If EVs have proven anything over the course of the past couple of years, it is that as viable as electric cars may be for a small sliver of the population, range anxiety is very much a real thing. While numerous ideas have proposed ways to solve range anxiety, a German company has come up with a solution that is both silly, and sensible; a battery pack confined entirely to a trailer.
Called the “ebuggy” and designed by ze Germans, the ebuggy is a new take on an old idea; namely, adding an extra battery pack to the outside of an electric vehicle. Designed as a replacement for immobile charging stations and rare battery swapping stations, the ebuggy can be positioned at any gas station to offer EV drivers some extra range.
Customers need to register for the ebuggy system, after which they’re recieve a kit that contains a tow hitch, power socket, and an in-car display. After hooking all of these up, an EV driver merely needs to pull into a gas station with the ebuggy system, hook up the battery trailer, and go!
The trailer can go up to 62 mph and offers up to four hours of driving range. Some simple math tells us that the ebuggy can offer over 200 miles of range, on top of what your car’s battery can normally provide. Once the trailer is drained, it has to be returned to an ebuggy station to be recharged. Clever, but will EV buyers go for it?
If you ask me, it’ll be a hard sell. People who are buying electric vehicles aren’t looking to take long trips with them, often choosing a secondary car for extended driving excursions. ebuggy’s inventors believe that their innovation could leader to cheaper EVs with smaller on-board batteries, but I doubt many consumers are keen on the idea of dragging a trailer along with them on any trip longer than 60 miles.
Trailer range extenders are probably best left to the DIY-crowd and concept cars. As a business model, it just doesn’t seem like a long range idea.
That said, the trailer-mounted spoiler IS pretty sweet
Source: Gas 2.0
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment