Featured VW's Transportable Quick Charging Station

VW builds and shows great prototypes and the occasional Pike's Peak racer. But they have a problem going from units of 1-5 to 100-500,000 unless it has a gas or diesel engine. Their production departments still remain opposed to mass EV production.

Bob Wilson

 

We’ll know a year from now. They are under the gun to rehabilitate the company’s image and say that In the near future they will lead in EV production. They are redoing a manufacturing plant in Zwickau to produce only the new I.D. vehicles. They are talking about big numbers for European delivery, few if any destined to come here until later. They are focusing on reducing CO2 at every stage of manufacture.

 

But the limiting factor is battery availability? And for true sales volume success, battery superiority because the 400 mile car can quell the range anxiety and the quick charge the total trip time anxiety.

 

If they cared about the US market, but VW is like Toyota, more focused on the home town and maybe China. Places are closer together in Europe than here. The i3 REx had about 90 miles of ICE range because that was the typical distance between metropolitan areas. Most of the rest of the world doesn't drive the miles Americans do.

 

battery availability doesn't just affect VW. Think how much availability there is for Toyota - for example. - to build a hundred thousand Prius plugins with 20 EV miles (plus buffer) - you may require ~800 kWh's of batteries.
But - for a hundred thousand EV's with 300 miles? You may require 7½ million kWh's ....

In other words - your inventory needs to be over 9,000 X larger. If anything makes it easily understandable why VW, or Toyota, or Chrysler, or whoever, isn't competing with Tesla type EV range, that should make it pretty obvious.
Got battery factory?
.

 

Math check.
a Prime has ~8 kwh battery. A 100,000 of them would require 800,000 kwh of batteries, or 800 MWh.
If you want to go 10x as far you'll need about 10x the battery size...or 8000 MWh

Mike

 

Math is hard ;-)

A prime has a 8.8 kwh battery and an epa estimated range of 25 miles.
A tesla model 3 medium range has a 62 kwh battery and a range of 264 miles.

That is a 10.5x range for 7x the battery. Its no mystery.

A phev can't use as much of the capacity.

It is counter intuitive though. Car companies have been telling people that cars are too weak to carry big batteries. The 600 mile roadster should be out soon.