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Electric cars are all the rage these days (at least in the media, if not on the roads), and one expression that is sure to gain currency is "range anxiety". What is it and how can we remove that anxiety? That's what I want to talk about today.
What is Range Anxiety?
Bob Lutz, the Vice Chairman of Global Product Development at General Motors and one of the people responsible for the Chevy Volt range extended electric car, likes to tell an anecdote about the time he ran out of juice on his electric scooter. He had to call a friend who came with a big pickup truck to get Mr. Lutz and the electric scooter ("Not very green," he says).
That's exactly what range anxiety is in the context of an electric vehicle. It's the fear that one day you're going to find yourself somewhere that is too far from your home (so you can't just go back and plug in), yet far from known charging stations, or if you are close, you just don't have the time in your schedule to stop for a long time to allow the battery to recharge.
This is the main reason why the Chevy Volt is a range extended electric car; this means that it carries a gasoline engine to act as a generator when the battery runs out. As long as you have access to a gas station, you can drive around (but this has some downsides -- a gas engine is heavy to carry around and adds complexity to the drivetrain).
How to Get Rid of Range Anxiety?
The are two main solutions to EV range anxiety. The first one is just to keep working on battery technology until the power density increases and the cost decreases enough that electric cars have long-enough ranges to satisfy the vast majority of people.
The power density of lithium-ion batteries (the most popular kind for electric cars) is improving at about 8% per year, so that's a doubling about every 10 years. This might seem slow, but other breakthroughs could make things move faster (such as new chemistries, or the use of new techniques such as more nanoscale components).
The second solution would be to figure out how to "fill up" electric cars quickly enough that people can just stop at the gas station (or rather, at the charging station) and recharge in a few minutes.
This could be done either with battery technologies that can handle lots of power without over-heating or being damaged and fast charging stations with "fat pipes", or with battery swapping stations where a machine takes out the battery from your car and replaces it with a fully charged on (Better Place is working on this and has already demonstrated this technology publicly).
I think what we'll probably see is a combination of both approaches (batteries will keep improving for sure, but that alone probably won't be enough, so fast-charging stations and maybe battery swap stations will have to be built).
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