Large EVs Shouldn’t Be Impossible – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 12th February 2025, 09:36 am

According to various media outlets, Ford CEO Jim Farley wasn’t optimistic about the larger EV market during the company’s last earnings call. In short, the price of battery storage just isn’t coming down fast enough for Ford to see full-size trucks and SUVs as a profitable option anytime in the near future. This leaves people wanting to do things like towing, driving large families around, and going off-road with the choice of spending big bucks or skipping out on the EV revolution for now.

I don’t know about you, but being stuck getting 12 MPG around town just to be able to carry a large family around isn’t fantastic, and Farley’s right that there are far too few takers at $80,000. So, we can’t just hit pause on the larger EVs and expect everything to be okay. In this article, I want to briefly cover some possible ways out of this bad scenario.

One thing that we should probably be thinking about is battery swapping technology. It’s not something that Tesla ever seriously pursued (except to allegedly bilk California out of grant money), but it’s a very much proven technology in China and in some other countries that allow Chinese EVs.

While the main advantage to swapping is a quick re-up of energy, especially for people who don’t have home charging, the technology has a lot more potential than just speed and convenience. It also gives a vehicle a lot of flexibility in battery capacity.

For example, an electric SUV could be sold for a lot cheaper if it only had 150 miles of range, but people want to be prepared for things like, say, towing a travel trailer from Phoenix to Flagstaff (that’s a very steep and battery-taxing climb, for those of us who haven’t gone up I-17). Battery swap technology, combined with adjustable suspension, can allow the family SUV to upgrade to a rented 400+ mile battery in five minutes. Then, once back home, the family can go back to a battery that fits local driving needs to keep saving money.

Another possible solution to the cost of giant batteries is a bit of a bad word in the EV community. Yep, I’m going to use the R-word (Range-Extender!).

While I know that adding a range extender to a battery-powered car technically makes it a hybrid, that has only been a problem in the past because automakers offered plug-in hybrids with tiny, sometimes anemic and useless, battery packs with a range of one half of ten miles. Or worse, some of these plug-in cars didn’t have any battery-only range at all, only operating on battery power if you pressed the throttle very lightly.

If automakers instead offered batteries with at least 100 miles of range, there’d be real reason to actually charge the vehicle up. It would actually have enough range for a real day’s worth of driving, with plenty to spare. The nasty ICE would only start belching out toxins and planet-warming plant food on the rare occasion the owner tows or goes out of town, making for a real improvement over the status quo of doing that every day.

Finally, we need to think about moving batteries out of vehicles and into trailers to help keep the cost of daily driving down. Even if the trailer isn’t powered, being able to add it into the mix when you’re hooking it up to the vehicle would be a good way to add that extra battery power. A trailer may also be a good place to put a range extender if the cost of the trailer needs to be kept down, so you don’t have to carry that thing around every day and not use it.

The Real Fix We Need

While manufacturers could alleviate the situation with the above ideas, we really don’t need to do any of that. The cold, hard fact is that we need the whole industry and ecosystem to be better. Batteries shouldn’t need to be 400+ miles for a truck or SUV to do serious towing. Stations should be everywhere, like gas stations! But, even if we did still want to put that many battery cells in a vehicle, it shouldn’t cost that much. If the battery industry kicked into high gear like it is doing in China, there’d be plenty of cheap chemical energy storage bits for everybody!

In other words, it shouldn’t all rest on the automakers. But that would require the United States get some better people in office and stop spreading anti-EV FUD all the time. That’s much easier said than done right now.

Featured image: an image from a Ford sales brochure, featuring the Super Duty-based Ford Excursion. (fair use)