On Oct 22, 2015, at 8:47 AM, John Lussmyer <cou...@casadelgato.com> wrote:
> My Electric F-250 gets around 650Wh/Mile. My range is about 70 miles. > No Towing. (that would REALLY suck power!) > Even with those restrictions, I find it very useful. I've had it at a bunch > of car shows, and there have been quite a few people that think it would be > useful to them, even with those restrictions. > > That article requiring towing and a long range, sounds just like all the > other EV articles that require cars to have a 400 miles range and charge in 5 > minutes. Standard range anxiety. I've no doubt your truck is hugely useful. I can get by fine without a truck, but, were I to consider one, what you describe you have would likely be pretty much perfect for me. But a demand for a truck that can tow 4,000+ pounds over 200 miles...well, that sounds to me like somebody who tows a large boat or a few horses, and that kind of towing can, especially in the West, easily involve well over 200 miles of such towing in a single day. The problem here isn't that people are being unreasonable in their demands for performance specifications. The problem is with them expecting such performance specifications from an electric vehicle with today's chemistry. As the news is demonstrating so well, diesel turns out to be a really, really poor choice for passenger vehicles, and electric versions of those same vehicles would be superior almost no matter how you measured them -- and mostly hugely superior. But diesel is also far and away the best choice today for long-haul tractor-trailer rigs. That's no contradiction; you just have to pick the horse for the course. Between those two extremes there'll be overlap...which is why what the original author probably actually wants is a Volt-style plugin hybrid. Give it a powerful electric motor, a ~50 kWh battery...and an onboard 5 - 10 kW generator and a 30 gallon fuel tank. The generator will be more than able to keep the battery from running dry on long distances, plus you could then add a bunch of high-amperage 110V and 220V outlets. Now you've got a vehicle that's mostly electric powered with all those advantages, plus you can run your entire small construction site off of it. _That_ would be a vehicle you couldn't make enough of fast enough...though it's still going to come with a price tag similar to a Tesla's. ...and I vaguely remember hearing something about somebody offering exactly such vehicles for sale already.... b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20151022/76b25f61/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)