>Towing with an EV is terrible
Why?
Why?
The thing is that ICE vehicles are so inefficient to begin with, but a towed trailer needs the same amount of energy regardless of what is towing it. Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.
Once I discovered that the entire EV battery holds only 2 gallons-of-gas-worth of energy (roughly about 65kwh) , all of the range issues made a lot more sense.
With that type of reasoning, let me guess, the competitor you work for is General Motors?
A federal law could easily fix this though, but you would need an administration that cares about climate change or at least about EV
Excellent sleuthing, either way.
That doesn’t change the gist of your comment however - which is correct. (I’m a happy Bay Area Rivian owner who’s made that trip often)
How is your Rivian by the way? Is it in any way comparable to a cybertruck or is it just far and away better?
Ergonomics and ease of use are why people get cars. Ergnomics right now to me are reason why EV's in America don't sell well. Infrastructure. If every apartment complex and shopping mall had chargers or we had a novel way to charge a battery like an ICE engine then yeah it will take off. Culturally though I think we just love gas stations, emissions and pollusion.
It's why I got my EVs, for certain. It would be hard to convince me to go back to the inconvenience of a gas vehicle at this point. I'm hooked.
An ICE vehicle isn't less efficient because the frame itself takes more energy to move, it's less efficient because the engine burns off a high percentage of its energy as waste heat.
But that will be true regardless of what the load is. If the ICE truck takes 5 units of energy to pull itself compared with 1 unit for the electric truck, that implies that the the truck chassis only actually requires 1 unit to move, but the ICE engine burns off 80% of its energy as waste heat. The engine is only 20% efficient.
Now if you start pulling a trailer, you have (in total) 2 units of energy worth of load. But if the ICE engine is still only 20% efficient, then it will take 10 units to pull both, rather than 6.
I can believe that this effect is real (electric cars suffering more range loss when towing), but it seems to require an explanation beyond this one.
There's also that electric cars have a marginally better drag coefficients for a few reasons - ICE vehicles have a bot less incentive and they need to use more air for cooling - so the drag from a trailer will be worse, as a percentage extra, on the average electric vehicle.
Of course an ICE uses more fuel in absolute terms on a higher load than a lower one. But the proportion of fuel wasted compared to fuel turned into propulsion improves as load is increased (at least up to a point, maybe not all the way to absolute maximum load).
Electric systems also have efficiency curves, but they are less drastic within the primary load range.
* cylinder filling is more efficient at maximum output request (on naturally aspirated engines operating in vacuum, due to less simple pumping loss, on turbocharged or supercharged engines, due to less wasted energy producing charge air and generally more optimized air/exhaust exchange). in short, air gets into the cylinder more efficiently in the first place at high torque requests
* combustion is more complete at high cylinder filling; not only does more air get into the cylinder, but it also burns more completely
* friction losses matter less at higher torque, especially on larger engines
Almost every ICE complexity advancement over the years is to hack around these basic properties: VVL and VVT to optimize pumping, direct injection, stratified injection, and dynamic compression hackery to get around cylinder filling efficiency, and cylinder deactivation / variable displacement to avoid friction and pumping loss from unnecessary engine size. but while ICE engines have made huge strides, they're still more efficient when they're loaded.
And note that this is efficiency, not absolute consumption - of course you'll consume more at higher load still, but the ratio is better. Combine this with the aerodynamics of most ICE pickup trucks and you have a scenario where ICE trucks frequently lose very little fuel economy / actual consumption when towing a trailer.
But boy does my model Y tow tiny trailers well.
What? It takes about 3 minutes to add 350 miles of range to my gas vehicle.
In my little commuter car with a 40l tank the fastest I’ve ever filled up was 6 minutes.
Generally this is only true for ICE with an abundance of extra power to start with, but that is basically every truck and most other cars for the last 25 years.
I frequently tow between Washington and Montana, and I only have to fill up the F-350 once or twice when loaded. You would need to recharge a loaded Cybertruck 5+ times on that same route. My 11 hour drive just turned into a 15 hour drive in ideal conditions. And I don't think there are the latest superchargers available on most of the route, so the time spent charging is likely much higher.
