The New Acronym In The EV Revolution Is EREV (Extended Range Electric Vehicle) – CleanTechnica

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The extended range electric vehicle (EREV) has become the fastest growing propulsion system for cars in China. EREV sales have more than doubled in that country in the past year and now account for 30% of the country’s plug-in hybrid sales, according to research service BNEF. They will begin arriving in America next year when Stellantis rolls out the Ramcharger, an EREV version of its Ram 1500 pickup truck that it says will have a 690 mile (1110 km) driving range. The company says the Ramcharger is being “built to pull an entire skeptical demographic” into the electric vehicle age.

As automakers worldwide struggle to persuade mainstream car buyers to go electric, EREVs are emerging as a solution to the two biggest roadblocks to EV acceptance: price and range anxiety. Bloomberg explains an EREV can be charged by plugging in, like a conventional EV, but it also has a small gasoline engine that charges the battery while driving, which dramatically increases how far it can go. Rather than powering the wheels the way it does for a conventional automobile or hybrid, the EREV gas engine acts only as an onboard generator.

As a result, an EREV only needs a battery that is about half the size of a traditional electric car. A smaller battery means a lower sales price — typically about $4,000 less according to Bloomberg. With the engine automatically topping up the battery, long trips don’t have to be interrupted by stops to recharge along the way. “It has a smaller battery, 95% of the trips are going to be all electric, and then you don’t have range anxiety,” Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, said in late May after returning from a trip to China. “We really like that solution,” Marin Gjaja, chief operating officer of Model e, Ford’s EV unit, added. “You can charge when you want to, not when you have to, and that’s a big, big unlock.”

Because an EREV runs on battery power most of the time, they are more environmentally friendly than conventional hybrids, such as the Prius that Toyota has sold for more than a quarter century. Conventional hybrids are driven by a gasoline engine supplemented by a small electric motor that’s charged by the car’s electrical system and kinetic energy captured when the car is coasting. EREVs emit less global warming carbon dioxide because their gas engines run only periodically to recharge the battery. The battery in an EREV is smaller than the battery in a fully electric vehicle but larger than the battery in a conventional hybrid. That makes an EREV more expensive than a conventional hybrid but less expensive than an electric car.

Automotive experts tell Bloomberg that EREV technology could be ideal for powering the models Americans love most — SUVs and pickup trucks. Because an extended range vehicle requires a smaller battery — the single most costly component of an EV — both the vehicle’s weight and price can come down, while its driving time is extended. And the technology doesn’t require any battery breakthroughs. An EREV relies on existing technology that automakers already have.

“It just makes so much sense for the US market because we like our big vehicles and we like to go at high speeds over long distances,” Michael Dunne, a former General Motors Co. executive in Asia and now a consultant specializing in the Chinese market, says. “It’s a lifeline to Detroit. They could adopt a practical powertrain, reduce costs, increase range and keep their customers happy in their core segments — SUVs and trucks. We’ve had a reset driven by customers who are thinking pragmatism wins out over idealism. We rushed into electrics before the charging infrastructure was ready. EREVs would be a natural pivot,” he said.

Not everyone is ready to climb on the EREV bandwagon. Because a gasoline engine is used to extend the driving range of an EREV, it’s considered a hybrid, which many say is not “green” technology. For example, “EREVs could be a harmful distraction that could stall momentum in the crucial transition to zero-emission vehicles,” says Katherine Garcia, the Sierra Club’s director of clean transportation.

It’s unclear how US regulators will classify EREV models. Will they be eligible for the $7500 federal tax credit? Bloomberg seems unsure of the answer, but the criteria at the present time are as follows:

• Have a battery capacity of at least 7 kilowatt hours.
• Have a gross vehicle weight rating of less than 14,000 pounds.
• Be made by a qualified manufacturer.
• Undergo final assembly in North America.
• Meet critical mineral and battery component requirements (as of April 18, 2023)
• Have a maximum sales price of $55,000 for a sedan or wagon, $70,000 for an SUV or light duty truck.

The “big decision for us as an industry and for regulators — ‘Is that an EV or isn’t it?’” Farley said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York in late May. “Customers are voting; they like these in-between solutions. We still have a lot of work to do with regulators because they’re not there.” It seems unlikely any manufacture would offer an EREV with less than a 7 kWh battery. Farley must know something we don’t.

GM In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time — Again

GM actually pioneered EREV technology 14 years ago with the Chevrolet Volt, which ran on electric power supplemented by a gas engine. The original Volt had an electric driving range of only 40 miles, later increased to 55 miles. GM pulled the plug on the Volt in 2019. “The technology in the Volt was really good for its time,” Mark Wakefield of AlixPartner told Bloomberg. “But it was also horrendously expensive, and they put it in an economy car. The classic strategy would’ve been to start at the top, put it in a Cadillac, and then bring it down over time as the price comes down and the capability comes up.”

