So both Rivian and Tesla have or say they are going to have range extenders for their trucks, but in both cases even if they are removable and rentable they are huge as trucks are huge. In teslas case it seems to be a permanent change though.
What about commuter cars though?
One thing we really need is cheaper in city commuters and those don’t need a long range. That brings costs down and gets more people into EVs, but those will get relegated to 2nd cars in many cases.
If those commuter cars could go to a shop and get an extender added in the trunk though that would make them much more capable of longer trips as well while keeping costs down.
If the battery rental is similar or less to renting a car for the same period then people would opt to use their own car for the longer trip and all the personal comforts that provides.
The batteries would be much smaller as well for a smaller vehicle.
I’m not so sure they’d be as huge as you might think though.
It’s huge on the trucks because the trucks are huge. The CT extender is almost as big as a standard range vehicles battery.
The extenders size would be proportional to the size of the vehicle and i think battery size doesn’t grow linearly so smaller could be substantially smaller, but i might be wrong on that part.
Tesla ditched swapping batteries as a drive up service ages ago and hasn’t talked about doing that since. This would be different as it’d be a service appointment, not a park it for 5 min and swap it out.
Both Rivian and Tesla supposedly solved the cooling problem on their trucks,so it’s really just how much does that increase the size, and would the option to even do it make it prohibitively expensive on an inexpensive car.