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
Most EVs have a 300+ mile range
Cold weather will decrease the range by about 10%. The real range suck in the winter is keeping the passenger cabin warm.
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.
Batteries are expensive and heavy, and very temperature dependent, batteries also hold less charge the more you recharge them, batteries charge slower the closer to full they are. Petroleum is energy dense, relatively inefficient, and while engines lose power the longer they run, it is not dramatic for the lifetime of a vehicle.
The goal is also not really the same. Most cars only drive maybe 50km in a day most of the time. So if have a small battery that you recharge daily overnight it’s fairly efficient. A big battery on a big heavy car would also potentially take a long time to charge even at a special fast charger. You are generally better to nearly empty the battery and charge to 80% twice than to have a battery twice the size charge once, since that would probably take 3x as long (or more) for the same energy, but since batteries are heavy, doubling the range requires more than double the battery.
So now we have the problem that batteries are better to have a shorter range and charge frequently, running into the problem of a charging network that is sparse compared to petroleum.
Oh and batteries lose quite a lot of range when cold (depending on how cold).this means if you live somewhere warm (southern us or Mediterranean), you will get more range than further north (or far south). But estimates are based on averages for large regions.
For a fixed battery size, getting more range is hard since electric motors are very efficient, and reducing drag while not using power and complying with safety rules is quite hard.
A thing to note here: There has been almost no demand for electric cars until very recently (I’d say 7 to 10 years).
Low demand equals low investment in R&D.
Just look at for how long combustion engines have been used in cars and try to imagine the amounts of money that have been poured into it.
And even if that money would keep flowing, combustion engines would not get that much better.
But just in the last five years there have been astonishing leaps in EV battery technology, because now everyone wants one.
The statement:” All EVs suck in the winter” is already not true anymore. Sure you’ll loose some range, but it’s not as extreme as it was just a few years ago due to new kinds of batteries and other technologies.
And seeing that a lot of countries and car manufacturers already announced that they go full electric sometime in the next 20-30 years the research is just going to continue until we have cars with comparable or better range than gas powered.
It’s like rockets. If you want to add more lift capability, you need to add more fuel. Then you need to add more fuel just to lift that extra fuel, on and on.
To add range, you have to add more heavy batteries. And the to haul around those batteries, you need some extra batteries. And pretty soon, you’re out of space for batteries in the vehicle, so now you have to add more vehicle, which then requires more batteries to haul around that extra vehicle weight…on and on.
A pound of batteries has much less energy than a pound of gasoline. So you need a lot of batteries to go a reasonable distance. The weight of batteries is a bit of a problem, so the car makers work to make the rest of the car lighter to make up for it. It costs extra money to save the weight. At the end, though, the battery car is better than the gas car. Gas cars waste most of their energy, and they pollute a lot.
So, I have a Model Y LR (AWD) and I would imagine that it gets between 220 and 270 miles regularly, based on the way that I drive, including last winter (efficiency does go down when you blast the heat and when you drive over 65 mph; also, I usually charge my battery to 80-90% to preserve its life). If you are really interested in an EV, then I imagine that you could get by on one 20-30-ish minute charging stop between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, if that is something that fits your schedule and is otherwise feasible (and there are convenient chargers if you choose a non-Tesla EV).
Current ranges reflect a variety of considerations and tradeoffs – battery technology, weight, average driving distance in the US, wind resistance and temp, assumed charging behavior (home vs. roadside), etc.
Lithium battery technology today has an energy density of about 125 Wh per pound, roughly. which means 1 kWh of energy storage in lithium batteries weighs about 8 pounds.
For comparison, a gallon of gasoline weighs just under 8 pounds, but contains over 30 kWh of energy.
Now, a gasoline engine cannot extract 30 kW from a gallon of gasoline, it may only be able to extract 5 kW. But still, you can see how for the same amount of weight you can carry five times as much energy with gasoline, then with lithium batteries.
Weight is the reason why gasoline cars have longer range. But technology is moving quickly and more energy dense batteries are being developed.
Energy density. There is more energy in a tank of gas than a battery can store electrically.
One of the reasons this is the case is that the reactants in the batteries have to be stored within a vessel (cell). With fuel, the hydrocarbons are actually only half of the reactants, with oxygen being the other part of the chemical equation, and you don’t have to store O2, that can just be taken out of the air to mix with the fuel in real time.
With batteries always containing the reactants needed for energy storage, that also means that failure can cause it to all react at once, so it has to be protected against electrical, thermal and chemical degradation, adding weight and therefore reduced energy density.
Batteries are the main thing holding electronics back these days.. whoever cracks the next major development in storing electricity will change the world
Latest Answers