Electric Car EV Range Extender Engine Technology

There is a certain romance to the idea of electric cars. You see them often in sci-fi futuristic movies and you get this idea that somewhere in the distant future in some distant utopia everyone will be driving electric cars. Maybe the electric cars will even be doing the driving. We don’t need to be bothered with the details of getting to a destination. Just get in, tell the car’s user interface where you want to go and sit back and relax. It all sounds exciting, but it doesn’t sound like anything I’ll see in my lifetime. Then again, maybe I will.

The electric cars of today are in their infancy. There is a lot left to do to get to that distant future, or any real distance in today’s electric automobiles. Battery life and range are a large issue that needs focus. As the suburbs have spread out over the last few decades, the average daily commute to work has gotten much longer for most people. Electric cars need to have a far enough range to reach your destination and get you back home. Road trips and vacations are even more problematic in an electric vehicle.

Battery technology is improving, but right now it just isn’t good enough. One of the ways that current electric car builders are approaching the range issue is by using small internal combustion engines as range extenders to recharge batteries on the fly. An example of this would be the Chevy Volt. The Volt uses an I4 gasoline-powered Voltec engine as a range extender. The engine kicks in when the batteries get low and it runs a generator to recharge the batteries.

There are companies that are now manufacturing small engines designed for the specific purpose of extending the range of electric vehicles. Lotus has teamed with Spanish auto components maker Fagor Ederlan to turn out a line of EV extenders that is a 3 cylinder 1.2 liter engine. Mahle Powertrain Ltd is manufacturing a twin-cylinder, port-injected gasoline combustion engine that should add to the distance an EV can travel. Duke Engines is also currently testing an interesting design.

There is an interesting newcomer to the EV extender market that has been in development for the last 20 years that may be well worth keeping an eye on. The Huttlin Kugelmotor, designed by Dr. Herbert Hüttlin, is different from the standard internal combustion motor. While it is an internal combustion motor, it is a radically different design from the norm. It is a four stroke engine that uses 4 pistons with large titanium ball bearings on the tops that run in a sine wave channel. The engine only has 62 parts, while a conventional engine has around 240 parts. The Kugelmotor is a spherical gas engine that may one day soon revolutionize the way range extenders are built.

Electric cars using range extenders are more hybrid that true electric cars, but today they are probably the best option in EV’s. As battery technology advances companies are working towards the total electric car. One day, maybe sooner than we think, the streets and highways will be full of electric vehicles and internal combustion engines will be a piece of history that is no longer used.


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