A heavier car will require a larger battery for an equivalent range, but
I think that is over played.
If you are concerned about city range, with lots of starts and stops,
your battery range will be chewed up badly by a heavier car. But the
real need for long range is freeway driving. And, there, if you drive
reasonably carefully, acceleration and deceleration affect range
minimally. The biggest factor is, of course, aero drag, where weight
doesn't factor in at all. Rolling resistance does increase with weight,
but I don't think it's increase plays a significant role.
Another factor is the time spent driving the car. For city driving,
speeds are slow and, yet, the HVAC system is consuming energy as well as
all the other non traction activities. On the freeway, for the same
amount of distance traveled, those non traction loads are cut
dramatically, e.g. by a third if your average freeway speed is 60 mph
and avg city 20.
In other words, for a US consumer, EV range is all about the battery
size, not about the vehicle weight.
So, getting back to the cost of a luxury EV: here I'm just speculating
and have no facts. Unlike an ICE car, the battery is by far the most
expensive component of the car. An ICE vehicle has no comparable high
cost element. So, to build an EV with adequate freeway range, at least
for the US market, it takes a pretty expensive battery. That eats into
profits. The best way to recoup those profits is to dress the car up and
sell it as luxury.
Someone posted that they question whether any of the traditional auto
makers are making a profit on their EVs. If that's the case, imagine if
they tried to sell a trimmed down EV with still an appealing amount of
EV range. Financial disaster.
As battery prices come down, the EV "economy" cars will appear.
Peri
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