable battery as their energy store, which typically has an energy density of around 260-270 Wh/kg. For comparison, gasoline has an energy density of 12,200 Wh/Kg. Yes, electric motors are far more efficient at converting that stored energy to useable energy (about 90% efficiency vs about 30% for internal combustion engines), but that massive gap in energy density is hard to overcome.
Let’s do the math. A typical BEV battery is 454 kg. At an energy density of 265 Wh/kg, that’s 120,130 Wh of stored energy. Assuming a 90% motor efficiency, that’s 108,279 Wh that will be used to power the car. Meanwhile, a typical gas-powered car can store around 60 kg of fuel. At an energy density of 12,200 Wh/kg, that’s a total of 732,000 Wh of energy. At a 30% engine efficiency, that’s 219,300 Wh of energy that will power the car.
There’s also the refueling issue, especially in rural remote areas. Tesla offers superchargers network and it is fine for dense areas (there *might* be consequences later if the electric cars become more popular because there’s an upper throughput limit for every electric network, but now we are not near it), but if you travel far, it is less likely to meet a high-wattage charger.
And you’ll probably have to charge it overnight using the regular home charger. Now imagine the battery has even more capacity and takes even longer (and last 20% of the battery take even more!). So basically, large batteries on consumer cars get into a vicious cycle:
a) no one travels really far using electro cars so people would prefer cheaper and faster charging batteries
b) so this scenario is not prioritized, so why enlarge the capacity anyway if it’s a hard engineering task (see other comments) ?
c) …so no one starts traveling really far using electric cars
upd. okay, I read some comments and I see the charging is less of an issue nowadays.
It is not that difficult to get the range you just need to put in more batteries.
Look at [https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g32634624/ev-longest-driving-range/](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g32634624/ev-longest-driving-range/) and for eample [https://ev-database.org/car/1404/Tesla-Model-S-Dual-Motor](https://ev-database.org/car/1404/Tesla-Model-S-Dual-Motor) for more detail indomation
The problem with batteries is they are expensive and heavy.
Gasoline has an energy density of 46.4 MJ/kg but Lithium-ion batteries are in the 0.3-0.9MJ/kg range, that number excuses the structural part around the battery and the cooling/heating system you need. That is around 100x more weight needed for batteries. Electric motors are more energy efficient, with around 95% compared to internal combustion engines, and are in the 30% if you use them efficiently so at least 3X more efficient. This all means the battery pack will have a weight of around 30x the weight of the fuel you use right now. The battery packs always stay in the car so the mass is constant and does not drop like with an internal combustion engine.
A heavier car will require more energy to accelerate and go up a hill. So doubling the batter weight will not double the range it will be a bit less. This means if the same car model comes with two battery sizes the one with the larger battery will require more energy if you drive the same distance.
So for short-distance trips, a car with a larger battery costs more to drive. For longer distances, it might cost less because you can drive a larger part of even the whole trip with electricity from home that is cheaper than from a fast charger.
There is the question do you need to drive in one go? The trip took just under 5 hours on Google. That is quite a long time to just drive, a short break to relax, eat, and change the car something you can do,
Use a route planner like https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ and test it with some car models and look at the result. Next time you drive simulate the stop, get something to eat and stretch your legs. Now you have information about and experience of how a chain along the road influences the trip.
At the same time, you should consider the stops you make at the gas station today to fuel up your car. Try to record the times you spend filing your car including any extra distance to get to the gas station. If you charge an electric car at home you can skip all of those stops.
An electric car adds some stops during the long drive but removes stops when you drive close to home. I suspect your total time spent to fuel/ charge the car is reduced every year. A stop during a long drive is also not just wasted time but a break, an opportunity to stretch your body and eat.
It’s not difficult to design, it’s just expensive to manufacture that many batteries. There are many models currently on the market that exceed that range, it’s a bit of a benchmark: [https://www.topspeed.com/cheapest-electric-vehicles-300-mile-range/](https://www.topspeed.com/cheapest-electric-vehicles-300-mile-range/)
Yes the real-world range is less in winter, but 300 miles is chosen for a reason – it’s sort of a point where most drives become pretty feasible. For example, if you were to do that drive today, with seasonally average weather, in the very popular Hyundai Ioniq 5 (one of the ones in that list chosen more or less at random), you would have to spend 15 minutes charging along the way ([https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=5b620d6b-2f51-4b1f-834b-820c3bf7a614](https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=5b620d6b-2f51-4b1f-834b-820c3bf7a614) ). That seems not a terrible handicap, and most people would think it’s a good idea to stop and stretch your legs a little bit on a drive that’s over 3 hours anyway.
It’s not. It’s actually very easy.
You just keep adding batteries until you hit that range.
The issue is that then the car is heavy, has poor interior space, is expensive, and will take a long time to charge.
Battery technology is slowly, but steadily, advancing such that power density (amount of power per volume of battery), specific power (amount of power per lb/kg of battery) and charging rates are making it easier.
For instance, at least one company (Amprius) is actually producing batteries with the anode material made out of silicon instead of carbon. The batteries are lighter and smaller for the same amount if power, and they can be charged/discharged much more quickly. They’re going into “high demand” applications first (read: aircraft), but it’s only a matter of time before they end up in ground vehicles.
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