> "tow your expensive toy somewhere which ev's suck at currently"
Do EVs suck at towing because of battery life? I thought electric engines were often superior to comparable internal combustion engines regarding torque.
The instantaneous torque definitely helps, and EVs are often heavier which helps with stability. But if you're towing anything with significant air resistance (e.g. a boat, a caravan, a big trailer) it kills your range. The general rule of thumb is that it will cut your range in half, which depending on your original max range is ok for some use cases, but unacceptable for others.
This is exactly the situation. ICE also has a massive range hit as well, it's just easy to put a massive fuel tank in to get a stupid amount of range not towing compared to a battery electric that struggles to get a similar range. When you start with almost 600mi losing half isn't too bad, when it's maybe 300mi on a good day and you cut it in half is just not as usable for that usage.
That said, if it's not the towing but the bed you need, the range but isn't nearly so bad.
Additionally, all ICE cars can charge from 0-100% in under 5 minutes. Even if their towing range was somehow less than an EV, it would matter less because you don't have to spend an hour at a charging station.
With the difference that with an EV you always leave home with a full battery and you never have to step into a gas station unless you have a long trip ahead.
But even when you, the amount of time is not 60minutes. If you have kids, the time to go to the restroom, grab a coffee and come back is usually already around 20min, which tends to be enough to charge from 20-60% or even to 80% in newer vehicles. If you have a meal and take around 40minutes, you are probably already hitting 90% or higher.
This is exaggeration. A half hour for a well-loaded truck, sure, but an hour is generally exaggeration.
And as for five minutes for a fill up, it's usually more than five for a regular fill-up on a regular passenger car for me compared to just continuing on.
Yeah 5 mins is not true, its 1 minute actual 'charging' as in refill from empty to full.
I don't know what your family does on the gas station, but my wife and 2 small kids can cover toilet visit (as long as there was no accident) for all 3 combined under 5 mins. So can I with paying, so at the end its 5 mins stop total all counted in. Eating as in lunch is once a day, and when we travel we certainly don't need restaurant experience of sitting around, quick sandwich is more than enough, driving on full stomach sucks anyway.
Never understood people loitering around gas stations for long time, but then again when we travel its often 500km or more, the typical trip cca 2x a year back home is 1500km.
EVs are not for us for quite some time, US EVs seemingly never.
I've timed a number of the pumps around my home filling ~20gal. None of them have come close to filling in a minute. They're often 3-4 minutes of pumping, after spending a few minutes negotiating payment. I don't think I've ever spent less than 8 minutes between pulling off the road, pulling up to the pump, getting out of my car, negotiating payment, pumping, finishing up, getting in my car, and returning to the road.
It takes a few minutes just getting the kids in and out of their car seats. No way everyone is getting out of the car, through the bathroom, and then back in the car ready to go in 5 minutes.
Seriously, time yourself sometime. You're way underestimating the actual time you spend at a stop.
That is still significnatly less time than an EV charge time. (new EVs are starting to come that can do really fast charges, time will tell how this changes)
I do agree, from the perspective of the total time to get the energy into the vehicle it is significantly more time, easily a bit over 2x as long for a "quick" road trip stop.
But take a look at it from another perspective. Its another 10-15min on a several hour road trip. On a 5hr road trip that's like 3-4% more time for the total time of the road trip, assuming you're definitely doing a fast stop on that 5 hour trip and not sending the kids through the bathroom and you're not stopping for a quick meal. Is adding 3% to your travel time really that significant?
And as pointed out, if you're having to get the family through the bathroom or stop for a quick bite (even just sandwiches in the parking lot, although I usually pull off to a rest stop when traveling in an ICE car when having a quick bite) its not even more time, its the same total time.
