Comment by pbmonster
9 hours ago
> especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range
The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.
If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.
The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.
Which is part of why I think Range is often a distraction in EV discussions. The people asking for 600+ mile Range EVs may see those built because it always sounds like there are plenty of people "demanding" that, but the weight trade-off in batteries isn't going to make those great cars, most of that range will be "waste" given average trips. But it is easier to get to 600+ miles of range by adding more (and better) batteries than by making larger gas tanks and engines.