Don't get me wrong, I like EVs and have a Model 3 as my daily driver. But I would never get rid of the gasser given today's battery tech with the number of roadtrips we take.
But... why? Like, at that point it should make more sense shipping whatever freight you want to ship by train?!
Locally farmers built a rail to port system as a grain carriage has more tonnage than a road train.
Two axle trailer is it? What's that max out at, two tonne?
Yes, clearly there are cases when it makes sense to ship by train, otherwise they wouldn't exist. I can't tell if I'm not getting my point across, or you just want to be pedantic, but the point is that most people who own the capability of transporting something, will transport it themselves.
I did specifically ask about your trailer - not a generic set of trailers, but, okay.
What I'm getting is you don't have a prime mover actual truck with one, two, or three trailers to tow single or in a road train.
> the point is that most people who own the capability of transporting something, will transport it themselves.
to some degree but by no means always, sometimes it makes sense to have others do transport while getting on and doing others things in the same time.
> or you just want to be pedantic
Just familiar with transport, a great deal across a remote state 3x size of Texas, and a fair amount to other parts of the world, by air and sea.
If a car held gas worth of 750mi of driving and towing would reduce it to 500mi, and your actual driving distance was significantly less than both, the difference would be unnoticed.
If a car held gas worth of just 500mi with extremely well optimized aero and driveline loss minimization and highly efficient regen, and a towed trailer would absolutely ruin that, and your driving distance was too close to the diminished range, you will notice that.
If your EV held like 12500kWh of charge for like 3000 miles of range, and it was mostly for Costco runs, towing range penalties will not be among your top concerns.
Because the numbers are a bit off. I've towed a lot, gas trucks do not lose 15% when towing. My old F150 went from 18mpg to 10mpg. My super duty went from 16mpg to 8mpg.
The advantage is that gas is so energy dense we just routinely equip trucks with 35+ gallon fuel tanks. There's no battery option equivalent yet.
The efficiency is usually defined as the energy the car can use to move itself over the energy going in (electrical, or chemical for gas). If an ICE is 20% efficient then using 5 units means you get one unit out. Towing a trailer that doubles the load means you need 2 units out, which means you need 10 units in. So you get half the range either way.
The engine doesn't get more efficient just because you hook a trailer to it: it's still 20% efficient regardless.
“20% efficient” is like an EVs “270km range” - how far you can actually drive an EV depends on temperature, speed, etc.
Is it just that these EV trucks don't have multiple gears to tune themselves for towing? Like how many EV cars are geared for city speeds but suffer on the highway. I know dual-motor ones have different ratios, but that's still 2 speeds vs 6-10. Edit: Could also be about engine tuning.
By contract in EVs, much more of the energy is going towards moving the vehicle and therefore both weight and air resistance greatly affect the amount of energy use.
Ironically, the private owner/operators are most often the ones installing accessories to make their trucks look cool and sacrificing immensely for it.
2. When optimizing, you want to start with the biggest problem and work your way down. ICEs are so laughably inefficient that improving aerodynamics just won't have that much of an impact.
In practice, diesel engines can become more efficient under additional load, and it obviously varies between models but it’s not a 16% vs 50% difference like your example.
The reason EVs don’t tow well is they don’t have a high enough range to begin with. Diesels have nearly double the starting range of an equivalent EV, and storing additional fuel on board is an option.
This is highly variable. My Lightning was cheaper than the ICE version I had been shopping for. It has been better for my wallet from day 1. And it has depreciated less. The credits did distort the market for a while, though, that is for certain.
Care to clarify with actual math? We are a technical audience here.
The fuck?
If the charging port were on the front of the vehicle, you could pull straight in, but now your trailer is probably blocking traffic.
Of course you could disconnect and reconnect the trailer, which adds an extra 5-10 extra minutes to your 15-40 minute charge time depending on your battery level.
Pulling a trailer with an EV is very common around here (Norway).