Renault presents concept EV with 40 kWh battery and hydrogen cell for more range – Image and sound – News

The battery of the Renault Scénic Vision is small for an EV

How did this position come about? Who thinks 40 kWh is small and why is it found?

I think it’s a relatively unhealthy way of looking at cars and transportation, and it’s a holdover from the way of thinking for fossil fuel cars. After all, for those vehicles you have to make an effort to get fuel – you have to look for a special point, then go there and then interrupt your ride to buy the fuel.

Charging an electric car usually takes 0 time: your car charges while you are not working on it, such as at home, visiting family, at work or at the supermarket. You arrive at your destination, plug in your car and do what you want to do there. When you need the car again, it is always full of fuel, so it can immediately travel the distance that its fuel capacity allows.

In practice, a 40 kWh battery can easily reach 250 km with efficient and modern cars. I live in Zwolle, so I can draw a circle around Zwolle with a radius of 250 kilometers. With that I can easily get to everywhere I would use the car. And if I want to go somewhere from work or family, the car is of course also charged there, so I can drive 250 kilometers from there without having to spend time charging.

Suppose I want to go on vacation once or twice a year. Then I might want to go by car, because I don’t want to go to the trouble of going by train, or because I want to take a tent and a lot of luggage with me. Fine, even if I want to go more than 250 kilometers. Then of course I just use the (rightly) expensive fast charger, take a 30 minute break every 2 and a half hours, something that is actually very healthy and safe. Can I go to Berlin in half a day or to the south of France in a long day.

Sounds like a very useful, cool and practical means of transport in my head. Now, do we want a bigger battery, say 80 kWh? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons:

Advantages:

• – Two vacations a year I spend a few hours less on the outward and return journey. In other words, I have six hours less a year to entertain myself in a roadside restaurant with a nice coffee and the newspaper. Fine, but is that really an advantage?

Cons:

• – Twice as much raw material has to be used for the production of my vehicle’s battery – so I appropriate myself much more scarce resources, which may also have been obtained through slavery and forced labour. As a result, there is also less raw material for other batteries that the world needs.
• – Perhaps twice as much CO2 is emitted for the production of my vehicle. So this car might only be better than a fuel car after 100,000 miles, rather than say after 50,000 miles if I had a smaller battery.
• – I may pay 10,000 to 20,000 euros more for the car to purchase, and the depreciation also increases.
• – The car is heavier and therefore perhaps more dangerous as a vehicle, the roads wear faster and use more energy to propel itself. More health care costs, infrastructure maintenance costs and the whole car will probably have to become more expensive to use stronger and more robust parts.

Okay, so to save myself six hours less a year on a fast charger, I might have to pay an extra 20,000 euros, use more energy, cost society more, produce significantly more climate pollution and take raw materials for myself that others can also use?

Sounds pretty irrational.

40 kWh is a very good battery capacity for the majority of Dutch people. Sure, you may have to drive far every day for work, and you may not have a home loading facility, and you may want a van that can carry more goods or people. Fine, find a solution for that, but remember that for perhaps 90% of Dutch households it is actually completely unwise economically, expensive, climate unfriendly and ethically wrong to have batteries of more than 40 kWh in your car. If you’re aware of that, maybe it wouldn’t even be aso to get another car with a big battery pack?

There are always exceptions, but if we really want to do something about climate change with electric personal transport, want to be able to pay for it and find just as much convenience, then we should certainly not see 40 kWh batteries as “small”.

Thanks for reading my essay

[Reactie gewijzigd door Helium-3 op 19 mei 2022 14:16]

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