Authors

Christian MARTIN, Günter FRAIDL, Paul KAPUS 
AVL List GmbH, Graz, AT

Summary

Especially with passenger cars, both current purchasing behavior and technology forecast for the future are quite volatile and, in addition, highly diversified both regionally and by vehicle class. This makes the transition to a widespread electromobility much more complex and also more difficult to plan than originally expected. Range Extender solutions were already used at the beginning of the new millennium, especially in small vehicles, to counteract range anxiety and accelerate the market penetration of electric drives. However, as battery technologies and the charging infrastructure improved, these solutions disappeared from the market again. Since 2020, there is an ongoing boom in Range Extender applications, originating from China, but this time strongly focused on larger vehicles, especially SUVs. Due to the large batteries (> 80kWh) required for BEVs in this vehicle class, halving the battery capacity, which is common for Range Extender applications, allows for attractive solutions both in terms of costs and overall weight. Roughly simplified: practically all the advantages of a real BEV combined with the possibility of extending a purely electric range of around 200 km to over 1000 km using a combustion engine. A cost-oriented approach that maximizes synergies with both BEV vehicle platforms and the modular design of the combustion engine not only leverages unit volume effects but also makes production facility utilization more resilient to volatility in market preferences. Range Extender solutions therefore represent extremely useful bridging technology, particularly for large vehicles and markets, where charging infrastructure and charging anxiety are hindering BEV growth.

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