Hyundai has revealed a new way to get more electric car range. This is one of many ways we’ve seen over the last twelve months that will change cars to get them more range without actually changing the battery pack at all, not at all. I think every single electric car, which is not a budget EV, should have this technology from Hyundai. It just makes sense. It just makes perfect sense.
The Hyundai suite of electric cars is pretty good. But to be fair, well, they could get more range. I mean, they are using some decently sized battery packs. For example, the Ioniq 5 has a 77-kilowatt-hour pack. But considering the range is just over 500 km, it could be more if you think about it. I mean, they do use ternary batteries, which should be quite an energy dense. And I just think that Hyundai needs technology to prove that it’s going to do what it says. What am I talking about?
Hyundai said its EVs would have 40% more range at no extra cost within a couple of years’ time. They said that last year. Maybe this is one of the ways they aim to achieve that. Now, Hyundai Mobis, which is the Korean brand’s parts and smart mobility arm, (who also, by the way, supply General Motors with most of their electric car parts, not that GM would want you to know that) revealed a system that can automatically adjust an electric vehicle’s ride height by 2.3 inches or 6 cm, acting in a similar way to a premium air suspension setup, but with the added benefit of affordability.
But it’s a bit more complex than that. This just sounds like air suspension. It’s not. The system, called Electronic Leveling Control, or ELC, was developed in cooperation with Hyundai Motor Company to protect EV batteries, increase driving range, and make it easier to get in and out of vehicles by raising or lowering the suspension. In my opinion, the most important thing that it will do is increase the range of an EV without doing anything to the battery pack.
Will it really increase the range? Big time, significantly. According to the official press release, Hyundai ELC an electric hydraulic pump to control the height of the vehicle from all four wheels, with sensors detecting changes in the car’s height while going down the road. After analyzing the driving speed and the gross vehicle weight, the system automatically controls the ride height. But it can also show the driver how to manually select a height level as needed.
So basically, if you want to get in and out of the car, if you want to raise the car because you’re driving through a little bit of water or whatever reason, you can do that, that’s just normal. A lot of cars with air suspension can already do that, but they can’t read the road and change the height of the vehicle in order to save money on fuel efficiency. No electric cars or no cars that I know of do that now. But it makes so much sense.
Lowering the height of a car by two inches could improve aerodynamic efficiency so much as to give you an additional 10% to 15% more range without doing anything. That’s a big difference. Hyundai says there are a lot of benefits to controlling a vehicle’s height, especially in an EV, where the floor-mounted high voltage batteries can be better protected from poor road surfaces by raising the vehicle, which is just one other positive to this technology. At the same time, it can lead to an increase in driving range by lowering the height and making the car much more aerodynamic. The center of gravity also becomes lower, which leads to improved driving performance.
So if you’re living in this place, right in a city, or you’re driving in a city where the roads are great, the roads are perfect, and you don’t have to drive over any bumps or anything like that, you can just have it in its lower setting if you’re not and it’s variable. Or you could have it in the adjustable setting, where it can automatically adjust based on reading the road. Now, how well can it read the road and therefore adjust itself to actually adapt to your driving conditions? Well, no idea.
But you would think it wouldn’t be too bad, considering all the autonomous driving technology that companies have been working on over the last few years. This is nothing like that. It doesn’t actually need to have self-driving. Just read the road and raise its height, or lower its height depending on driving conditions. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me. Moreover, when applying the ELC on passenger vehicles, convenience can be improved by automatically lowering the vehicle when one of the doors opens. In other words, it’s something similar to the so called Kneel mode offered by the Rivian R1T and the R1S, both of which have air suspension and are very similar to the Tesla cybertruck.
However, the cybertruck’s ability is quite different. For example, this technology will give Hyundai’s EVs 2.3 inches, which is a lot, but not a lot compared to, say, a pickup truck. Cybertruck aims to have 8 to 16 inches of adjustability, which is massive. And it might be one way that Tesla can actually get the range of the cybertruck up to where they’re, aiming for 500 miles plus, enabling this feature while driving.
Inside EV says that this seems to be a more sophisticated computerized version of the hydropneumatic suspension introduced by Citroen way back in 1954 on the rear axle of the traction of Art and subsequently on the iconic DS. But I don’t really think that’s true. That technology was wildly different from this. This is 100 times more advanced, but I can see the analogy there.
However, Park Jong Hoon, vice president of Hyundai Motors, said, “ELC is a technology that has been developed to be applicable not only in the EV and PHEV market but also in high-end performance cars. We expect ELC to attract a huge amount of attention in the future mobility market as it will materialize different new features.”
Hyundai says it plans on developing a version of the electronic leveling control system that makes use of a front-row scanning camera and navigation data to basically prime the suspension for upcoming potholes or bumps in the road, similar to the way Mercedes does it with their Magic Body Control suspension. But the Mercedes feature is quite different.
Magic Body Control can actually change the way your car goes around a corner by using advanced suspension to raise the height of one side and lower the height of the other in order to counteract G forces when you go around a corner. It’s quite different from this technology.
Hyundai Mobis and Hyundai Motor Company are working on verifying the reliability of their ELC technology on test vehicles right now. They say that this technology will be soon available to the market. That means it will soon be in Hyundai’s electric cars, but also likely in the cars of companies that Hyundai Glovis currently sell electric vehicle parts to.
Now, one of those, of course, like I said in the starter’s video, is General Motors. Might we see this technology in GM’s EVs? Absolutely. I think it’s very, very likely. This is a much cheaper way to get more range in an EV than simply increasing the size of a battery pack. This technology, in my opinion, is so simple, it’s brilliant. And it’s technologies like these that are coming together to make EVs have more range without even doing anything at all to the battery pack. This and many other technologies like this are the reason why I believe we’re going to see 500 miles range EVs by 2030 that will be commonplace, and also very affordable.
