Increase Range with Bigger Better Battery Instead of Bigger Fuek Tank?

[McCloud_Rainbow]

With all the talk about MPG, range anxiety and fuel tank capacity, why not look at the electric side of the Land Cruiser for improvement? Seems like solutions might be easier to find and implement and would provide more benefits than just a few more gallons of gas onboard. I was originally getting a Rivian R1S with its 450 mile electric range…until I realized I would have to sit at the charger for at least an hour to top up the batteries for full range. No thanks! Happy I bought the LC instead.

Here is my thesis…

• 1.87 kWh NiMH stock Land Cruiser traction battery - underpowered and old chemistry = lower range and less usage
• Tesla Powerwall 3 weighs 200 lbs and has a 13 kWh LiFePO4 battery in it and is about the size of the current LC battery
• Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries are great….they don’t overheat and explode like Li Ion batteries and I bet a LiFePO4 battery the size of the current LC NiMH battery would have 5x the capacity (8-10 kWh).

Why not replace the undersized LC battery with a higher capacity battery to improve electric range and overall range?

Of course, the LC computer would need to be adjusted to both recognize the higher capacity battery AND allow the LC to run on electric only at higher speeds (at least up to 25 mph for around town).

Side benefit of that bigger battery…that inverter would keep things going a lot longer than it does now! Maybe even add a plug in hybrid function too so the battery is always full and ready.

Toyota notoriously cheaps out on the traction batteries for platform stability and cost savings. Many people with older Priuses (Pri’i?) replace the OEM NiMH battery with a better Li Ion battery when the original dies.

Anyhow…no turnkey solution right now, but though I would get the hive mind creative juices flowing on this one.

 

[jayce]

Toyota spent a lot of money to engineer the LC the way it currently exists. Your idea is non trivial to implement.

For example, in order to efficiently utilize higher battery capacity to enable electric only mode, you need a sufficiently powerful electric motor. Given the over 5000 lb weight of the LC and current 65 hp electric motor, you can imagine trying to travel uphill or away from a stoplight on electric power only. It would be painful to say the least.

Also, someone will correct me if I’m wrong, the concern over limited range mainly comes into play when traveling off road. There aren’t going to be many electric chargers along the way in this scenario. If one is just talking about highway travel it’s easy enough to pull into a gas station every 200-300 miles and refill.

 

[Doggman1525]

The trick is making enough room for that much battery in a body on frame vehicle. Our full EV sedan weighs almost as much as the LCLC (only about 300lbs short) and that's for about 75 kWh worth of electrons and a realistic range between 175 and 200 miles. The BMW hybrid carries about 1/3rd of that storage, around 35 miles of range. The car is also in the same weight range but both carry a lot of that weight down low in their unit bodies with the car built around them so they are very solid in corners even at speed. They also both use Li not Ni as the cathode which has its own design requirements. The LC battery is less than 2 kWh, barely enough to mow my lawn in comparison.

My guess is that to engineer a battery sizeable enough and energy dense enough to really push the EC around you'd be losing feet, not inches of cargo space and that much weight above the waterline would not feel very stable.

That said if they could problem solve a plug-in hybrid solution that could run all electric for around town driving and just use gas at speed where it's more efficient I'd be all over that!