Re:GM plans electric van for business users
by coredog64 on Thursday June 04, 2020 @11:37AM
(#23418040)
Aerodynamic drag dominates at high speeds, but there’s a friction component that’s influenced by weight.
Accelerating more mass takes more energy. While you can recover it with regen, you can never break even.
Yes, but battery vehicles are not that much heavier as ICE vehicles and the efficiency of the electric propulsion and the benefit of regeneration works very strongly in favor of the battery vehicles. While it is not released yet, the Tesla Semi even seems to make electric propulsion work for heavy semi trailers.
For ground transportation, the percentage of the weight dedicated to batteries is important, but so is the ratio of wind resistance to battery power.
For low speed start and stop traffic, it is true that if your car is already 90% battery by weight, adding battery won’t help. For freeway driving, this doesn’t hold at all, since most of the energy is being lost to wind resistance.
The reason teslas have so much storage space is that air doesn’t weigh much, and the empty space helps them design for aerodynamics. Filling the space with batteries would make the vehicle too expensive.