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
It is the energy density. Gas has more energy per volume than battery. Energy density is one aspect that EVs need to improve, another is the charging speed.
My EV gets 300 miles. On the very very rare occasion that I need to travel that far, I check the route for a charging station and have had no problems. If I’m really concerned, it’s totally worth it to just rent a car for a road trip but again that’s like every few years. I’m saving so much money on gas and the cost of the vehicle (tax credits) and maintenance (there are so few parts that need servicing compared to a gas car) that this pays for itself many, many times over.
There’s not a super good ELI5 for this other than to say that gas is really dense with energy while batteries (so far) are a bit more energy-light. But again, 300 miles is totally achievable.
Toyota is developing a solid state battery that would double the range of EVs and shrink the charging time, too. Tech will solve these issues before long
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/04/toyota-claims-battery-breakthrough-electric-cars
Because batteries are heavy. As you add more batteries you have to add extra batteries to help push the extra weight which adds even more weight and costs. And as you add more weight to push, the efficiency of the system gets worse.
In my 10 year old Chevy Volt, I can regularly get 4-5 miles per kw. It only has a small battery pack though and I only get 40 miles before I have to use gasoline.
However, in the much newer all electric cars with giant battery packs, some only get 2.5-3.5 miles per kwh because they have so much more weight to push around and unlike IC engines, the car doesn’t get lighter as the fuel runs out.
For your use case, you might want to look in to hybrids. In my chevy volt, I just went 6 months without needing to fill my gas tank because I didn’t really go anywhere other than to work and back. But this past weekend, I had to drive about 350 miles so I used gas and got 35mpg. The new phv prius is the spiritual successor to the volt.
A battery contains all the chemicals for the energy-producing reaction,and the means to reuse them, vs an IC engine draws oxygen frim the air and disposes of used reagents out the exhaust.
A battery on an EV contains the same energy as only about 2 gallons / 10 litres of liquid fuel.but the powertrain is far more efficient
New generation of battery technologies will improve the energy / weight ratio and ranges of 600 miles+ will be common in 20 years.
It’s not difficult, but the car companies have figured out that 300 miles is the sweet spot. More than that makes the car too expensive (see the Lucid Air or Model S) Less than that and people won’t buy it.
If they increased the range enough for your drive then someone else with a marginally longer drive would now be on here asking why it’s so difficult for EVs to make their drive.
It takes energy to move a big, heavy car.
Gasoline packs a lot of energy in a small size and weight. That should make sense, because it’s basically explosive. It does not take much gasoline to push a car a long distance because of how much energy it has.
Batteries do not carry as much energy for their size and weight. You need more batteries to push a car the same distance.
If you want the electric car to go the same distance as a gasoline car, you need a lot more batteries, which is heavier, so you need more batteries to push the extra batteries you’re carrying.
Gasoline has an energy density of 34.2 megajoules per litre. A 100kWh battery pack contains 360 megajoules of enery. So all the energy contained in a large (when looking at passenger EV vehicles) battery pack is the same as that contained in 10.5 litres of gasoline. A 100kWh battery pack is about the practical limit of size and weight of a battery pack to put in a passenger vehicle and according to google can weigh up to 600kg, which is the same as roughly 800 litres of fuel.
All in all, it’s easier to add more fuel capacity to a vehicle.
In addition to other answers:
Even if they somehow manage to cram a big enough battery, it will cost a BOMB during the time of battery replacement which will deter the future consumers.
I’ll throw one other answer in here that’s a little indirect: inertia. Not physics but societal inertia: we’ve designed roadways and vehicles around combustion vehicles which have historically weighed thousands of pounds. While it’s possible and even easy to design a smart car-style vehicle to travel 300 miles between charges, their popularity has suffered because of the dangers of sharing the road with semi trucks and other large vehicles. This is especially true in the US.
Latest Answers