We’ve written about electric cars on numerous occasions here and it’s great that consumers are starting to be more accepting of such vehicles. The problem of course is the limited range an electric vehicle has to offer at the moment. If you’re purchasing it as a city car only, then it’s totally fine but the average household can’t afford to have an electric car just for driving around town.
To get an idea of why people have range anxiety, here are the approximate ranges on some of the electric cars on the market today. These numbers will be different for each owner since you have to factor in driving habits, traffic, and even the outside temperature.
Examples of Approximate EV Range
Chevy Spark EV – 82 Miles
Volkswagen e-Golf – 83 Miles
Ford Focus Electric – 76 Miles
Kia Soul Electric – 90 Miles
Nissan Leaf – 84 Miles
Fiat 500E – 87 Miles
Mitsubishi i-Miev – 66 Miles
The Tesla Model S doesn’t count as the average consumer cannot afford such a vehicle but its range of 208 to 253 miles is more ideal.
The folks over at KSPG Automotive are here to put an end to range anxiety for electric vehicle owners. Their solution is to use a tiny petrol motor to keep the batteries charged allowing for a longer range. The KSPG Range Extender is a small two-cylinder petrol motor which fits in the trunk where the spare tire should be.
Plug-in Hybrids also use a small gasoline engine and with this system, you’re sort of turning your EV into a PHEV. Surprisingly, having the two-cylinder motor in the back of the vehicle is actually quiet and vibration-free with the passengers hardly noticing the motor running. Once the batteries in the vehicle start to run low, the Range Extender motor kicks in and supplies the batteries with power.
If car companies were to adapt to a system like this, they would not have to worry as much when it comes to battery size thus reducing costs and weight. The biggest advantage would be the travel range and skipping the lengthy recharging stops.
Besides a radiator and fuel tank, all the components of the Range Extender are mounted on a ready-to-install support frame. The vehicle they have been testing the Range Extender on is the Fiat 500E which has a range of 87 Miles (140 km) in its factory form. But with the KSPG Range Extender, the range can be extended by “several hundred kilometers” according to the company. I would love to see some third-party tests of this system to find out the exact details.
While we wait for battery technology to improve, this seems to be an ideal bridging technology which can help bring more acceptance of electric vehicles to a wider audience. KSPG Automotive needs to market this to the car manufacturers (which I’m sure they have) or they have to offer an easy-to-install kit as an after market modification for the limited number of electric vehicles on the market at the moment.
Visit KSPG Automotive for more information about the Range Extender as well as some of their other technologies
Would a rotary like the wankel or Liquid Piston engine be a better fit for this space?
Defeats the purpose of having an electric car.
Exactly.
I’m considering designing a battery pack that replaces the useless back seat.
It would consist of a battery pack, battery charger wired to the charging plug and an inverter that would charge the car’s existing pack whenever you turned the car off.
My understanding is that these cars won’t charge while running for obvious reasons. I wonder how KSPG Automotive is getting around that.
I believe auto manufacturers are under the gun to provide a certain number of vehicles that don’t rely on any petroleum at all. A fossil fueled auxiliary power unit (APU) installed by the manufacturer to charge batteries would most certainly cancel out those efforts to appeal to CARB. A loophole may be that the dealer could offer the APU at the time of sale when they try to pitch all of the extras to roll into financing.
As for it defeating the purpose of having an electric car, it would certainly beat having a 2 ton tow truck pick you up on the side of the freeway because you couldn’t make it to a charging port due to the insane amount of traffic clogging up the road.
I would certainly have one of these for extra piece of mind.
Not me.
This is simply great!! How much does it cost and where can I get one?
We use our 2013 Fiat 500e daily as our main vehicle in town. We would really appreciate the opportunity to use a range extender in the event that we went just a bit too far in our daily travels. It would ease our worries about getting up our 1500 ft. elevation hill (it takes about 10% battery to climb it) to get home. Hurry up KSPG, we are ready to buy!
I contacted the company. They only made a few prototypes, would not consider selling me one, and say if it ever comes to market, it would be 2020 and not necessarily for the Fiat, it was just what they chose for the prototype. Although, I think it is one of the best in this size range. I purchased mine from California for about $9k with 20k miles under warranty. It is a great electric, but just another 30 miles would make the difference. I have been searching for a battery extender (extra battery like the Leaf–so far no luck.
Crap……….they dropped it. It will not be available.
Negative efficiency. Very “green”..