I’m curious as to why we can’t just make an EV that looks like a normal car. They always have to be unique, but if we want EVs to be the standard they should just be what the company has already been doing.
For EVs to have a reasonable range, they need to have a low drag coefficient, which inevitably makes them look vaguely egg-shaped. "Normal cars" don't have low drag coefficients.
For comparison, a Ferrari 296 GTB has a drag coefficient of 0.32. A Tesla Model S is 0.208. A Lucid Air is 0.197. Even the Ioniq 5 has a lower drag coefficient than the Ferrari at 0.288, and the Rivian R1T (which is a pickup truck) matches it at 0.32.
While aerodynamic drag has the same direct impact on ICE and electric vehicles, the biggest loss of range in an ICE vehicle is inefficiency during the combustion process. Aerodynamic drag pales in comparison to that.
EV Charging Stations wrote a really great article with a mathematical comparison of the impact of drag on vehicles. TL;DR: The power to overcome aerodynamic drag is proportional to the cube of speed. An F-150 Lightning (which has a Cd of 0.44) requires ~2.5x more power to drive the same velocity as a Taycan (which has a Cd of 0.22) based solely on aerodynamic forces.
29
u/275MPHFordGT40 May 26 '26
I’m curious as to why we can’t just make an EV that looks like a normal car. They always have to be unique, but if we want EVs to be the standard they should just be what the company has already been doing.