Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Electric car and the generator…why?

Why can an electric car not be equipped with an alternator/generator to provide electricity just as a gasoline vehicle? Have pondered this question for a while now and never have heard it even discussed. Just seems that powers to be want to sell us electricity when it is generated by the vehicle….car, lawn mower, etc…. anything that is “running” and has a power source to generate electricity will run for years. A automobile battery last for years and is recharged as vehicle is running….what are we missing here?

Great idea, if they dropped a little V6 powered generator in a electric car it'd probably charge pretty quick.

There's plenty of room in that frunk space they have.

Any transfer of energy is a loss. That's the law.

Been done on a few EV’s already, including the BMW I3. BMW calls it a “range extender”. The I3 is all electric, and could be optioned with a small gas engine to charge the betteries while driving.

You would still have room for a case of beer and a shotgun.

What you describe is called a hybrid. Hundreds of thousands of them on the road already. A gas engine, a generator, a battery, and electric motors. There are different ways to do it, but those are the main components.

Our Toyota Highlander Hybrid is a mid-size SUV that goes 300+ miles on eight gallons. NObody does hybrids as well as Toyota.

Duh

The opportunity for the ability to suck $$$s out of the shutdown of the fossil fuel industry and the start-up of the 'Alternative' Energy Industry..........

And the beauty is they get to suck out of BOTH industries for a long while since todays EVs are still powered by the same fossil fuels...... and until something better comes along, will be so for quite a while...

To the first point you make Internal Combustion/Electric Power has been around for well over a Century.........boats, surface and submersible, trains, factories............. batteries for submersibles....

You'd think coasting, and braking would charge the battery.

They do to some extent but it's not nearly enough to completely charge the batteries. They need some form of external power to completely recharge. Regenerative braking is just a booster.

When was the last time you coasted for hours?

Wow, a perpetual motion machine, and they said it couldn’t be done!

Way back, I was told a traveling salesman would take his time getting up to speed, and coast to the slower speeds. Easy, on fuel, and brakes.

I might be misinterpreting your question, but are you asking why there isn't an alternator included which can run off the lithium battery? Sorta like a perpetual motion type deal where the battery could turn another shaft other than the axles which would have an alternator attached to it and constantly continue charging battery by using same battery's power.

I am not an electrical engineer by any means but have fixed enough vehicles in my time to think that the power it takes to turn this type of ac alternator may cancel out any benefit in charge to the same battery. I may be wrong in this assumption but would figure this is the reason you don't see this type of setup on any electric vehicles as of now. Perhaps this may change with future innovations.

Good thought though.

-Ken

IIRC, there is/was a world wide contest for a perpetual motion machine. Prize is 100K or maybe 1M. Anyway, some fellow developed an generator that would produce more power than was needed to run the electric motor, that turned the generator. Hooked a light to it and a meter to show it worked, but it needed a battery to run the electric motor. He didn't get the money, because even tho the battery was being constantly charged, it would eventually fail, thus stopping the movement of the mechanism.

Thermodynamics.

Cold fusion is next, get ready for free energy..

More like the batteries in a hybrid that are recharged by braking aren't big enough to power the drive train in an EV by themselves and aren't meant to power the drive train without an engine to do most of the work.

Beanie propeller hat type thingy on the roof of the car, wind generated charger... bingo...

Kent

IF the car moves, unless you have pushed it, the engine has done ALL the work..... with energy provided from an external source!