Towing With EVs Sucks Now… But Not Always
Eves aren’t great at Towing it’s something we’ve all heard before something the media loves to cling on to whenever they’re trying to make electric vehicles look bad and there’s lots of evidence to somewhat support this Theory whether you do electric Towing tests with the F-150 Lightning the rivan r1t
Or even the recently announced cyber truck which really is making them look bad because they initially promised over 500 M of range for $70,000 yeah it doesn’t take you very long to find a towing experience where it’s like man I couldn’t go more than 100 miles and the
Charger was full or it wasn’t optimized for trailers and that kind of thing so it’s fairly easy to just write it off based on present day evidence and just say well electric vehicles just inherently aren’t very good at it therefore we’re always going to rely on gasoline infrastructure EVS are not the
Future at least if you’re the kind of guy that needs to do some kind of CrossCountry Towing right well I personally disagree even though today’s vehicles are not well optimized for long-distance Towing I’m going to be arguing as to why I don’t think this is a forever issue with electric vehicles
It’s purely an issue of today’s electric vehicles because we’re on The Cutting Edge it’s easy for us to forget that the Tesla Model 3 which was kind of one of the first mass Market fast charging electric vehicles out there that barely launched about 6 years ago okay less
Than 7 years we went from basically EVS being a rich people toy to somewhat of a mass Market relatively affordable option for the masses now with the Tesla Model y That’s only been out for about 4 years becoming the bestselling car in the world so it’s still very much new to the
Market as a whole and I personally think that the market of long distance towing with our personal owned Vehicles is just going to be the last thing that the EV industry actually tackles because it’s kind of the most complex see the main reason we’re so used to gas vehicles
Towing pretty well is because there’s so many losses involved with the internal combustion engine most of these trucks that are towing Great distances across the country are hauling around basically the equivalent of 600 to 800 Kow hours worth of energy within their gasoline tank but they’re losing so much of that
Anyway whether it be because the pickup trucks are not very aerodynamic and of course all of the processes involved with extracting that energy from gasoline with pistons and transmissions and all the different valves that have to be moving all of those are energy losses and of course you hear noise
Coming from a gas engine that’s a form of energy loss and you got a tailpipe spewing out a bunch of that energy as well it’s not being used usefully by the time you slap on a trailer to this already loss leading mess of energy extraction you don’t really notice it
All that much because so many losses are already going on but yes you still do get worse fuel economy even with a gas vehicle but it’s relatively a simple engineering problem to extend the range of most of our gas vehicles today because gasoline is very very energy
Dense and it’s not that hard or that complicated to just put in a slightly larger tank in a vehicle it’s literally just mostly empty air and you just have to optimize for how much Li liquid you know how many gallons of gas you can fit in a vehicle it’s a lot more complicated
With EVS because batteries are by Design far less energy-dense than gasoline but thanks to electric vehicles being far much more simple just a battery pack to an electric motor it’s far more efficient there’s weigh less losses and that’s why personal vehicles and commuter Vehicles like Crossovers and
SUVs and sedans those were kind of the first thing to be tackled by the EV industry because those you have a lot more control over you can make them very dnamic which enables better range despite there being much less energy in a battery pack than there is in a gas
Tank and you can extract a much higher percentage of that energy from the battery pack thanks to that aerodynamic shape the smaller form factor which allows it to be a lighter weight vehicle motor doesn’t have to work as hard to get the vehicle up to speed so if you’re
Starting out as a startup company or a legacy automaker as okay how do we make electric vehicles profitably and let’s make them desirable for the masses you’re going to start with the more efficient vehicles like the sedans and the crossover overs and just in the last couple years we’ve started breaking into
The pickup truck space it’s still a very very relatively new thing but we’re still building a lot of today’s electric pickup trucks with the same kind of energy density and aerodynamic requirements of those Crossovers and those sedans and that’s why we’re not seeing range get all that crazy with
Most of these electric trucks and when they’re designing them they do everything they can to shave off a little bit of aerodynamic drag so they can squeeze out a little bit more range from that massive battery back already pickup trucks kind of inherently by Design are not very aerodynamic so it’s
Already a big Challenge and they’ll put all of this work into the aerodynamics but then of course you slap a trailer onto the back of one of these things and all of your arrow falls out the window plus all of the weight distribution gets different you know those electric power
Trains are kind of optimized for the weight to be distributed a certain way on the vehicle with the low center of gravity but bring in a trailer that’s you know 11,000 lb and suddenly yeah all the electric motors are having to work double time and your aerodynamics takes
A massive hit because trailers are all kinds of different shapes and sizes most people can’t choose to make all of their trailers super aerodynamic so that creates the perfect efficiency equation that all of these Engineers work so hard on to immediately fall apart because there’s a bunch of variables that now
They can never really truly account for but there are solutions in the long term I don’t think they’re going to happen overnight I don’t think longdistance EV toeing is really going to be practical for the next couple of years but I do think it will eventually happen mainly
