Suppose you bring back a half a gallon of gasoline: enough to take you 10 miles, maybe? How big a battery would you have to carry to power an electric car to go 10 miles? (10 miles/400 miles range) * (1200 pounds) = 30 pounds of battery. Maybe a little less, as not requiring all the infrastructure of the car's battery. Say 20 pounds, or maybe 10kg for the non-Imperialists out there. Maybe push the weight back up a bit for the charging interface.
Not impossible, especially if the makers designed it as a backpack, but not fun.
4 comments:
Walking ten miles with it, 20 lbs is a lot more than 4.
The lady sharing the waiting room for me at the tire store said she just pulled into the driveway of the first occupied house she saw, told the residents "here's $20 I'm plugging in" and waited for the "range" to exceed the remaining distance on the trip gage.
She blamed her husband, an engineering professor at the local college, for underestimating the actual range available.
Listening between the lines I was pretty sure that he's given adequate caveats that included accounting for driving conditions and use of the climate-control, and thought to myself that those were pretty expensive electrons but they got the job done.
The car we purchased last summer comes with a deflated spare-tire and a compressor. If instead of the battery for your bucket of electricity, you got the smallest/lightest generator from Tractor Supply and kept it fuelled up in the frunk, you'd have hundreds of miles of range after a half-day of charging for the same weight, and no walking.
Another consideration: the energy in the gasoline won’t be much affected by the cold, but a battery with a small cross-section will drain a lot faster than a big battery mounted on the car. Hiking it out there and then waiting while it transfers the charge is going to entail some loss, so you’ll actually need a slightly bigger and heavier battery to get the 10 miles.
Yep. I've argued that we should look into synthesizing octane instead of hydrogen.
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