GM has said it will introduce plug-in hybrids into its lineup in 2027 but declined to say if that will include extended-range electric vehicles. “The challenge with PHEVs and EREV (models) remains that they’re complicated and costly because you’re engineering two propulsion systems, and you still have tailpipe emissions,” said Jim Cain, a GM spokesman. That’s all very interesting, but the fact remains that GM ceded the EREV market to the Chinese, just as America did with battery technology.

So far, GM has squandered any first mover advantage it might have had when it scuttled the EV1. It threw the Voltec powertrain developed for the Chevy Volt into the dustbin and never leveraged it for any other vehicles, and it axed the Chevy Bolt just after sales began climbing and before its replacement was ready. It could appear to an outside observer that the corporation just lives from government bailout to government bailout while it spits out happy talk from the marketing department about its electric car ambitions, the way ExxonMobil greenwashes itself with press releases about algae research.

Somehow the Chinese are able to manufacture EREV models profitably. Li Auto leads the EREV market in China. Its sales surged almost 47% in June, to 47,774 vehicles, driven by demand for its cheapest EREV, the L6 SUV, which starts at $34,500. Li Auto’s vehicle sales more than doubled last year, helping the company post a full year gross profit of $3.9 billion (27.5 billion yuan). “Li Auto targets family car buyers,” said Siyi Mi, an EV analyst with BNEF. “Its EREV products provide not only an electric driving experience without worry of range, but also infotainment and advanced driver assist systems tailored to this customer.”

EREV News From Hyundai

Tariffs on Chinese made cars mean Americans won’t be seeing any EREV models from China in US showrooms any time soon. However, if there is any company that has its finger on the pulse of the market, it is Hyundai. According to Korea Economic Daily, Hyundai Motor Group is developing an EREV powertrain for its pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles amid an industry view that the current electric vehicle sales slowdown could be protracted. The most commonly used range extenders are internal combustion engines, but fuel cells or other engine types can also be used.

An EREV is similar to a hybrid car in that it has an internal combustion engine and a battery. Still, they are often regarded as EVs since the internal combustion engine is only used to charge the battery and a motor drives the wheels. In hybrids and many plug-in hybrids, the gasoline engine is connected to the driven wheels and assumes much of the responsibility for moving the car forward, with an assist from a smallish electric motor. “Global automakers will enter a period of suffering for at least two to three years starting in the second half of this year,” said a senior Hyundai Motor official. “Hybrids and EREVs are our weapons to fight this battle.”

Sources told KED that Hyundai has begun working on EREVs since it believes a relatively short driving range and lack of charging infrastructure are among the biggest barriers to rapid EV adoption. Growing fears of EVs catching fire have also prompted Hyundai to focus on the development of EREVs before fully migrating to pure electric vehicles, they said. (Oddly enough, plug-in hybrids have the highest incidence of vehicle fires among all electrified vehicles.) “It is still years before we see an affordable EV equipped with batteries that can travel 1,000 km on a single charge. EREVs will be competitive for at least 10 years before the arrival of the EV era,” said an industry official.

Sources told KED that Hyundai Motor Group will likely apply its EREV system to its flagship Santa Fe SUV and the Genesis GV70 in two to three years. The group’s next-generation pickup trucks — code named TE for Hyundai Motor and TV for Kia — will also be equipped with EREV drivetrains and begin rolling out of production lines in 2028 or 2029, they said. The new pickups will have a driving range of over 530 km with a load of over 4,535 kg (10,000 lb), sources said, which should appeal to American buyers.

The Takeaway

If you take all this talk about EREV models at face value, you could conclude that the EV revolution is over. We here at CleanTechnica prefer to see it as taking a breather before its next growth stage. I had a Chevy Volt for a week in 2017 and absolutely loved the car. I never could figure out why GM refused to leverage that technology, but then again, I am probably not as smart as Mary Barra. It does seem like just plain old pigheaded cussedness, though.

The idea of EREVs makes some sense, especially for the hard-to-electrify market areas such as large SUVs and pickup trucks. Reducing emissions from those behemoths is a worthy objective even if EREVs are not the ideal solution. For all we know (which isn’t much), EREV may be what has been kicked around in the discussions between automakers and the Biden administration that led to an easing of the proposed tailpipe emission rules scheduled to take effect in 2027. Perhaps the auto industry said, “Let us do the EREV bit now and we promise to have the battery electric piece of the puzzle in place by 2032.” Stranger things have happened.