Due to three main things that EV manufacturers need to eventually focus on and there’s a lot of subcategories but I’m doing my best to keep this video somewhat short so we’re just going to be focusing on the three main things the main one that’s the biggest elephant in
The room is we need more energy dens batteries and every year there are energy density improvements to especially nickel-based cylindrical cells like rivan just came out with the max pack on the r1t which is slightly higher energy density it’s the same number of cells as the large pack and
Over time as there’s more and more demand for electric vehicles Vehicles there’s more and more funding available for research that goes into how do we get more wat hours into each cell of the vehicle and this has improved a lot over the last decade I expect it to continue
To improve for the next decade but there’s no way around it because you can’t fight against physics and no one knows exactly what kind of trailer you’re going to be Towing but most trailers are usually not that aerodynamic anyway so there’s no way around it in order to have good
Long-distance towing with our EVS we’re going to need bigger battery packs and they can’t be you know 9,000 10,000 lb battery pack using today’s current energy density cells like the Hummer EV because for one it’s just not practical it’s not cost effective and it’s arguably not that safe to have vehicles
On the road that weigh that much plus when the vehicle weighs that much it starts to not even be that cost effective against gasoline anyway but that’s just one piece of the puzzle which will take some time energy density of cells the next piece number two is DC fast charging infrastructure this is
Something that also inherently has to develop slower than Vehicles because you can’t just CR crank out DC fast charging stations in the same way you can crank out cars you have an assembly line and you build products that are sitting on Wheels and then you can roll those
Products out to whoever wants to buy them but with DC fast charging it’s a different story because you need permits you need access to land and you need to make sure that it’s reasonably placed nearby highways and freeways and a lot of you probably noticed that gas stations typically are mounted more
Centrally in a parking lot usually under some kind of parking structure and that’s not on accident they do that on purpose because gas station need to have these giant fuel tanks always somewhat full so they’re ready for whatever Vehicles come by and pull fuel out of them and those giant tanks usually it’s
Much safer to keep them underground so if you’re going to keep them underground it’s much cheaper and much more coste effective to make sure that you’re not having to pump that fuel that far so to maximize the amount of space in your gas station it makes sense to put those
Pumps in the center of a big parking area and that’s just by Design more easy for trailers and vehicles that are Towing to just pull through and top off as they need and then they can just keep on driving whereas it’s a little bit of a different story as many of you
Probably noticed with DC fast charging stations because they don’t have giant fuel tanks they need to worry about just a few electric cabinets that can pretty much be placed in any old parking lot you’ll often see superchargers or EA stations that are just in grocery store parking lots or right next to strip
Malls and because of that it actually makes a lot more sense to put them alongside parking areas and because EVS typically take a bit longer to charge than it does to refuel a gas tank it also makes sense to have far more charging stalls than you do at a typical
Gas pump because it’s far cheaper and also more practical to just have 20 sometimes 30 supercharger stalls all in one place and it’s much easier to lay those out if you put them off to the side of a big parking lot than it would if you tried to lay it out exactly like
You lay out a gas station of course Tesla is trying to build as many DC fast Chargers as they can not just for their vehicles but for all EVS now and the most costeffective way to do that is to put them sometimes alongside most parking lots so that you can charge the
Most amount of EV simultaneously and while that is more efficient and costeffective to flooding the market with tons of superchargers available it by Design makes it kind of harder if you’re towing because a lot of these Stations don’t have pull through stalls although we are seeing a little bit more
Of a push thanks to companies like rivan with the adventure Network trying to make pull through stations more viable and I do think with time there will probably be a way VIA over theair software update to let customers know which superchargers and which DC fast Chargers have pull through stations that
Are optimized for trailers right now they’re not really doing that but I don’t see really any inherent limitation that would prevent them from in the future enabling that like I could imagine a future where you get in your cyber truck and you’re towing with it now so you put it in trailer mode
Because the vehicle is going to behave differently when it knows there’s a ton of weight hanging off the back and when it knows that there’s a trailer attached it could automatically route you just two superchargers that have pull through stations available and there’s even ways via software that if a customer that
Pulls into a supercharger that does not have a trailer attached tries to charge at one of the pull through stations you could have a popup that says hey there’s another stall available that is not optimized for trailer pull throughs or at least you could have that popup only
Show up if you know that there’s a vehicle with a trailer that’s in route to that location you could say hey please move over someone’s actually going to occupy that stall unless of course all the other stalls are occupied then it’s a different problem but the other big infrastructure change is not
Only more of these pull through stations but also faster charging capabilities because if we’re going to be expecting the great long-distance EV trucks of the future to have 200 or 250 Kow battery packs there’s still going to be a pain in the butt to charge if they max out
