5 Energy Saving Tips That Increase The Range Of Electric Cars

Post date: 23-Apr-2020 12:18:35

Ten years ago when what I'm going to call the first modern electric vehicles were hitting the roads of the world electric vehicles generally managed somewhere between 70 and 100 miles of range per charge these days the standard or perhaps that should be acceptable range that people look for in an electric car is far higher than that with most new cars shooting for between 150 and 200 miles as a bare minimum range and most going way above that how far your car can travel per charge is of course dependent on many different things from how large the cars battery pack is through to the aerodynamics and the efficiency of the vehicle itself and the drive train and power electronics and usually when I can't company announces a revision to a cars range or capabilities it's because that company has upgraded the car's battery pack to a newer higher energy dense one.

I say usually because in the last few weeks we've covered several companies that have seemingly managed to pull off the impossible to get their electric cars to go further per charge without any physical changes to the cars battery pack and to drive trains we've even seen companies like Tesla Jaguar and Audi magically unlock extra range via software updates and so we've had some of you reach out and ask us how that's possible after all you can't add extra storage capacity to an existing battery pack so what's going on I'm not going to go into the specifics for each automaker here.

but what I can share are some of the ways that such magical range expansions are possible and they all boil down to a couple of key things revised battery management software revised power train control software and some software re-calibration let's start with the batteries and the dirty little secret that you probably don't know ful isn't full and empty isn't empty lithium-ion cells don't like being completely full or completely empty and while it is possible to technically charge a lithium-ion cell to its fully charged voltage and then fully discharge it.

doing so can prematurely age the cell I'm not going to go into the electrochemical reasons for that here but it's all to do with the way in which the cells operate at the molecular level and the heat that can cause irreparable change to their structure when they're overcharged or fully discharged and to keep your car's battery cells operating for extended periods of time with as fewer problems as possible your car doesn't actually charge its battery to its maximum state of charge nor does it allow you to discharge it below a certain set level this means that when your car says it's 100% full it's probably technically between 80 and 90 percent full and when it says it's fully empty they could have anywhere from 10 to 20 percent cell level charge sitting there that you can't see or use.

exactly how much you can't use depends on the automaker and their approach to battery management some automakers are on the side of caution and hide a lot of the physical capacity of the car's battery pack some automakers let you use more some even switch how much you can use depending on which charging and driving mode you happen to be in automakers often start with more conservative battery management and then after they've got plenty of data from their customers cars decide to unlock more capacity for use by their customers.

the reason they do this is because unlike some battery chemistry which have a very obvious and continual drop-off of voltage as the battery discharges lithium-ion battery cells have a much more consistent cell voltage throughout the discharge process until the very last few percent when the cell voltage drops off the metaphorical cliff by which point you may have already damaged your battery cell it's harder to detect those tiny drops in voltages so automakers play it safe when they have more data to predict how a battery will behave they're more confident in how those cells will discharge and therefore they give you more access to more capacity.

several automakers including Tesla and Audi have done just that essentially moving the goal posts as to what the car considers full and what the car considers empty sin a software tweak rather than a physical tweak the change can be pushed in a software update next let's look at power train software like battery management software and honestly pretty much everything else in a modern electric car it is all down to the code back at the turn of the 20th century electric cars used electromechanical controls to govern how much power went to their direct current motors but today it's all done using digital three-phase controllers that control how much power is sent to the motor by pulsing power on and off at the correct frequency.

to get the electric motor spinning just right how much power is sent depends on where your foot is on the throttle again I'm not going to go into the electronics of that in this video but because the controller is running software that tells it how to interpret the input that it gets from the throttle and turn it into power delivery at the wheels it's possible to tweak how the motor responds not only to each position of the pedal but also the speed at which the change in those positions occur as in acceleration versus cruising versus slowing down by changing how the car's motor controller software responds automakers can make their cars more or less efficient which is where software updates can come in.

again it's possible to tweak how the motor controller works changing how it provides power under acceleration or how it recovers energy using regenerative braking and when paired with other software and running on other parts of the power electronics system you can dramatically improve how much energy your car uses and therefore how efficient it can be in the case of January how it's helped increase the range of the eye pace I'm honestly not sure if it unlocked extra battery capacity as well because that's not clear from press material but it has tweaked how its power controller works including its throttle response.

in order to operate more efficiently without dramatically impacting driving dynamics it's also increased the maximum regenerative braking the car can engage which of course increases the amount of energy that can be recuperated from movement and stored back in the battery pack for later use and of course this makes the ipace a more energy-efficient car overall other any other updates that can magically give your car more range well there are a few I guess technically you could tweak the energy use of other in-car systems including the heating just to increase the range but one what I haven't really talked about yet and I probably should is battery warming.

if you tweak the battery pack heating of a car you can make the battery pack a little more comfortable and thus not get pushed quite as hard under acceleration or regenerative braking and while that physically doesn't change how much energy you can store in the battery pack it can make it easier to get energy out and put energy back into the battery pack it's one reason might as well and Porsche preheat their car battery packs prior to high current.

rapid charging because it makes that charging more efficient so that's it while your car's battery pack will inevitably lose some capacity as it ages hopefully it's a very slow rate it's possible to magically add more range by tweaking some of the software that your car runs and that's how cars like the Jaguar I pace how de Tron and pretty much the entire Tesla family can suddenly wake up one day with more range than they had the day before.