Range Anxiety

On 6 July 2010 General Motors filed to trademark the term, stating that the purpose was promoting public awareness of electric vehicle capabilities. A manufacturer applying to own the name of the anxiety about its own product is a move with no parallel elsewhere in this catalogue, and the stated rationale is worth reading twice.

Why the fear is studied as a barrier

By 2010 range anxiety was described as one of the major psychological barriers to large-scale adoption of electric cars, which is how the phenomenon has mostly been studied: as an obstacle rather than as a distress.

Bill Reinert, then national manager of advanced technology at Toyota's United States arm, put the case for taking it seriously in 2010, arguing that range anxiety would limit where an all-electric car could be used even if battery costs fell.

Against that, the material notes that the anxiety may be exaggerated, since studies have concluded that most daily journeys fall comfortably within the range of an inexpensive electric vehicle. The gap between the trips people actually make and the trips they plan for is where the anxiety lives.

The American Automobile Association's conclusion is the shortest statement in this entry and the most useful: the cure to range anxiety is owning an electric vehicle. The fear resolves through the exposure that ownership provides, which is exposure therapy arrived at by accident and delivered by the market.

Which engineering responses exist

Range anxiety has produced more distinct countermeasures than any fear in the catalogue, and none of them is psychological.

Charging infrastructure is the obvious one. As of December 2013 Estonia was the only country with a nationwide network, with fast chargers along highways spaced at most forty to sixty kilometres apart and a higher density in cities. The material adds the caveat that makes the achievement legible: Estonia is smaller than many first-level subnational divisions elsewhere, half the size of West Bengal, and three United States counties cover a larger area.

The rest divide cleanly:

• larger batteries
• range extenders, as in the Chevrolet Volt and the BMW i3, where an internal combustion engine starts to recharge the battery before it empties
• reserve capacity released on request, as in REVA's Revive
• whole-chassis exchange, as the proposed Ridek approach would do
• better navigation, since lack of information is itself a contributing factor

Then the unusual ones. REVA's Revive is a reserve of battery capacity that the driver cannot access until they text or telephone an operations centre, which converts a range problem into a permission problem. The proposed Ridek approach would exchange a vehicle's whole chassis for one carrying a larger battery at dedicated stations before a long journey.

Better navigation is named separately, on the grounds that lack of information is itself a contributing factor, and a system that knows the battery capacity and the remaining distance reduces the fear directly.

Why battery swapping predates the fear

The idea of exchanging a depleted battery for a charged one, in about the time a petrol fill takes, was first proposed in 1896, when the electric car was the leading competing technology.

It was put into practice by the Hartford Electric Light Company through the GeVeCo battery service, initially for electric trucks. An owner bought the vehicle from the General Vehicle Company without a battery and bought the electricity from Hartford through an exchangeable one, paying a per-mile charge and a monthly service fee covering maintenance and storage. Vehicles and batteries were modified for fast exchange. The service ran from 1910 to 1924 and covered more than six million miles.

A solution operating commercially for fourteen years, a century before the anxiety it addresses acquired a name, is the sort of fact this catalogue exists to record. Battery swapping remains routine in warehouses using electric forklift trucks.

Where the word won an award

The Norwegian equivalent, rekkeviddeangst, was placed second in the Norwegian Language Council's list of words of the year for 2013. Norway's electric vehicle adoption makes that unsurprising and it is still the only entry in this catalogue whose term has been formally recognised as a word of the year anywhere.