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EV range doesn't drop much with weight. Especially on the highway.
In town, you're predominantly hit by rolling resistance and the start/stop nature of driving in town. Rolling resistance does increase by weight, but when you have 450km of range, anyway, it doesn't really matter. The start/stop nature of in town driving is also mitigated by regen braking. The weight there isn't free, but regen chops its effect way down.
On the highway, you're predominantly hit by aerodynamics. This is a problem when adding a trailer for a truck, but in an enclosed van, nothing changes. There is a slight drop from rolling resistance still, but it's not the biggest factor on the highway.
Putting more batteries on trailers is also an option that hasn't seen commercial use yet. We could hypothetically increase total range with a trailer.
https://evdances.com/blogs/blog/understanding-the-impact-of-vehicle-load-on-electric-vehicle-range
Does it?
https://www.amateuraerodynamics.com/2024/12/the-problem-of-ev-sizing-weight-battery.html?m=1
Does it really?
https://www.acebattery.com/blogs/electric-car-battery-weight-per-kwh-what-to-know
Love to hear what you're basing your assumptions on (and why you think adding a trailer with more batteries, more weight and more drag would help)
Those numbers largely align with my claims. Though the first and third smell of AI generated articles that might be hallucinating numbers, but I can work with it.
Consider my claim:
In town, you’re predominantly hit by rolling resistance and the start/stop nature of driving in town. Rolling resistance does increase by weight, but when you have 450km of range, anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
The numbers on the first article suggest that adding 1000lbs would drop range by 15%. So instead of 450km, you have 380km. If you're staying in-town, that's still more range than you're going to use in a day's work. You plug it in at night and it'll be all set by morning.
For highway driving, consider these results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA
Particularly the numbers starting around 11:50. This test compared no trailer, an unladen trailer, an unladen trailer with a big piece of wood on front to make a sail, and then that same plywood setup while hauling 4k lbs.
The aerodynamics of the sail cuts range in half, but adding 4k lbs barely moves it at all.
I'm assuming you already need a trailer, so the aerodynamic cost is there regardless. Adding batteries there won't change the highway range much. It does reduce the total weight of stuff you can haul, so there is a tradeoff there.
While regen braking is a bonus towards range, there's a lot to be said for how the increased weight of larger batteries (that are required to provide that range) cause an increase in tyre and brake wear, increased damage to the roads themselves, and increased drain on the power network that the people use to charge these cars.
Additionally, excluding the higher range rural, long distance highway, and everything outside of a city where you're only ever doing short trips is missing the point of my argument, since I'm not talking about short trips and 'just going about town' im talking about the people who have to drive around the country to keep their equipment running.
I will concede that electric Post vans/inner city couriers/milk+weekly grocery trucks/city taxis is 100% perfect use case for electric vehicles, considering exhaust pollution in heavily residential areas and the like, but there's no escaping how much the battery drain, tyre and brake degradation increases with weight.
Considering this bit "Towing heavy trailers drastically increases weight and drag. For example, towing a 3,000-lb trailer can reduce range by 40–50% depending on terrain and speed."
If you're assuming you already need a trailer, just to carry enough batteries to increase the range, then you're chasing your own tail by reducing your overall carrying capacity for minimal gains in range; bigger batteries have diminishing returns and only ever increase the price.
Not to mention the development cost of building a trailer that has A) High enough strength and safety standards to be legal on the roads or even remotely safe to tow. B) An adequate way of connecting to the car itself (would require a whole redesign of the electric car itself to account for an external power source for use while driving) C) Any capacity at all for storage when taking the batteries into account (think of the weight of the frame and tyres required for a trailer to not only contain the batteries but the storage space, it would be like towing a caravan just to get the same capacity as a transit van, but with double the weight.
This isn't even remotely accounting for the material cost of the "just add more batteries" ("Why don't they don't just add more fuel tanks to orbital rockets?") method of thinking, given the amount of rare earth metals that are already being dug out of open pit mines by machines that exclusively run on fossil fuels, transported by fossil fuel machines and processed using fossil fuels.
My stance is still along the lines of "Why go after personal combustion vehicles while there are entire industries polluting more each month than every peronal vehicle does in a year?"
It's the same as the argument for "Reducing your carbon footprint", which is a campaign made up by BP to deflect the blame for their actions onto their customers - saying electric cars can solve the issues of internal combustion while ignoring their downsides.