The 2022 Dakar Rally came to an end and Toyota won the championship. However, this year's Dakar is not the old faces of Toyota and BRX, but Audi, which competes for the first time.
Audi's three extended-range electric vehicles, the Audi RS Q e-tron, all finished the race, and won four stages in 12 stages, accumulating 14 stage podiums. Next year, Audi will return to the 24 Hours of Le Mans after a six-year absence – also using a ranger.
Audi is finished, the ideal is happy, and the audience is blindfolded - is the extender "obsolete technology"?
Yes and no.
Let's start by saying why "yes".
The invention of electric vehicles and "charging treasures" is earlier than everyone thinks. Extended-range technology can be traced back to the early 20th century, when Ferdinand Porsche installed an internal combustion engine to generate electricity in order to improve the driving range of electric vehicles.
However, at the beginning, Porsche was just to show off, and by the beginning of this century, the world began to save energy and reduce emissions, and electric vehicles were treated as a serious thing. GM has launched the Chevrolet Volt and Buick Velite 5, and the BMW i3 also has a range-extender version, which is 70,000 yuan more expensive than the pure electric version.
However, both giants abandoned the range-extender program after a few years. After all, with the development of battery technology and the improvement of charging facilities, the behavior of bringing a "charging treasure" is indeed a bit redundant.
And then why "no".
European and American car companies gave up, and Asian car companies stood up. The extended range version of Nissan Xuanyi e-power has just been listed, Mazda is still studying the conversion of the rotor engine to a range extender, and the new forces of domestic car manufacturing such as Ideal and Lantu have also chosen the range extender program.
In a country as densely populated as China, existing infrastructure is not enough to completely eliminate mileage anxiety. In Europe, a few hundred kilometers of pure electric endurance is completely enough, but in China, it may not be able to get out of the province - last year's Eleventh Highway charging station queue was widely known.
Some people may say that the new forces of domestic car manufacturing have chosen to exploit the loophole of the extended program in order to be simple to operate and bypass technical patents. Then looking around the world, pure trams are not even more environmentally friendly than fuel vehicles. It wasn't me who said it, it was Mazda who said it.
In 2018, Mazda calculated at the "Zoom-Zoom Sustainable Development Strategy 2030" briefing: the current mainstream A-class pure electric vehicle consumes about 21.2 kWh of electricity per 100 kilometers, which translates to 128 grams of carbon dioxide emissions per kilometer; and a model equipped with Chuangchi Blue Sky engine, the fuel consumption of 5.2L/100km is converted into 142 grams of carbon dioxide emissions per kilometer. That is to say, as long as the energy conversion efficiency is high enough, the carbon emissions of fuel vehicles can be the same as electric vehicles, or even lower.
The energy conversion rate of extended range electric vehicles is higher than that of fuel vehicles. Because the fuel engine can only achieve the highest energy conversion rate in the speed range of the best working conditions, the conversion rate at low speeds will be much lower; and the range extender, because it is only used to generate electricity and does not directly drive the vehicle, can always maintain a relatively high energy conversion rate under the best working conditions. Although range extenders may not be as thermally efficient as engines, they are more energy efficient in urban congestion, and the average carbon emissions can be lower than that of electric vehicles.
Today, human power generation still relies mainly on coal, and the end of electric vehicles is also burning fossil fuels. Only after clean energy such as nuclear power, wind power, hydropower, and photovoltaics have replaced thermal power in a large area, electric vehicles can be regarded as truly environmentally friendly.
Electric vehicles are the future of humanity, but until this future arrives, range-extended electric vehicles are not a suitable solution.
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