31. August 2023 · Categories: Politics

One interesting article on the Distribution of car distances travelled shows that a plug in hybrid with 75km electrical range would be able to cover 75% to 80% of all driving using the battery alone, and it did not include the ability to recharge your car at work.

This makes them a really good policy choice to reduce carbon emissions. The worry with e-cars is that they will all come equipped with 80kWh batteries just to allow the rare road trip, a battery that even with just 1000 cycles is good for 400000km, and will likely deteriorate more from aging than from actual use. Instead a 75km plugin would just need a 12kWh battery, much closer to the actual live span of a car, and also much lighter, 100kg instead of over 400kg.

Currently there is not a singly electric car on the market that is affordable, and able to cover longer distances. A 25000€ petrol car can easily travel 800km in 6.5 hours, while starting with just 100km range remaining, but electric cars with sufficient charge speed for this are only available with huge batteries, raising the cost into the 80000€ plus range, and requiring you to travel at more than 160 kph to reach that average speed.

The plugin will for 1/5th the battery resources enable a 80% reduction in fuel consumption, reduce city pollution by having enough range to run there fully electric, produce half the road damage, be less dangerous to others in a crash, and would not require huge upfront costs for buying a car. As such it is a much better policy choice than forcing everyone onto super heavy electric cars.

The alternative would be for sufficient cooling on the batteries to allow a 5 minute fill up. Then people would be willing to use a 250km range car, knowing that extra range is a fast top up, and not a half hour wait. A few such experiments are now conducted, and I sure hope this becomes standard soon. It would also require a massive extension of fast charging stations on highways, half of which would only be used during a handful of peak holiday travel days. I suspect the cars are ready much earlier than the charging infrastructure.