Around 2250 KW right that’s still not fast enough so these EV trucks of the future are absolutely going to be more dependent on 800 volt to 1,000 volt fast charging and that should enable them with less amps to be able to hit 350 KW 400 k much much faster charging speeds
Than what we’re seeing today so that you can pull into a DC fast charger plugin and within 20 to 30 minutes get a lot of your battery pack added back into it and if you’re consuming more and more energy like that you’re going to need faster and faster charging to compensate for it
So that’s number two DC fast charging infrastructure has to get much much better and lastly number three which kind of dives into the first two steps all of this has to be done in a cost effective manner you can’t just throw a bunch of battery packs in a truck and
Sell it for $50,000 because you’re quickly going to bankrupt your company so this is honestly probably one of the most challenging steps it’s not just about getting energy dense sales in building out a great reliable DC fast charging Network that has software that is flagging all of the
Pull through stalls it’s also about how do you do all of this while still making the vehicle affordable because sure some of you probably already bring up things like hey well the Hummer EV has over 350 KW DC fast charging an over 200 K battery pack and the Silverado EV has a
200 K hour battery pack and 400 Mi of range and 350 KW fast charging so there you go there’s your great long-distance Towing EV of the future well for one it’s not really well optimized for the step number two the DC fast charging infrastructure is not really ready for
350 Kow and pull through stations everywhere you go but lastly you notice it’s very hard to find these Silverado EVs and even if you’re lucky enough to find a Hummer EV at a dealer lot you’re probably not going to be able to afford it so that’s not going to make a
Noticeable impact on the long distance Towing market for pickup trucks because people need to actually be able to afford these options and everything we’re seeing in the EV industry that we’re tackling first you know the aerodynamic efficient smaller battery pack market like the model 3s and y’s
That are the best sellers in the EV industry everything we’re talking about today is basically the opposite of that we need something that honestly is not very efficient because it has to tow a big trailer everywhere it’s not going to be very aerodynamic and it’s probably going to be expensive because it
Requires such a large battery battery pack but none of these things are inherently impossible they’re just not the most cost effective way for a legacy automaker and definitely not a startup to begin their production with you know the profitability is what they’re going to focus on first because they don’t
Want their companies to die so of course all of the atttention is going towards what is most profitable for us to build first which is a lot of SUVs Crossovers and sedans and now we’re seeing slowly companies getting to the pickup truck space But even including Tesla I’m
Fairly confident in saying that no electric truck truck being manufactured right now is profitable even the Hummer I’m skeptical on whether or not they’re actually turning a profit on that thing because of all the bells and whistles it has Silverado EV is definitely not profitable otherwise they’d actually be
Delivering them to Consumers and they’d probably be building them at higher scale but the vehicles that are profitable the model y’s and the model 3s of the world those are being ramped up in production more and more because they’re so efficient and they don’t require such massive big battery packs
And they don’t require such picky DC fast charging like oh does this have a pull through stall or not so my overall thesis is that the last gas vehicles on the road are probably going to be the ones used for longdistance towing and while I’m not a big fan of plug-in
Hybrids I kind of have to admit that the best argument in today’s world for getting a plug-in hybrid is kind of that Ram Charger concept it’s a pickup truck with a gas generator and 100 Kow battery pack so for around town if you’re just
Driving 50 to 60 mes a day you can never turn on the gas generator and just rely on the battery but then when you do a long-distance road trip and you need that you know 700 mile range because you know with a trailer that’s going to turn
Into 300 mile range that’s when you turn on the gas generator and rely on gas stations which are everywhere most of them are pull through optimized and great for trailers so you have that gas back up when you need it but then when you’re not doing the long-distance
Towing you just use the battery pack again I really don’t like relying on gas infrastructure if it can at all be avoided but for those markets out there that do care about the longdistance towing yeah I got to admit that approach does seem pretty tempting but but I do
Think longterm the DC fast Chargers will get better and there will be more software features to let you know which stations are pull through so you don’t have to unhook your trailer every time you charge cuz that gets annoying really fast and also we’re going to need 500
Plus mile range pickup trucks which there’s no way around it even if you make them super aerodynamic you’re going to need 200 Kow battery packs because once you slap a trailer on the back all of your aerodynamics and weight distribution gets thrown out the window and we’re not going to get battery packs
In vehicles like that that are affordable and able to scale up in production for quite some time we’re going to need much much higher volume battery manufacturing and improvements and energy density before that happens however I do believe it will happen give the industry about a decade and I do
Think we’ll start to see some coste effective super fast charging electric pickup trucks with 250 Kow battery packs inside and I really really hope I’m not wrong on that but do you disagree feel free to let me know your thoughts down in the comments below and thank you to everybody supporting this channel
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