I quite often drive beyond the range of an EV, to a place where there are no chargers at all. If I could just have a little range extender motor that I could put petrol in and use to charge overnight, I could fully commit to EVs right now forever. But I can't yet. That little bit of pragmatism would make it all work. It'd even fit in the front cargo space of a Tesla!
But you can! Get a portable Honda generator [1] and plug into it with a mobile connector to charge (my Tesla can charge from a 120V 15a circuit, or a 220v dryer outlet). If that doesn’t provide you enough charge, find a surplus generator on a trailer [2] and haul it behind you with a hitch. If it’s a diesel, you can even run it on vegetable oil instead of petroleum.
When you’re not going to the boonies, you’re fully electric without dragging a generator with you, and can rely on charging stations.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but this isn't a reasonably well packaged solution for people to use. What's the security of the generator sitting outside my car all night? It needs to be an integrated solution.
Scroll down to jurisdictions banning fossil fuel car sales. It’s a problem only until the government no longer allows you to buy a petrol vehicle. Canada’s ban starts in 2040, although I expect that to be pulled forward to align with other jurisdictions targeting 2030.
> It’s a problem only until the government no longer allows you to buy a petrol vehicle.
Right, you're nailing it - it's a problem today. A problem we could solve today. By popping a range extender under the (currently empty!) bonnet of a Tesla. Then everyone could get an EV, figure out how to make it work right now, and be ready for the way forward.
Don't think about what we could be doing by 2030 - think about what we could achieve right now!
And it's not just about petrol - don't fixate on when petrol is phased out - it's about diesel as well.
(An unrelated problem is that EVs need more form factors, such as off-road vehicles, which Teslas don't currently do.)
You just don't need it. It's solving a non-problem.
Tesla is selling all of the cars they can make, and the people simply don't find themselves experiencing the range anxiety they imagine they will. The vast majority of them just plug in their cars when they get home and never, ever think about going to a gas station. It's not about 30 minutes at a charger vs 5 minutes at a gas station; it's about 5 minutes at a gas station vs 0 minutes.
That's 99% of the trips taken in a Tesla. For 99% of the rest, there are superchargers.
So your range extender is a lot of extra machinery in an otherwise mostly solid-state device. To a Tesla owner, it just feels dirty, the way a gas station always feels grimy. It wouldn't help them sell any extra cars because the limiting factor on their sales is how fast they can build them.
They're scaling up, and by the time the gas cars are phased out, the entire system will have shifted. There will be even more superchargers and even more solid options for those 1% of 1% of trips that it won't suffice for.
Meantime, Tesla owners already spend less time than gas car owners fueling their cars, because it happens while they sleep. They don't need a mechanical solution because it's already solved.
