EV Towing

Ian F (Forum Supporter) said:

not having to think about whether the daily job route passes a fueling station. 

They would need EV mowers and weed eaters to realize that one. Looks like the guys that are local to me are there every other day or so.

I think that ford's drop-in range-extender is the ticket here.

If you have a full-EV truck that has 200 miles of range and 500 horsepower, you can conquer any hill towing. You can take off from stop lights and get up to speed just fine. What you can't do is cruise down the highway at 65mph for five hours straight.

Figure that the aero drag, the rolling resistance, etc for a truck and trailer is about 100 horsepower at 65mph. You can get an awfully compact, reliable, economical motor that puts out 100hp and stuff it in that truck-bed-tool-box. Figure a little turbocharged atkinson cycle 3 cylinder and 35 gallons of fuel will fit just fine in a truck box. That's what gives you all the range you like, re-charges your EV batteries slowly, and now your truck works an awful lot like a diesel-electric locomotive. Small and efficient gas motor running at a single speed all the time feeding your batteries, and those batteries feed your monster drive-motors.

The real win comes in when you realize that you just rent the truck-box at uhaul. You still get to tow around town in your truck with zero work. Going to the lumber yard or launching the boat, you're already all set. But if you decide that you need to launch the boat three states away, you hitch up, swing by a u-haul or ford dealer on your way out of town and you rent a range extender for a couple days. Still YOUR truck, still YOUR trailer, you're just renting a small generator and a gas tank.

Seems like the people that could use the "in bed" range extender would be better served with a PHEV variant. You'd still get regen braking and enough EV range to do most local driving in electric mode and then switch to the ICE for long distance stuff with no range anxiety.

Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) said:

Ian F (Forum Supporter) said:

not having to think about whether the daily job route passes a fueling station. 

They would need EV mowers and weed eaters to realize that one. Looks like the guys that are local to me are there every other day or so.

Apparently you didn't read the entire post...

Going back to the solar as a data point, this guy adds about 10 miles of range per week with his rooftop setup:

alfadriver said:

Kind of an open question- will campgrounds allow the trucks to recharge?  The biggest power supply for campgrounds is 50A at 120V, so you would get the leftovers that isn't being used for your trailer.  You'd need a smarter distribution, but without any other loads, that would be 600W.  Not sure how long it would take to fully charge an F150 at 600W.

You dropped a factor of ten -- 50 * 120 is 6000 watts.  Also, I believe the 50A RV plugs are 240V, so that's another factor of 2 -- 12kw.

If that F150 has the 150 kwh battery that people are speculating about (Ford hasn't released specs yet), then minimum time to go from zero to full would be 150/12 or 12.5 hours.  Obviously you don't get full speed charging the whole time (it'll be lower as it reaches max) and it's unlikely you'll start out with a completely empty battery, but 50A @ 240V is a decent amount of charging capacity.

I suspect, though, that campground fees are not designed with the expectation that a camper is going to use 150 kwh of power.  If it's a flat fee then that's probably going to have to go up for them to allow EV charging using it.

In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :

oops.  Still, hooked up to the 50A service and using nothing else, it would be a long charge to get full.  And the 50A service isn't as common as the 30A.

Chris_V said:

Going back to the solar as a data point, this guy adds about 10 miles of range per week with his rooftop setup:

 

10 miles isn't enough for me to deal with the ugliness, and "after-thoughtness" of all of those panels.

That said, I could see a lot of people saying that it is only 10 miles, what the hell is the point? Well, that is my roundtrip to daycare. That is significant, that it takes care of about 5-15% of my driving in a week. 

mtn said:

That said, I could see a lot of people saying that it is only 10 miles, what the hell is the point? Well, that is my roundtrip to daycare. That is significant, that it takes care of about 5-15% of my driving in a week. 

I wonder if he accounted for the reduction in range by adding weight and aero drag from the panels?  10 miles is low enough that it could easily be overwhelmed by those reductions in efficiency.

