Four door pickups have become quite popular. What if these were built as small pickups? The bed could be used to place the ICE for long trips and the bed would be available at other times for all those truck things….

If 17Kwh gets the car 87 miles as stated then a 10Kw unit should be able to work like this;
17Kwh will drive car at 43.5 mph for 2 hours in which time generator has supplied a further 20Kwh. Hence to my reckoning the car should be capable of 50 to 60 mph for many hours.

As an example let’s say we are going to grandma’s place 140 miles away, then 140 miles at 50mph = 2.8 hours. 2.8 hours @10 Kwh generator is 28 Kwh. plus 17Kwh battery = 45 Kwh or just over 16Kwh for each of the 2.8 hours of drive time. Now according to the statistics given the car has a range on battery only of 87 miles so if we travel at 50 mph this is 1.74 hours and 17.4 Kwh of power produced by the generator. In other words as long as you have gas the range is unlimited and in practice a 5Kw generator will likely suffice for a 140 mile trip to Grandma’s.

We already know the battery will take us 87 miles in 1.74 hours during which time the smaller 5kw generator has produced 8.7Kwhr so 140 miles total. a 1 lunch break and the car is ready to drive another 30 plus miles.

Wouldn’t it be easier to put a charging port inside the trunk and drop portable honda generator in there for extended range? I’m serious. The biggest work would be adding the new mode to the battery-regen controller software.

If we need the flexibility of offering a generator OR a bigger battery, then also put in a port next to the charge port to plug an additional larger battery. Once again, the work is in the integration of the larger battery into the resource management algorithms of the vehicle’s controller, and in the electrical engineering of the whole system.

Screw mechanical linkages.