Surely you can avoid all this expense and complexity by simply hiring a car for longer trips?
Never underestimate the huge hardon some people have for EV. one of my ex employees has a nissan leaf and would spend 8-10 hours making a 200 mile trip hopping from charger to charger
Another thing about the serial hybrid - the ICE has a fairly constant power demand when it’s running - it’s just running a generator, not having to power the drive train. This allows you to tune things to have the ICE run at its peak efficiency. It also allows you to consider designs that would have problems actually powering the car. For instance, the ICE could be a small turbine. Turbines don’t work well with fluctuating power demands, although they’ve been tried in automobiles. And you do sacrifice some efficiency over a reciprocating piston. But for this application, the fact that the turbine is smaller than a piston engine of the same power would be a win - less space taken up by the auxiliary range extender. The turbine is also cleaner, and can run on a variety of fuels. Have to figure out some way to keep the whine when the sucker fires up from driving the occupants of the car crazy, though. Of course, if it were in a trailer, at least it would be outside the car whining …
If I could lease a towable battery pack or generator for less than leasing a car, why wouldn’t I do that?
Hrmm… a diesel powered turbine in something like a Volt would be the ticket. Since you don’t need that mechanical torque that a traditional ICE provides for.
With todays batteries, you could easily develop a means to serialize and track the use of each battery. Also, if the battery was dropped off, it’s not too hard to devise a battery pack that would allow access to individual cells to test each one and have the pack sent back for depot level service if needed.
That all being said, this would be expensive as people are going to be expecting a minimum range and demanding the maximum range all at the same time. So, as soon as you get that battery pack that has slightly less range you’ll be complaining. The company would have to maintain those batteries to be at 98% or above range and then send them back to the depot (or do it onsite) and repair/replace the bad cells. Really, for the cost of the Tesla, that is what people will be expecting.
Might need smaller capacity, but more, battery packs to help alleviate the maintenance burden of a big pack but I kinda doubt that would really help in the long run. Could be a better idea to take that 25kW/hr battery pack and make it 30kW/hr and have it only provide the range of a 25 so that you get max usage out of it before going back for maintenance.
Thing is, that’s exactly why rockets are designed in stages. Once their fuel is used up you dump the extra mass rather than have to continue accelerating dead weight (flip side being that the dumped stage is a total loss). Obviously this would not be practical for land based vehicles.
True hybrids are not a bad idea, though people tend to forget the long term battery building/replacement/disposal costs in their rose-colored figures. EVs are stupid though. At least with today’s battery technology. Their only real practical use is as niche vehicles for commuters. They offer a measurable decrease in local pollution for areas with miles of highways of cars often sitting in slow/stopped bumper-to-bumper traffic. But as is so often pointed out, unless your power company is nuclear only, the electricity is still coming from fossil fuels (and there’s a measurable loss in transmitting it).
Until we see a paradigm shift to fuel cells or Hydrogen or some other electro-chemical generation method EVs are a dead end.
Aren’t large electrical power plants more efficient than the generator in the car of a hybrid?
You’d also have inefficiencies in transporting the gasoline to the gas station. You’d also have different efficiencies for starting with the fossil fuels and generating electricity, versus starting with the fossil fuels and refining to gasoline (or diesel fuel). I don’t know how all the trades pan out, but you can’t just look at bits of the equation.
How about a trailer with an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) in it hooked up to an automatic transmission that drives the tires. One would put the Electric Vehicle (EV) in neutral & let the trailer push them to their destination city. At that point, drop the trailer & drive the EV normally. No parking problems in the city. Leave the trailer at the motel.
These trailers could be rented or leased out perhaps.
I read in one of the Do It Yourself (DIY) EV forums that one fellow did this. He used a VW Rabbit front end, engine & trans-axle. I do not recall if it was a diesel or a gas unit. He was in Oregon as I recall. He claimed that it worked very well. I do not know how the trailer was controlled.
Aside from however much it might cost someone else to make this service available (although I believe U-Haul will rent you a towable generator trailer), plus the hassle of towing it, the idea of towing a gas trailer to recharge an electric vehicle rather than just, say, renting a gas-powered vehicle seems a bit counter productive. You’re putting a lot of miles on your car for a trip it’s not engineered for.