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Re:Rolls-Royce concludes testing of plane technology to brea... by Robotbeat on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @03:56PM (#24632213)
I mean, this plane is a sprinter. If you want range, use sailplane techniques and with similar chemistry as for terrestrial lithium ion you can get >1000km range with multiple passengers and speed just as high as high speed rail (or higher). Eviation Alice and other concepts show how this could be done. Just a matter of time and a LOT of effort.

Battery EV trucks (lots of prototypes and maybe even low volume production going on, from Tesla to Daimler) regularly get multiple hundred kilometers of range and 1000km isn’t at all unreasonable although 500 miles is probably the sweet spot in the near term to avoid reducing available payload (any greater range has diminishing returns due to regulatory requirements for rest stops). And that’s without advanced chemistries that you can get now at low volumes like metal anode or lithium-sulfur which double the specific energy and allow double the range (to say nothing of lithium-air, which is easily over a decade away from practical use but would eliminate the disparity in useful specific energy between battery-electric and hydrocarbon combustion in almost all cases—rocketry and munitions being the major exception).

EDIT: Daimler has delivered some 300-400km range electric Freightliner semis for customer testing already: https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/daimler-electric-freightliner...

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