It’s not just range anxiety. You need to have extra capacity for cold weather and degradation over time.
If I have a car with a 300 mile range, and it’s 0 degrees outside, now I’ve lost a solid chunk of range, I’m down to the low 200’s
Then, if the car is 15 years old, I’ve lost another 10-20% of battery capacity.
But I also need to stay below 80% charge or I’ll double my charge time, so really I only want to operate between 5-80% on a road trip.
Now I have to charge every two hours of driving or maybe even less.
Compound that more if I need to tow something, put a kayak on the roof, put a bike on the back, etc.
So if I’m starting from an EV that has a more reasonably sized battery pack delivering 150 miles of range, well, maybe I can tolerate that but not in the winter 10-15 years from now.
Of course this discussion isn’t extremely relevant to school buses.
It’s not just range anxiety. You need to have extra capacity for cold weather and degradation over time.
If I have a car with a 300 mile range, and it’s 0 degrees outside, now I’ve lost a solid chunk of range, I’m down to the low 200’s
Then, if the car is 15 years old, I’ve lost another 10-20% of battery capacity.
But I also need to stay below 80% charge or I’ll double my charge time, so really I only want to operate between 5-80% on a road trip.
Now I have to charge every two hours of driving or maybe even less.
Compound that more if I need to tow something, put a kayak on the roof, put a bike on the back, etc.
So if I’m starting from an EV that has a more reasonably sized battery pack delivering 150 miles of range, well, maybe I can tolerate that but not in the winter 10-15 years from now.
Of course this discussion isn’t extremely relevant to school buses.