10 December

Thanks to Trevor for the link. ‘Range’ is a total furphy when talking about cars. It can be as little or as large as engineers design it to be. EVs were the first proper cars, you can see Thomas Edison standing next to his early Bailey Electric here. Even in those earliest days of batteries, it had a range of 160km. That’s more than 100 years ago, when there were barely that many km of road available to drive on. If the world hadn’t been sidetracked by rubbish combustion engines, when Rockefeller flooded the world with cheap oil at about the same time, imagine where we’d be with EVs today. Today’s ICE range of 600-1000km isn’t a feature of ICE technology. It’s an entirely arbitrary figure, which evolved to prevent the need to build lots of expensive service stations. You could engineer an ICE or EV to have a range of 10km, or 10,000km. It just depends on the context. Not on the technology itself.