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.
In: 165
A liter of gasoline weighs about 0.72 kg and has about 8900 Watt hours of chemical energy.
A liter will hold roughly 44 Panasonic 18650 batteries, one of the most standard Lithium Ion battery cells (they’re AA sized). Each of these weigh’s 44 g and has about 7.5 Watt Hours of useful energy capacity. However, these 44 cells weigh just under 2kg and hold roughly 334 Watt hours of energy.
So the rechargeable batteries weigh almost 3x as much as the gasoline and have a bit less than about 1/25th the energy capacity as the same volume of gasoline. And while the chemical energy is mostly lost as heat, even getting a small fraction of that energy is still considerably more than the batteries offer assuming 100% conversion of energy to motion.
That’s why it’s hard, you have far less energy density both in terms of energy by volume and energy by mass.
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