LEVC unveils e-Camper range-extender electric camper | Hacker News Reader

LEVC unveils e-Camper range-extender electric camper

drivingelectric.com

17 pointsteleforce13 comments

Seems to be a series hybrid which is unusual. Most hybrids are parallel and connect the engine to the wheels. The electric double conversion of a series is less efficient than a direct mechanical connection especially at highway speeds. Somewhere in the 80% range for series double conversion vs 96% for direct mechanical drive. Also you have the weight of the dedicated generator vs using drive motors as generators in a parallel hybrid. Hybrids are usually not that useful for a vehicle that does mostly highway driving, in parallel hybrids the hybrid system is doing very little on the highway.

The van is obviously designed for urban routes with lots of stop and go so the series hybrid might make sense there, but with campers you are typically doing long distance highway travel and very little stop and go. Not much info on the drivetrain technology I can find.

Electric RV's will be great but they will need really big batteries. In the US you want a vehicle that can do at least 300 miles at highway speeds but really 500 miles for 8 hours of driving then charge overnight at a campground.

I wouldn't really be interested until there are Class A RV's with megawatt hour batteries and decent charging infrastructure (3 megawatt HPCVC) since that what I currently have and love to travel in cross country.

Clearly, this thing is designed for a leisurely jaunt across the UK, not the American road warrior long haul.

So in the UK is going across the countryside stop and go mostly?

Why sure, stop for a few days, go for 3-5 hours, stop for a few more days ;). This van is a conversion of their urban work van, because they saw people buying and up fitting their work vans for RVs, as noted in the article. The short haul optimization is clearly appealing to enough people to make sense.

The point was you would normally get higher efficiency and spend less money and have higher payload capacity with just a diesel van if your mostly doing highway driving.

Was interested in seeing if they did anything special to get efficiency out of series hybrid which is normally a sub optimal design compared to pure electric or parallel hybrids.

I'm planning a future where I retire in a pure electric mobile home. Charge in the sun and use syngas for cooking and boosted heating in the winter. Heat pump keeps the interior cool or warm.

I have no desire to maintain and pay for a static property which just rots in place and requires constant maintenance and upkeep.

A smaller mobile home I can easily just tinker around in and keep it tidy and running.

I have a permanent wanderlust and desire to explore.

With EVs, you may not even need any hydrocarbon for cooking and heating.

I've seen some existing ICE van conversions that run induction cooking purely off of solar and about $1k of lithium batteries in warmer climates.

Some also have fancy floor heating that run off of auxiliary batteries, so it should be a piece of cake for EVs.

With proper insulation, I imaging you can go pretty far on solar alone between plugging-ins. Just gotta reserve enough for the trips to town.

I like the other guys answer, but also always wondered wether something like this could be integrated (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/homebiogas/the-new-home...) maybe the heavy part under the floor...and the gaseous in the walls?) any way I also wanted to suggest you look into led lighting for micro greens and solar cookers) You of course know diesel engines can be run on filtered cooking oil, personally I enjoy freeriding no gear (or for smaller roads) motor going downhill, it's incredible how far inertia will take you..:-) I always dreamed of a gps which would take such driving style into account and calculate optimal moment to disengage the gear...(as I came to Ankara, I had a wow 10km freeride) On the same note in a green future it would be fun to see tinkerers integrate a "Twike" style assist for driver and passengers

Seems like a very poor effort for the price?

'Range extender' is not the right term when the internal combustion engine is obviously going to do most of the work. It's not a vehicle for short trips within the city.

This belongs more to the category of hybrid SUVs that have a small battery, run on petrol most of the time but get taxed favourably for being 'green'.

>This belongs more to the category of hybrid SUVs that have a small battery

For contrast, 31kwh is larger than the original i3 (22kwh) and the new Fiat 500e's entry-level battery (24kwh). Plug-in hybrid cars and SUVs have much smaller batteries typically.

Green-washing alert! "e-Camper" and "electric range of 60 miles", in the same sentence.

When I was a kid it seemed that electric cars will come sometime in the future. But, it was difficult to imagine how incremental is the change. It seemed that once we had electric cars, everything was going to be electric cars.

Nowadays, I see so many interesting news about electric cars in all categories (even about electric planes). But even that the increase in investment, discovery and deployment is accelerating, it seems slow compared with my expectations.

An electric camper is another drop in a sea of improvements, and it opens options for the ones that are already in the electric bandwagon.

Perfect for those who've always wanted a camper that looks suspiciously like a London taxi!

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