Range Anxiety

The adoption of EV’s must overcome numerous misconceptions and prejudices for a consumer to buy one. Some fall in love with the technology, some are driven by a desire to not pollute the environment when driving around, and some like specific features. Probably the biggest “hesitation factor” that my friends, even the technical ones, have is “range anxiety.” These friends worry that traveling from one place to another, they will run out of “juice” in the battery. Somehow this worries them more than running out of gasoline. Of course, there are, today, considerably more gasoline stations than there are EV charging stations. Thus, to travel on a single charge from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, about 269 miles via I-15N through the desert, is a worry. Is this within the range of my EV? If not, then finding a charging station en route is essential. To avoid range anxiety, this needs to be done in advance (typically with a app on a cell phone, or better an ap built-in to the EV.) Even though planning in advance is not much of a problem when looking for gas stations, the many fewer charging stations on this route requires more planning.

An EV manufacturer needs to explicitly address range anxiety. A built-in app to locate reasonably near charging stations would be a good start. Accurate range-to-go estimates would also help. In fact, there are so many range anxiety facets here, an EV manufacturer would be wise to have a dedicated technical program manager to manage both the business and the technical components of this problem. Here are a few such:

Business components:

• the cost and business structure of home and commercial charging stations
• leasing property for charging stations
• geographic saturation of commercial and private charging stations; range goals; range anxiety
• partnering with commercial charging companies
• various plugs for different types of charging (US, UK, Europe, China, Tesla, VW, etc)
• revenue produced from charging stations
• who pays for charging? Algorithms? Credit card transactions.
• competitive need for fast charging (what are competitors doing?)
• strategic need for fast charging (meeting customer demands)
• rolling out new charging technology into the field
• added vehicle manufacturing cost for fast charging and different plug accommodations

Technical components:

• battery management, especially during charging; tracking charging history
• warnings for under and over charging
• accurate display of remaining range; altitude adjustments
• plug accomodations in the vehicle; adaptors
• issues around “topping off” batteries to 100% charge
• issues around “draining” batteries and charging drained batteries
• creep mode to travel with nearly drained batteries
• issues around number of charging cycles and battery lifetimes
• slow charging, e.g. overnight at home.
• optimizing regenerative braking
• use of vehicle batteries as an energy store during black-outs
• meeting range goals: battery size and weight; aerodynamic vehicle properties
• battery size versus charging time
• incremental range per unit time of charging for various types of chargers.