Extended Range EVs – Too late for the show?
By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
Extended Range EVS or E-REVs could be obsolete before they hit the showrooms, says Simon Lindley, host of the popular YouTube Channel Trucked Up EVs.
E-REVS seemed like the magical answer to the high cost of EVs and range anxiety. Create an EV with a range of 150 to 250 kms, add a gas generator to it, and bam, you have 1,100 kms of range.
This may have been true a few years ago, but it’s all part of a move that could set the American auto industry back years.
The United States under President Donald Trump seems to think it can ‘Make America Great Again’ by retreating to fossil fuels and abandoning EVs.
But Simon Lindley of the popular YouTube Channel Trucked Up EVs (our original story) says the US is retreating to the dark ages while EV innovation and adoption are soaring around the world.
The World is Innovating at Light Speed
“The world is innovating at light speed, and the United States is going back to a deliverance scene. You know, it’s all going backwards,” says Lindley.
“We’ve reached this point of complete irony where the communist country China is in a dog-eat-dog piranha fest frenzy of capitalist 101, where 200 companies are innovating or dying,” says Lindley.
“There’s just this frenzy of free-market capitalism in China. And then we look to the United States, and we’re seeing protectionist state-run type thinking around its auto industry.”
Ford stopped making its popular F150 Lightning EV Truck and is now in a race with other carmakers to produce so-called E-REVs, extended-range EVs.
E-REVs are having a moment
“E-REVs are selling like hotcakes in China. It’s like the next best thing. It’s been going crazy,” says Lindley.
“Scout Motors, which is associated with Volkswagen,” and “85 % of their reservations are for E-REVs rather than the pure EV variant. I think once people start realizing what these things can and can’t do, that might change,” says Lindley.
Data is already coming out suggesting E-REVs don’t get the best gas mileage, especially if you run the gas generator all the time to charge the battery.
My own plug-in hybrid Mitsubishi Outlander is similar this way. It’s rated at 3.6 litres per 100 km. But over 2.5 years, I am averaging 7.7 litres per 100 km in real-world use. You can get 3.6 litres per 100 km if you never drive more than 60 km before recharging.
But that’s the least of the challenges facing E-REVs.
Time is not on the side of E-REVs
“There are three things really holding back eREVs,” says Lindley.
- One is battery tech and the speed at which battery tech is advancing.
- The second is the price of batteries, which have plummeted
- And the third is the manufacturing cycle. It takes four to six years from concept to showroom for most vehicles.
“We’ve got one or two [E-REVs] that might trickle into the market in 2026, but most of the 16 models that have been announced are going to [arrive] between now and 2030.”
They aren’t going to perform the way we’d hoped, and new “technology is also going to render them obsolete,” says Lindley.
Stellantis pulled the plug on their RAM EV truck and pivoted to E-REVs, and although it’s been delayed a few times already, it’s one of the few E-REVs due out on the market as early as 2027.
The Ram E-REV has an estimated range of 690 miles or 1,100 kms on a single charge, says Lindley.
But remember, to get this range, you need a full charge and a full gas tank.
And “If you don’t charge the batteries and you just use gasoline, you drop to 18 miles per gallon, a US gallon.”
In China right now, there are vehicles with 1,000 km of range, and “you’ve got vehicles on the road right now that can charge in less than five minutes.”
“We’re at light speed innovation coming out of Asia. And that’s not just China. That’s Korea. That’s Japan. So just on the battery density and the battery technology improvements, we are already seeing innovations that will be in vehicles by the end of this year that will render a lot of the concerns that E-REVs were supposed to address obsolete. You won’t need an E-REV.”
There may be use cases for E-REVs in this landscape of rapidly innovating EVs, such as towing trailers, but EVs will win the market for most applications, says Lindley.
Lightspeed Battery Innovation
Solid-state batteries were beginning to sound like the promise of fusion energy, always coming many years in the future.
But Donut Labs claims about their solid-state batteries shook the industry, and whether true or not, battery innovation is on a tear right now.
There are many companies working on new battery technologies such as sodium, solid state, and
“There are some big questions that have not been answered, but the race is on,” says Lindley.
Factorial, QuantumScape, Toyota, CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.), Samsung and Panasonic are all working on new solid-state and other battery technologies.
“It’s crazy how fast things are happening,” says Lindley.
“We’ve got sodium [batteries] now. We’ve got aluminum. We’ve got so many different chemistries that involve no rare earth materials,” he says.
Sodium batteries in particular are immune to extreme weather conditions.
Some companies are also working on hybrid battery systems and many new technologies are in production already.
A quick AI search reveals this table of technologies:
| Battery Technology [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16] | Market Tier | Major Benefit | Expected Mass Market Timeline | Key Players |
| Solid-State (All-Solid & Semi-Solid) | Premium / Long-Range | Massive range (up to 1,000+ km), 5-minute fast charging, ultra-safe. | 2026–2027 (Semi-solid/hybrid) 2028–2030 (All-solid-state). | Toyota, QuantumScape, Samsung SDI, CATL, BYD. |
| Sodium-Ion | Budget / City Cars | Eliminates lithium; entirely immune to extreme winter cold. | 2026 (Active initial rollout). | CATL, JAC, BYD. |
| Advanced LFP / LMFP | Mid-Tier / Mainstream | Affordable, zero cobalt, exceptionally high cycle life (lasts 1+ million miles). | Currently in use, with breakthrough variants scaling now. | Tesla, BYD, CATL. |
It’s just a matter of time until these technologies, such as solid-state, create the end game for gas vehicles, says Lindlsey.
“That’s why it’s the Holy Grail. But now, whether Donut Labs is true or false, it’s lit a candle under the you-know-what of absolutely every battery manufacturer because they got threatened. It’s an existential crisis,” says Lindley.
And this is why Lindley believes the E-REV is ill-fated.
The E-REV isn’t a bad idea. In fact, I can’t tell you how many times I have wished my plug-in hybrid had a range of 100 or 200 km instead of 60, but more than that, a hybrid of any kind mostly makes you wish you could go full EV.
The Ultimate F-150 Lightning E-REV build
Despite all this however, Simon Lindley is working on his own E-REV project. Using a new technology called EverDrive, he’s getting ready to modify his F150 Lightning by adding a generator, making his full EV an extended range EV.
“I’m actually turning. I’m converting my Lightning into an E-REV,” says Lindley.
“We’re going to do it right, as far as I’m concerned. Picture this. So what if you could have a full-sized battery pack instead of the current E-REVs that are half the size or a third the size of the battery pack?”
Lindsey is getting set to pilot EverDrive.
“There are two brilliant engineers in the United States. One of them is flying up, and we’re going to be doing the install. And then we’re to go out and test it with every kind of power source we can come up with and look at how we can create an extended range electric vehicle that is attachable to an existing EV with a full battery pack.”
So it’s a DIY E-REV?
“That’s exactly what it is. The hope is that everything I’m going to be doing on my new series that I’ll be doing on the channel is the Ultimate F-150 Lightning build,” says Lindley.
Check out the Trucked Up EVs YouTube channel and follow along if you want to see how it all turns out.
And here’s our original story on Simon and Trucked Up EVs.
