EP Tender could give electric cars unlimited range

Electric car owners, there is finally a solution to range anxiety. For those long trips where you can't just appropriate some random building's electricity, the EP Tender will get you to your destination. The only issue? It involves a gasoline generator that you tow behind your EV.

Inventor Jean-Baptiste Segard has really brought the EV journey full circle with his EP Tender. It's essentially a gasoline engine inside a small trailer that can provide extra electricity for electric cars on long journeys. Segard coupled the EP Tender above with a Renault Zoe, a pure-electric that's become a popular car in Europe, but the idea itself is not really all that new. Gasoline-engined range extenders like this existed during the days of the General Motors EV1, but like the EV1 they were niche machines that weren't really marketed commercially.

As the video shows, Segard has even come up with a way to make reversing with the tender attached pretty easy, fitting extra wheels to prevent the little trailer from jackknifing. Segard has plans on pitching the EP Tender technology to Volkswagen, BMW, and Ford of Europe, though he himself has admitted that the demand for this type of device is not all that great at the moment.

EP Tender
Reversing with the trailer attached has been solved by the addition of small wheels under the trailer.

We can't help but think that given the pace of Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S sales, both companies are thinking hard about offering such a gas-engined trailer to produce extra juice. This would allow one to drive a Tesla Model S pretty much anywhere (except off road in Mongolia, as a Tesla just doesn't have the ground clearance), and fitting a small engine into a trailer to produce extra juice is not a huge technological feat for either company. But we have a feeling that it'll be a few more years until there will be enough pure-electric car owners who'll face the necessity of making a cross-country trip for automakers to market something like this.

Finally, what about the absurdity of using an electric car to tow a trailer with a gas engine specifically for the purpose of generating additional electricity? No one ever said progress was going to make sense.

By Jay Ramey