On the route I often drive for a road trip (between DFW and Houston), I'm normally going to stop for lunch or dinner anyways somewhere on the route. I just stop where there's a charger (a few good options), have a quick bite, and hit the road. I'd usually do that even with my gas cars even if I didn't need gas, normally stopping at one of the rest stops on the way to stretch my legs, have a quick snack, use the restroom, and continue on my way. On paper taking the EV adds something like 15 minutes or so to the trip (which my EV isn't really great for road trips compared to others: smaller battery AWD Mach-E) but in practice for how I road trip its practically the same.
Right? These people are apparently taking off their seatbelts while rolling to the stop, sprinting to the bathroom, emptying their bowels in a few seconds, not thoroughly washing their hands, and sprinting back to the car as fast as they can to shave a few minutes off their several hour trip. God help them if there's only one toilet, I guess the family is going to share today.
Forget that. Take your time. Be comfortable. You've got a few more hours to go, enjoy yourself. Stretch, have your snack outside of the car so it doesn't get as messy and you're not hungry in a little bit (and as the driver, so you're not distracted trying to eat while driving). Don't get me wrong, don't just be idle at the stop, do what you need to do and get moving again. But you don't need to rush. Its not going to make that big of a difference in the end.
If you live in the US you likely are a two or more car family. You can argue the need for an ICE for one of those cars, but for most it wouldn't be hard to plan "honey I need your car tomorrow for my long trip so remember to take my car".
yeah for sure...in this shithole country thats true, China has 1,000-volt chargers which are basically as fast as filling a tank. Maybe the US will get something comparable by 2050, after Miami is 6ft under water
The reason that towing affects EVs disproportionately more than ICE vehicles is because of the efficiency of EVs. It’s unintuitive but consider that with an ICE car, you have say 30% of the chemical energy of the fuel being converted to useful power. That means that per liter of gasoline burned driving, 700ml is effectively lost to waste heat. A large amount of that energy loss is a fixed cost, that is it doesn’t scale linearly with the power demand from the car.
EVs are 90% efficient at converting their chemical energy to useful work. This is a good thing in general, but it also means that drag and extra losses hurt its range much more. If 90% of the energy goes into useful power, than anything that requires 50% more power is going to almost halve the range. Whereas with an ICE engine, the high fixed losses mean that demanding 50% more power doesn’t increase fuel consumption by 50%. Pair that with the higher energy density of gasoline and you’ve got a bad comparison for EVs.
I can't think what the issue would be aside from range. One thing that stood out to me about the cybertruck is that they made huge tradeoffs to make it more aerodynamic. The only reason to do that is to increase maximum driving distance. Put a big blocky trailer behind it and suddenly the battery's maximum distance is competing with a gas tank on a much more even playing field. Regenerative braking would make up for some of that in very hilly terrain, but on level ground it just can't get out to as many of the remote areas people take their trucks to.
I really think the first obvious use case (aside from bugout vehicles) would be something like the early road rangers - driving all over a farm and bringing back crates of produce from muddy fields without getting stuck or needing a lot of maintenance.
If you don't have a place to charge at home, yes. But if you are charging at home then the only time you need to charge away from home is on long road trips. And you need to stop for lunch or whatever. And if you are taking only a couple road trips a year the time spent charging on road trips will be exceeded by all the time spent on gas fill ups throughout the year for a gas vehicle.
Present day EVs don't take that long to charge (basically the time to go to the bathroom and check email), but they don't have enough parallelism so at a busy location you can end up waiting for an open charger. There are orders of magnitude more gas pumps than public chargers.
when you need a charger there is rarely any choice of location. Charging at home doesn't help when you are not home. Those rare public chargers is what you need and they can be hard to find.
This varies a lot based on where you are. For the trips I usually take around in Texas where I need public chargers, I actually usually do have a choice of chargers. I understand this isn't universally true in other parts of the US though.
Charging infrastructure is what sucks. Yes range goes half, but that isn't much of a problem if you tow once a month and there's tons of stations around. If not, ur screwed.
Charging infrastructure was always the key for EVs and it's still relatively behind.
Do EVs suck at towing because of battery life? I thought electric engines were often superior to comparable internal combustion engines regarding torque.