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

Someone mentioned aero way up thread.  This is huge once moving and something that would be so easy to improve on with modern trucks.  Can we please get away from this stupid trend of needing a berkeleying ladder to reach the bed of trucks.  Look at the bed height on an 80's/90's truck compared to today.  My daughter was moving recently and borrowed an F150 to move some large furniture.  The job would have been about a billion times easier if the truck bed would have been 8-12" closer to the ground.  Imagine the aero improvement of cutting a foot of (completely useless except for dick swinging) height of the whole rig.

I suspect the height has something to do with fuel mileage. Its counter intuitive.  But Myth  Busters proved that not having a cover over the bed or a lowered tailgate improved fuel mileage.  Not once but twice.  
     I suspect the height reduces the drag and having the back of the truck raised in relation to the front is more of the air bubble theory. 
  As for me?  I'd like my tailgate much lower, I'd gladly give up the one or two miles per gallon that represents. 

In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :

I bet you're right.  Everyone here knows that aero drag goes up as a square compared to speed so it doesn't take much once you're over 30-40mph to make a difference.

Recent real world example.  I went to pick up a Tesla Model S from the dealer in Chicago and brought it back to Michigan (off topic, outstanding appliance, very substandard car).  We planned out supercharger stop for 30-35 mins while grabbing food at Panera.   Up until the stop I'd been driving the Tesla and my wife was following in my Volvo.  After the charge I calculated we'd get home with 45-50 miles range left to get to work in the morning.  She jumps in and heads off down the road at 85mph.  I had to call her after 10 mins and tell her to slow the hell down.  She was drinking electrons at an alarming rate according the the Tesla app on my phone and I was watching the range plummet.  She did, but even so after those 10 mins at 85, we got home with 26 miles of range, not the 45-50 I had planned.  That was fine until a cold night made 26 miles range at 9:00pm into 12 miles range at 7:00am the next morning for a 13.5 mile commute.  I did make it to work with HVAC off, driving slowly aiming not to accelerate or brake unnecessarily, but it still went to 0 miles range 1.5 miles from work but kept running.

the_machina said:

I think that ford's drop-in range-extender is the ticket here.

If you have a full-EV truck that has 200 miles of range and 500 horsepower, you can conquer any hill towing. You can take off from stop lights and get up to speed just fine. What you can't do is cruise down the highway at 65mph for five hours straight.

Figure that the aero drag, the rolling resistance, etc for a truck and trailer is about 100 horsepower at 65mph. You can get an awfully compact, reliable, economical motor that puts out 100hp and stuff it in that truck-bed-tool-box. Figure a little turbocharged atkinson cycle 3 cylinder and 35 gallons of fuel will fit just fine in a truck box. That's what gives you all the range you like, re-charges your EV batteries slowly, and now your truck works an awful lot like a diesel-electric locomotive. Small and efficient gas motor running at a single speed all the time feeding your batteries, and those batteries feed your monster drive-motors.

The real win comes in when you realize that you just rent the truck-box at uhaul. You still get to tow around town in your truck with zero work. Going to the lumber yard or launching the boat, you're already all set. But if you decide that you need to launch the boat three states away, you hitch up, swing by a u-haul or ford dealer on your way out of town and you rent a range extender for a couple days. Still YOUR truck, still YOUR trailer, you're just renting a small generator and a gas tank.

One flaw with that is that this use case means the engine will be running flat out.  Atkinson engines are efficient at low power, not WOT, so in this instance a small Wankel makes more sense (and Mazda and Audi are developing this - NSU is still part of Audi).

Next problem is cooling.  100hp of constant load requires cooling that looks remarkably like what is up front in a Super Duty.

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Serious Q.  Wankles are notoriously thirsty and unreliable, except it seems in racing terms where they work well (that damn awful noise excepted).  What is it makes them so suited to WOT running compared to piston engines for WOT constant speed running?

