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I suppose it is one way of making driving an electric car more 'normal'. I think I'd be inclined to build my own trailer with a small diesel powered generator in it. Charge the car as normal at home, and when I needed to drive any distance, hitch up the trailer. As long as it was locked to the hitch and had a locked cover you could park up and leave it anywhere. Alternatively, design some brackets onto the rear bumper and have the generator attach that way. It would make parking in town a lot easier without having a small trailer to contend with, but would be more of a handful to get on and off the car. |
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The trailer with a fully charged pack in it sounds like a novel idea, but there is no way that it could reach widespread implementation, at least here in the US. It is bad enough that anyone out there can go out there and rent a Uhaul truck that has no experience or ability to drive a large truck.
I'd say that probably only 5% of the drivers in the US know how to drive with trailers. I foresee these things being involved in a lot of accidents as drivers don't think about their car being longer, and with the way drivers cut each other off now, when their car is 5 feet longer, they will hit the car they're cutting off. Also, backing up and parking will also be a challenge on these cars with the battery trailer... and we all know there's lots of folks that don't know how to park already. We don't need to make it more difficult. |
The Long Ranger genset trailer for EVs came out in the early '90s.
https://www.tzev.com/2001_rxt-g_.html While there isn't a solution for people that forget their vehicle is now 5ft longer, the designers did take parking a backing up into account. The trailer has computer controlled steering to help the driver there. |
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It had 265 x 16 inch tyres. They were great off road but I was getting really bad mpg. A mate of mine suggested swapping them for some more 'standard' 235 x 16 tyres. The overall height of the tyres would be smaller, which in my mind meant I'd get less mpg. I was wrong. With the rolling diameter, it meant that at 50mph or so I was running higher revs but it was closer to maximum torque. With the taller tyres I was below max torque which meant I was always having to use higher throttle openings to maintain speed. I ended up using the bigger tyres on another set of wheels for off roading. On the Seat I'm running 165 x 14s, I wouldn't want to go any smaller than that as I quite like throwing it into roundabouts. Especially the big one near me when I'm coming home on the late shift :) |
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I learned to reverse a trailer on the farm when i left school. I'd hitch up a tractor after work and go reversing between the trees in the orchard |
Car manufacturers selling in North America have to consider the car could see Canadian winters or driven through Death Valley in the summer with the AC going full blast. I'm sure such extremes easily exist in other markets.
Factory wheel selections are matched to a tire size that ends up with combinations with nearly identical diameters. The larger wheels usually get worse fuel economy because they add to the unsprung weight, usually wider, and may be more performance oriented with higher rolling resistance. |
Think of your wheels as flywheels, because in stop-and-go traffic, that's exactly what they are. Larger diameter wheels are not only heavier, they're heavier in the worst possible location: out near the rim, which exacerbates that flywheel effect. They're both harder to accelerate and to decelerate than smaller wheels are. So, larger wheels cost you the most fuel economy in city driving. What will cost you the most in steady-speed highway driving is wider tires (more rolling resistance). Unfortunately, larger wheels and wider tires often seem to go together. My 2011 VW Golf TDI 6-sped manual came with 225 tires on 17" rims. The U.S. EPA rated the car at 30 city and 42 highway. Before I took delivery, I replaced the car's wheels and tires with 205/65-15 LRRs. Over the life of the car (68,000 miles), it has averaged 44.6 mpg, and it will almost always better its EPA highway rating while driving in the city. It typically will achieve low-to-mid 50s on the highway (my best-ever tank was 56.7 mpg). I keep the tires inflated for even tread wear, not maximum fuel economy. My only driving concession to fuel economy is that, whenever it's polite to do so (no one behind me), I will coast to a stop in neutral. On a recent trip to the Colorado Rockies, we drove the car to the top of Pike's Peak (14,110 ft). When we stopped at the ticket gate at the bottom (~6,000 ft) on the way up, I zeroed out the trip computer. When we got to the top, it showed 31.9 mpg...which was the worst I have ever seen on this car, but it didn't seem too bad, all things considered. Of course, on the way back down it showed over 180 mpg...
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