Current EV owners: are you sticking with full-EV or switching to EREV Harvester Scout?

[VolInGa]

I had asked about this in another area of this forum when Scout said the battery size would be reduced in the Harvester model. I was told that 150 miles would be the battery-only range and the rest would be from the gas generator.

From the Scout website.

 

[OscarPhilips]

Full EV or Harvester will depend on the specs closer to the time of manufacturer ... I have attended a number web casts with the DOE, EV researchers, EV designers, etc. and know that motor or no motor is not a simple question, and the design choice is more complex than "let's get rid of 60% of the batteries, add a 60 HP Volkswagen engine and generator, oh and 10 gallons of gasoline."

The engine choice adds 3-4 hundred pounds, which is partially or wholly offset by the battery reduction, but the reduce battery is worked harder, but due to its size and the dead weight of the Harvester hardware when not running. This proportionally higher duty cycle will be harder on the batteries that are left, and the remaining batteries may not be "capacity wise" large enough to absorb all the regenerative breaking.

With the Harvester "add" you now have all the complexity and maintenance of two drive systems, plus the system that integrates the two. Part of the Tesla success is not having to provide thousands of service centers to perform regular oil changes and all the other "stuff" required for an internal combustion engine.

We have almost two years for all the Scout designs to be complete and I am really hoping for the best in battery technology, so I am convinced to go all in on the EV model Traveler.

 

[pcpacker]

Battery only for me. I have a 3500 diesel truck and a MachE. This will be an added vehicle to my home. My wife drives the MachE and we love it. The 3500 truck isn’t a good daily driver but I need it for my truck duties. So the Traveler will be my daily driver and hunting and fishing vehicle for stuff in the 350 mile range. If it’s longer than that or I need to tow a lot, I will take the truck.

 

[NukeDukem]

They aren’t saying that both models will have 350 miles of battery range. It’s not possible given they’ve stated they are reducing the size of the battery in the Harvester model. I had originally hoped, like you, that the Harvester added 150 miles of gas range but that isn’t the case.