Side note on spinning doritos of death as a previous owner.  Can we stop this BS that a 12A or 13b are 1.2L or 1.3L.  If you count the chambers and revolutions it can be argues that a 13b is at least 2.6L equiv and more likely a 3.9L.

Not sure if I already posted this, but we built electric panel vans for London back in 95. They used 2 tons of lead acid batteries mounted on each side below the load bed.  The plan was that the range was carefully worked out and the Vans could come in for a pit stop and battery change in seconds as long as you had a forklift to load the batteries. this worked well as the batteries were all owned by one operator. Having battery changes for private use would be a nightmare as the ones you swap in might not have as much life as the ones you just offloaded

Rigante said:

Not sure if I already posted this, but we built electric panel vans for London back in 95. They used 2 tons of lead acid batteries mounted on each side below the load bed.  The plan was that the range was carefully worked out and the Vans could come in for a pit stop and battery change in seconds as long as you had a forklift to load the batteries. this worked well as the batteries were all owned by one operator. Having battery changes for private use would be a nightmare as the ones you swap in might not have as much life as the ones you just offloaded

New York City at the turn of the last century had more electric than internal combustion engine 'cars' on the road working on this very premise.  Drive in, swap battery packs and drive off.  Many taxis.  Internal combustion became so much more efficient so quickly it really killed this model with the technology at the time.  

Edit speeelllliiinnngggg

Mount a 10,000Watt gas/desil generator to the trailer that you plug into the truck?  Add software that talks to the truck's computers that control it.  In effect making it a hybrid when needed.  Easily retrofitted to most trailers and only needed for really long-distance use.

As was mentioned before, this is right now probably the biggest obstacle to EV truck towing:

Picture this as a pickup truck with a 30ft travel trailer and imagine what it would be like trying to reach the charging station without blocking the lane or 10 other chargers...

In reply to Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) :

Taiwan  has tons of small motorcycles / scooters that have a pull out battery pack , 

when you are low on power you can pull into a battery shop and have them exchanged in minutes,

This is probably never going to work here , not enough people riding scooters , but it gives you another option to think about.....

dean1484 said:

Mount a 10,000Watt gas/desil generator to the trailer that you plug into the truck?  Add software that talks to the truck's computers that control it.  In effect making it a hybrid when needed.  Easily retrofitted to most trailers and only needed for really long-distance use.

Retrofitting is a lot harder than it sounds.  A 10kw generator is big by generator standards (expensive, large, heavy), but small by car engine standards (it's only 13 hp).  Trailers that have generator boxes (enclosed race car trailers, travel trailers) often don't have ones big enough for 10kw.  They're also often designed so that you open a door and slide the generator out to run it, running the generator inside the box with the door closed will likely overheat it and may well fill the trailer with carbon monoxide.  Fuel tank size is also a consideration.

The other common recreational use of trailers is for boats, and that means you need to dunk the trailer in the water at the boat ramp.  I doubt that's going to do good things to your generator.

As for battery swapping, it's not really practical for cars.  Aside from the "is the new pack the same value as the one you dropped off" issue, we're talking about very high current and voltages.  That's not a connection you want to trust to spring-loaded contacts the way you can with a couple of AAs in a remote, you want those cables securely attached.  The packs are very heavy and need to be securely bolted to the car (falling out onto the freeway would be really dangerous)  Many EVs also have liquid cooled batteries, so now you need to add dry-break connectors for that too -- hope that whatever coolant is in the new battery is compatible with what's in your car!  All in all it's just a giant logistical PITA.

You also lose a lot of weight and space efficiency when comparing a standard form factor, removable battery pack to one that's been custom-tailored to fit into all the nooks and crannies of a particular application.  This is why laptops mostly don't have swappable batteries any more -- you can get about twice as much battery capacity into a laptop by going custom, plus you no longer need all the casing/clearance/etc around the removable component.

