Carlton Supporters Club

An official with the US Dept Tranport, Jennifer Homendy, raised the issue in a speech in Washington to the Transportation Research Board. She noted, by way of example, that an electric GMC Hummer weighs about 9,000 pounds (4,000 kilograms), with a battery pack that alone is 2,900 pounds (1,300 kilograms)—roughly the entire weight of a typical Honda Civic.

"I'm concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights and increasing size, power, and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles," Homendy said in remarks prepared for the group.

The extra weight that EVs typically carry stems from the outsize mass of their batteries. To achieve 300 or more miles (480 or more kilometers) of range per charge from an EV, batteries have to weigh thousands of pounds.

Propaganda is propaganda.

That message in the current world state of play is not for anyone interested in saving the world and clean energy.  Its a statement to show the world how much further ahead the USA is than they are.

Here is one of the hidden issues related to EVs, weight!End users do not realise, but the weight of a battery required to match a tank of fuel can be as high as 10x the mass of that tank of fuel. In a typical 4-door sedan configuration an 80L tank holds about 75kg of fuel for 650km on a typical use cycle, for the same range the battery would have to weigh at least 650kg or more subject to the type of battery technology.

Yet it is one of the key reasons users report the elegant EV ride, they have more mass per cubic centimetre of car than just about anything else on the road. When you want something to move smoothly in a straight line, you can't beat inertia and kinetic energy!

It's pretty lucky those EVs have heaps of torque isn't it?

I read if you put a EV battery config in a large dual cab ute you will be adding the weight of a Honda Civic to the Ute.
Our roads are only designed to take a certain weight with regards total car mass and given 40% of new vehicles sold are of the large Ute variety good luck dodging the dents and holes in the roads which means Vicroads will be looking to increase its earnings which means we will all be paying for those EV Utes.
And good luck with the range on those 3.5 tonne unladen full EV Utes with a Caravan or boat attached when your weekend getaway to Knobs creek finds your intrinsic value for Kilometres specified cut by plenty thanks to all that extra weight.
https://www.whichcar.com.au/reviews/2023-ldv-et60-review-electric-ute
So its not much use for towing or offroad and has sub par handling.....but it will look impressive in the primary school carpark picking up the kids at twice the price of a combustion version and you are doing your bit for cleaner air. Good luck to LDV , they are going to need it....

Word has it that an electric version of the Toyota LandCruiser 70 Series recently broke the dynamometer at the Denso Automotive Systems’ testing facility in Clayton during testing in its state-of-the-art climatic chamber.

Adding to the above, if you add that much extra weight via battery to these utes, you have to limit the amount they can carry....which defeats the purpose!

it's no coincidence that solar panel installs are typically 5kW!

The beautiful thing about EVs, is that the laws of physics for electrical engineering are well known, and motors and transformers are already very efficient. So do not be sucked into some company claiming they found a new way to improve efficiency or range outside of providing bigger batteries, any such claim is bullcrap because there isn't enough scope left in designs to gain anything significant! Work done(kilometers driven or loads towed) have to obey the basic kinetic and potential energy equations. Unfortunately, the car industry is still full of people who grew up on "our car is more efficient" or "more economical", so much of the same spin remains.

I think you should revise that statement. At least if you are referring to your typical residential solar panel install.

The reason that they are about 5kw, is that is about the real estate available on your average house.

When i got mine 10-odd years ago, we got 3.3kw simply due to price, but was an upgrade on what the standard install was at the time. If we maxed out our roof space, we 'New technology' will come in terms of KERS and the like. Recovering energy, thus using less energy by comparison.

I generally agree that this seems a bit round about way to achieve greener energy for a net break even with different pollutants, but the one thing that battery and electricity and solar has over oil and petrol based technology, is the ability to power stuff in outer space.  I reckon thats the real push behind the technology going mainstream because we aren't going to setup bases on the moon and mars without solar and batteries unless we go nuclear and even then you need water which isn't an abundant source.

Actually, I had thought similar that SolarPV was the way of the future for local space.

But just last week I read that there are a whole bunch of upcoming NASA / ESA launches that are going the in the opposite direction and reverting to nuclear batteries known as Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators(RTG). Apparently heat management (heating and cooling) is a big issue that consumes a lot of energy, which rules out SolarPV because the surface area needed exceeds the launch capability for a single vehicle on many rockets. The various Space Stations are unique because they were built in stages from multiple launches.

In the past RTGs were reserved for big projects, because they took up a lot of space, were heavily built and very expensive, but apparently the new generation of devices is lighter, smaller and cheaper and also longer lasting!

RTGs don't fail if they collect too much dust!

Some of this is being driven by the realisation that if they had been equipped with better power sources(aka Not SolarPV) many of the recent Mars missions would have lasted decades like Voyager I and II. One of the recent missions had a few failed experiments simply because the project ran out of energy budget before it had succeeded, or failed because it was consuming too much energy to get it working so they shut it down.