How much more would people be willing to spend on avoiding a 30 minute charging break? I mean you have to pay for quite a bit of extra complexity in the car. That can't be cheap.

I feel like the population that both drives very long distances regularly and is willing to spend a large chunk of money of make the trip a little faster is pretty small. Plus it would be pretty hard to find gas stations if most people drove EVs.

In my mind the main use case is someone that doesn't have all that much battery range. They could buy a long range battery, but it would cost a lot more than the range extender.

If you don't have a long range battery, you might have to stop every 60-80 minutes of driving to charge. That will get annoying pretty quickly, especially since it's not like a smaller battery takes all that much less time to charge.

So I would expect the long range battery market to be quite big, and a range extender would have a good chance at grabbing many of those users.

Even if gas stations are somewhat uncommon, you'd only need to find one every 200-300 miles, and the worst case scenario is just that you go back to pure electric mode. You could also fill up a 5 gallon can for another huge chunk of extender range.

A single tank could save you an hour of waiting to charge.

This of the externalities.

To get "gas ranger extender" you still need oil drills, tankers, pipelines, refineries, tanker trucks, gas stations.

Without gas cars, we can retire all that infrastructure.

> Without gas cars, we can retire all that infrastructure.

Well, we can obviously reduce it if we reduce gasoline consumption from the status quo (true with moving to hybrids, especially plugins using gas mostly for range extension), but since its not used exclusively for autos, we can't retire it even if we replace all autos and do nothing else.

I don't think that many people really want them (well, are willing to pay for them), given that they are so rare.

BMW charged $4,000 for the Range Extender option in the i3, at that price, the manufacturer may as well just put in a bigger battery.

If I compare the battery pack for an i3, $4k of battery only gets you 25 miles of range. That range extender with a couple more gallons of tank could give you 200.

The battery pack costs $16K list price, but that price includes engineering, structural and support costs, so putting an extra $4K of batteries into it would give more than a 25% increase in range.

The range extender only adds around 70 miles of range:

current 2018 EPA estimates ding the more powerful i3s from 114 to 107 miles. BMW hasn’t cited an estimate for the REX model, which currently stands at 180 miles with the help of a 647-cc twin-cylinder engine.

The range extender adds 70 miles because it has a two gallon tank. Changing that to a six gallon tank won't change the price or meaningfully impact the convenience.

I don't think that small 38hp range extender could power the car for much farther, it's not powerful enough to run the car indefinitely at highway speeds (there's a lawsuit against BMW for the car slowing to 45mph while using the range extender), it needs some battery capacity to fully power the car.

They could put in a more powerful motor than that small scooter motor, but then that costs and weighs more, and then the car becomes a plug-in hybrid rather than a battery electric car with range extender.

And there seems to be low demand for plug-in hybrids as there aren't many options.

When I bought my Honda Accord Hybrid, I looked at the Clarity plug-in hybrid but decided against it. It didn't drive as nice as the Accord, cost nearly $5000 more, plus I was doing some regular long distance travel at the time, the accord has a ~500 mile range, the clarity has a ~340 gas+electric range, though the plug-in range would cover my commute.

And the Clarity was rated 40mpg highway, while I get around 50mpg @ 60-65mph with the Accord Hybrid (drops down to 44mpg at 70-75mph)

From what I read looking into the situation, it is barely enough to run the car at highway speeds in general. The lawsuit is mostly because the US version of the software won't turn the range extender on until the battery is almost completely empty. If you could turn it on at 50% battery you'd have almost no problems.