So I'm curious how far do most people tow? GRMers are a unique crowd and probably fall into the 1-2% of people who need more range. 

In my case all but one event is within 70 miles of my house, granted that one event is 327 miles away. I could shift my annual pilgrimage to a track that's 250 miles away and that would solve the issue.

In reply to Tom1200 :

I do two different types of towing. A fair amount of short local stuff with building materials and landscaping for our house and the rentals. Then we have a camper which return to take to Florida once a year, out west once a year, and up north in Michigan another 3 to 6 times per year. Total annual towing mileage easily tops 5000 miles in our family.

GRM cannot discuss trucks without getting into slammed minitruck territory :) I can tell you that the tall hood on my diesel 2500 is full of mechanical stuff. The 1500 appears to be styled so as not to appear weenie by comparison. So maybe we blame the tall hoods of half-tons on the arms race for the 3/4 ton.

As for charging at campgrounds - that's already being done by EV people. It's a fairly logical extra income source for the campgrounds, it would not surprise me to see EV charging stations popping up at KOAs across the country.

The primary reason I own my truck is towing. I went back through the logs about a year ago and figured that 80% of its mileage was with a trailer, and every one of those trips is a multi-day cross country (or international) trip. The average lifetime speed for engine run time is something like 45 mph. My M5 shows an average closer to 33, and I suspect that's a moving average and not an engine running average. This is not a typical use case at all.

mtn said:

Chris_V said:

Going back to the solar as a data point, this guy adds about 10 miles of range per week with his rooftop setup:

 

10 miles isn't enough for me to deal with the ugliness, and "after-thoughtness" of all of those panels.

That said, I could see a lot of people saying that it is only 10 miles, what the hell is the point? Well, that is my roundtrip to daycare. That is significant, that it takes care of about 5-15% of my driving in a week. 

I think some Hyundai/Kia and certain Toyota hybrids have optional integrated solar panel roofs. I don't think either application claims any range gain, but they can use the solar panels to run the HVAC while the car is parked without running the battery down. So you can theoretically get into a more comfortable vehicle, and use less of the energy sapping HVAC. Kind of similar to how some EVs have a "remote start" sort of function that allows them to warm/cool the interior while they're plugged in so they're ready when you are and you avoid a range reduction getting the car to your desired temp.

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :

I bet you're right.  Everyone here knows that aero drag goes up as a square compared to speed so it doesn't take much once you're over 30-40mph to make a difference.

Recent real world example.  I went to pick up a Tesla Model S from the dealer in Chicago and brought it back to Michigan (off topic, outstanding appliance, very substandard car).  We planned out supercharger stop for 30-35 mins while grabbing food at Panera.   Up until the stop I'd been driving the Tesla and my wife was following in my Volvo.  After the charge I calculated we'd get home with 45-50 miles range left to get to work in the morning.  She jumps in and heads off down the road at 85mph.  I had to call her after 10 mins and tell her to slow the hell down.  She was drinking electrons at an alarming rate according the the Tesla app on my phone and I was watching the range plummet.  She did, but even so after those 10 mins at 85, we got home with 26 miles of range, not the 45-50 I had planned.  That was fine until a cold night made 26 miles range at 9:00pm into 12 miles range at 7:00am the next morning for a 13.5 mile commute.  I did make it to work with HVAC off, driving slowly aiming not to accelerate or brake unnecessarily, but it still went to 0 miles range 1.5 miles from work but kept running.

Of course, a cold night will also decrease range for a gas car as it works to get up to temp. My wife used to do this all the time with her Grand Cherokee - park it with 10 miles range showing and on startup it would drop 5-6 miles immediately.

 A more normal use case would have been for the Tesla to have been plugged in overnight so it would have been fully charged and preheated in the morning. I know, there are a bunch of reasons why this didn't happen and you got in this situation, but the mode of propulsion is basically irrelevant to the story as this exact thing could have happened with an ICE.