Silvaire wrote:
Drag = Cd x Area.
Sure, but are you looking to make a vehicle with a longer range, or are you looking to make a larger vehicle?
Ford gives the F150’s frontal dimensions as about 80" wide by 76" tall with about 9" ground clearance. 80*67" = 5360 square inches
Tesla gives the Model S dimensions as being about 76" by 56" with 6" ground clearance. 76* 50" = 3800 square inches.
Both these will be overestimates as the cabins of both vehicles taper towards the roof.
Using a Cd of 0.44 for the Ford (I can’t find a value for that specific vehicle), CdA = 0.44*5360 = 2358.4 square inches
Using a Cd of 0.24 for the Tesla, CdA = 912 square inches. The actual reported figure is equivalent to 500 square inches.
But the back of the envelope calculation is that the Ford needs a more than 2.5 x bigger battery pack to get the same range as the Tesla, assuming that drag is everything and weight has no effect on range. A Tesla 100kW battery has 8256 * 18650 cells, each with a volume of about 16.5cm^3. This gives a total of 136558 cm^3 which is about 52cm^3 or about 5 cubic feet, which is 1/6 of the luggage space and much less of the total volume of the vehicle, even if you adjust the figures slightly upwards to account for cell packing inefficiency etc. There’s a lot of scope for increasing the battery size and vehicle range without making the vehicle significantly bigger.
Ford gives the capacity of the f150 cargo box as 52.8-77 cubic feet depending on the model, with an additional 12 cubic feet inside the cab if you put the seats down. I don’t know how you would fairly compare the volume of a pickup truck with that of an enclosed vehicle, but the ratio of battery size:reported cargo capacity for any given isn’t significantly better for the pickup truck, because its aerodynamics are so poor.
It’s the cost of the battery which is constraining electric vehicle range, and you won’t fix that by making the vehicles bigger.
And to be honest the Americans do like their big trucks. So it’s a win win for them, lots of range and the ability to claim they are doing their thing to counter climate change.
The only thing missing is the sound of that V8, but you can perhaps recreate that with the stereo.😁
Trucks get <10mpg so the quantity of battery required would be phenomenal.
Yes; we did that some while back. A 40 ton truck needs about 20 tons of batteries, so not viable currently, by a very long way. Probably a factor of 10, like most things in this sphere 
the Americans do like their big trucks
Unfortunately not just Americans. Here in the UK the entry level for parking at the supermarket is one of these
and for the school run you need one of these
so your precious spoilt brats don’t get injured by another divorced mum driving one of these
Only kidding, honest
Actually it is pretty much the same all over Europe; the main varying factor is how much money you have. At the height of the Euro-blown Greek bubble the Porsche Cayenne was extremely popular. I wonder where they all went?
you can perhaps recreate that with the stereo
VW and the others are already ahead in that game, with this horrible idea. I had mine removed…
Silvaire wrote:
Think about the form factor of a large transport vehicle or train versus a car of any size. There’s a reason they build them long and skinny.
That’s because if they built them wider, they wouldn’t fit on the roads or through the tunnels. I don’t believe it’s primarily for aerodynamic reasons.
David Wilson’s book ‘bicycling science’ recounts a land-speed record attempt when somebody tried to make a very long vehicle with lots of riders in line but the CdA of a single-person vehicle. It failed due to skin friction increasing in proportion to the number of riders, making the total drag much greater than predicted.
Also, AIUI, this standards still requires individual sign-up with each charge point operator.
Not really. All id and billing information is stored once in the car. A bit like phone roaming.
@kwlf, look at the battery configuration in a Tesla, how they actually do it and the resulting range, and I think you’ll understand that volume is an issue. Even more so if you what to eliminate the major issue with the car today – which is range to drive a full waking day without being delayed or distracted. Cost is obviously not an issue for buyers, they are spending 2-5 times as much as necessary to get a car that has less utility.
@Graham, for a long range HGV you could add a third trailer to carry the batteries. It will provide much more energy than that required to haul it because rolling friction is relatively kind and who cares if the thing drives like a truck…. It is a truck. You’re dealing with a huge but still 5-7 US mpg vehicle when powered by diesel, not so much power as you might think. Road vehicle fuel consumption at speed doesn’t directly scale with weight.
@Peter, the Porsche Cayenne is possibly the least reliable car ever made so I assume they all got thrown away 
The F-150 is most years the best selling vehicle in the US because it works, in several senses, and the relative lack of gross overpopulation allows people to own larger, more useful vehicles without issue. Also cheapish if you don’t buy the electric version (which itself is $41K, also not extremely expensive). It appears the range of the electric version at 400+ miles is likewise just barely practical (or almost there anyway). Obviously much further range than most smaller runabouts, as it needs to be to sell to a market that focuses on value and utility in the big, wide real world.
PS I’m at my hangar at this moment getting a VFR transponder cert and the guy who ran over to do it has dead batteries in his golf cart…. It’s appears to be a series/parallel combination of 12V lead acid batteries with 36 V output so lacking time to remove all the interconnect cables and charge using my 12V charger he’s hoping to sneak back across the field without issue. You can’t make this stuff up
Peter wrote:
This situation has some way to go. I have the house half prewired for 3 phase so it won’t be too hard.
While you really need the highest charging wattage you can get while on the road, at home three-phase is unnecessary unless you drive more every day than you can re-charge in the overnight hours, in which case an EV is probably not a good idea to begin with.
Also worth noting that while in theory, three-phase can give you 21 kW charging, the AC chargers in the car are the limiting factor so depending on what you have you might only get 12 or 15KW, or sometimes the standard 7 kW because that is all the car can do.
My EV charge point installation cost £560 including VAT; not bad but of course adds to the cost – at the moment, EV driving is a [relatively] rich man’s game
I want 3 phase for other stuff in the meantime. One is a heat pump, where above a few kW the motors (capacitor start) are basically crap.
Peter wrote:
A 40 ton truck needs about 20 tons of batteries, so not viable currently, by a very long way.
That’s reason number two (number one is of course research funds) why we got this in Germany:
I wonder how long it takes before someone proposes to add rails and couple several trailers in a way such that only one tractor is needed. I see opportunities for many research projects and patents…
That is called a “train”, no?
For sure you could get a PhD out of that one. A novel concept!
