Please take this idea and make money with it...

...while making the world a better place.

About fifteen years ago, BMW and other car makers came out with a type of car that was superior to EVs (electric vehicles) in a number of ways. As with an EV, and unlike with traditional hybrids, the wheels of an RE or “range extender” vehicle are driven only by the electric motor(s).

The RE design does share one thing with a traditional hybrid: it also has a gasoline engine.

In the RE, however, the only purpose of the gasoline (or diesel, or wankel, or turbine, or whatever) engine is to charge the batteries, and only when those batteries need charging.

The RE Design Is Just Better All Around

This provides a number of benefits, which I will list later. When you read them you’ll realize that the RE car is clearly superior to the three other designs: EV, traditional hybrid, and gas-powered .

Because of that obvious superiority, I was puzzled when BMW and others stopped making RE cars. Why stop manufacturing something that provides clear benefits to everyone: the buyer, the driver, society, the environment, and even the manufacturer?

They Couldn’t Allow The RE To Succeed

Then one day it hit me: in the big push to get people to buy electric cars, governments, environmentalists, and manufacturers face a big concern, which is reflected in the common question: What if I am on a long trip and the charge on my EV’s battery runs out in the middle of nowhere? The only answer to that concern is to assure the public that charging stations are rapidly being built in the middle of every nowhere.

And the only way to back up that assurance is to in turn assure the providers of the massive amounts of capital and other resources to build this vast network of charging stations that the demand for charging stations will materialize on schedule.

If in the middle of this massive project, ads for electric vehicles that have infinite range and never need a charging station pop up in the faces of the nascent, struggling charging station industry… Oops. There goes the demand for charging stations, and so there go the sources of capital.

The only solution was for the whole stampeding charging station herd to put pressure on the car makers and make them stop making REs. Indeed, make them pretend they never existed.

So Here’s The Opportunity

I promised a description of an opportunity and a more detailed list of benefits. Let’s start with the opportunity.

Think what fun it would be to make a lot of money by doing an in-your-face against virtually every part of the establishment that touches personal transportation, and in the process benefiting everyone except the charging station cabal.

Start here: an EV can be converted to an RE.

On an individual vehicle basis you could tinker and produce an ugly but functional RE. It’s a matter of removing some batteries, finding a space for, and adding, a small engine, generator, fuel tank and some circuitry. Much of the latter could be inspired by traditional hybrid designs.

To build a business making EV-to-RE conversions profitably will be much less simple. As with everything these days there will be patent issues to be gotten around, so you’ll need to lawyer up. The project will take a fair amount of capital, design and production engineering talent, and other resources.

But finding a product-market fit would be straightforward, starting with the audience of existing EV owners who are tired of battery-charge anxiety.

Once you’ve proven your design by converting a test batch of Teslas or others from EV to RE, you can start your production line. You could even do what AMG did with Mercedes, and offer modified brand new converted Teslas with a cool REV™ badge on the back.

So now for the list of RE benefits…

To charge batteries the internal combustion engine can run at a constant speed. Since it never drives the wheels, it never has to accelerate. It never has to deal with the increased power requirements and inefficiencies of acceleration. (Electric motors waste much less potential energy than combustion engines when called upon to produce extra torque for acceleration.) That delivers a number of benefits:

• The most obvious benefit is that its range is as infinite as that of a gas-powered car. You never have to stop to recharge, only for fuel.

• While the large number of heavy batteries are the source of the extra weight of EVs, the RE car requires fewer batteries. Of course that benefit is somewhat offset because you also have the weight of the engine; however...

• The engine can be much smaller and simpler than the engine in a “normal” car or a normal hybrid. Since the engine never has to accelerate, it an be air cooled because you’re eliminating the source of burned-out valves in traditional cars with air-cooled engines, which is acceleration. (Lead-footed drivers of old air cooled Porsches can tell you about that.)

• The weight, complexity, and added inefficiency of merging two sources of propulsion in a traditional hybrid is eliminated (as with an EV).

• Never asking the engine to accelerate provides a multitude of other benefits besides simplicity. Much higher fuel efficiency and lower maintenance costs are among them.

• REs operate in full-electric mode for most of the time, which results in a quieter driving experience compared to traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. An RE design should allow for plug-in charging, which means for many people the engine will almost never be used.

• Since REs are driven electrically most of the time, they have much lower emissions during typical use compared to hybrids, which frequently use the combustion engine for propulsion.

• RE designs should be less less costly than hybrid designs.

Doesn’t That Sound Like Fun?

I’m much too busy with my day job to pursue this idea. So please take it, no documents besides this post required, and when you make your first billion I know that a person of fairness and character such as yourself will remember where the idea came from.

About the Author

In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the much more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.

Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.

Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.