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Comment by nxm

8 hours ago

The key part is electrified and not pure electric.

On this note: It was recently reported that Electrified vehicles in general outsold conventional ICE powered vehicles in Australia, claiming it has reached a 'tipping point' with consumers:

https://www.drive.com.au/news/electrified-vehicles-have-offi...

  • Consumers don't realize they are getting the worst of both worlds with added weight, complexity, repairs, inefficiency, and costs along with potential reliability (ex-Toyota) Not to mention studies that show PHEV owners frequently don't plug in.

    • Well those owners are idiots. That says nothing about the car. You can't exclude Toyota when you make the claim that hybrids are unreliable and inefficient either. They have proven that they can be reliable and efficient.

      Hybrids aren't running around doing 30 miles a day with a 300 mile battery like most EVs. Talk about inefficient!

    • My Outlander rarely needed repairs and I always plugged it in. The car even complained about me needing to use the gazoline in the tank because it risked getting old in the tank and needed to be replaced. That was a great car. My new EV, a Subaru Solterra is great too though.

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    • My main goal with buying an EV is to give the middle finger to the oil industry as they have meddled with the world too much.

      They screwed public transit and entire nations just for profits. I love my Subbie and I'll keep that until it breaks apart and replace it with an EV. Maybe today there's many downsides to an EV, but I hope it evens up and maybe becomes even better to get one.

    • Nah, PHEVs are the perfect compromise for lots of people who wouldn't otherwise be able to go all electric. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

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About 2/3 of these are BEVs and the other 1/3 are PHEVs:

> In 2025, 34.4 per cent of Porsche cars delivered worldwide were electrified (+7.4 percentage points), with 22.2 per cent being fully electric and 12.1 per cent being plug-in hybrids.

I never understood the big push for full EVs over hybrid. Roughly speaking, a hybrid gets double the MPG of an ICE car, and a BEV gets double the MPGe of a hybrid. But BEVs require you to add a plug to your garage to get a rapid refuel, when your whole neighborhood gets them it strains the grid, you are range limited, etc...

My hunch is there are some laws or regs somewhere that kept hybrids from really taking off (or rather, they were taking off.. then suddenly were suppressed). Which is why I don't interpret headlines like these to mean "consumers have crossed the tipping point" - in many cases it is incentive-driven, not pure consumer demand.

The EU is committed to the full EV route and that is not changing. But it's not taking hold in the US, and over the next few years the big thing we will see being sold is actually EREVs, which are BEVs with a gas generator attached to charge the battery (yes, really).

Source: in the industry

  • > I never understood the big push for full EVs over hybrid.

    Being able to shed the ICE bits from the car's powertrain eliminates multiple entire classes of maintenance burden. With hybrid and EREV you get the problems of both types of powerplant and drivetrain, and even though ICE has evolved to be fairly reliable, it's still a very complicated assembly and basic wear-and-tear still is still a challenge.

    There will probably be parts of the country where hybrid or EREV make sense for some period of time due to the distances involved and the incredible energy density of gasoline, but a lot of the driving that happens day to day can already be handled with pure EVs as long as you have a 120V plug accessible to your car.

    • > Being able to shed the ICE bits from the car's powertrain eliminates multiple entire classes of maintenance burden.

      I don't know but is this a uniquely US (and/or a few other such countries) thing, because of the high volume of daily driving?

      Here in India we send our (ICE) car in for a service somthing like once or twice a year? And that too is mostly because "the engine sounds a bit off", not "the car isn't starting".

      Less maintenance sure is nice, but I don't think it's consciously a "problem" for many.

  • Don't most people already have a plug in their garage? All mine certainly have. There's no need to get full EVSE for most people, a 2.4kW outlet as found almost everywhere outside North America will easily handle daily driving needs for anyone who's not in a travelling job.

    Also if everyone in your neighbourhood turning on a space heater strains the grid you have bigger problems.

    Utilities have plenty of ways to solve that. We already have electric water heaters on demand controlled circuits and electricity billing that incentivises off-peak use.

    And as for range? 400km is plenty for all but one trip a year, if that's an issue for your use perhaps EVs are not for you.

    • > Don't most people already have a plug in their garage?

      Good point, most people without garages should continue buying hybrid or ICE, because EVs aren't for them yet.

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    • > There's no need to get full EVSE for most people,

      It's a lot more comfortable though. It's been a great addition to the home to get an EVSE, even a small single-phase one.

    • >Also if everyone in your neighbourhood turning on a space heater strains the grid you have bigger problems.

      Welcome to Texas.

      And with Texas a 200 mile+ driving day is just more common than people from smaller places experience.

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  • Every time an EV driver charges their car at home, a gas station loses a customer.

    Eventually this compounds and gas stations start closing.

    That accelerates the switch to EVs because gas becomes hard to find. Which accelerates gas station closures, and so on.

    The point at which it becomes impractical to drive a gas-fuelled car is approaching. It will hit different countries at different times, but it's there. 10 years, 30 years, whatever, but it's coming.

    Long before that point, a hybrid is just an EV that has to carry around a chunk of useless engine that is hard to fuel.

  • >> I never understood the big push for full EVs over hybrid

    Weight, space and reliability.

    Dragging that generator (and fuel) around costs weight and space, reducing range. Exhaust, fuel tank, radiator- all the support systems the ICE motor needs. Which leaves less space for batteries, which reduces range.

    Plus, the maintenance burden is still there. All those ICE parts still need all the maintainence etc that full ICE needs. One of the joys of EV is that maintainence is sooo much simpler.

    So yes, hybrid is much more efficient than gas only, but a poor cousin of full EV.

    By contrast full EV has range limitations. And yes distances in Europe are much shorter than the US. No that's less of an issue there. But even there we're seeing range go up, and charging come down.

  • The main issue will always be price. Whether that's purchase price, resale, or maintenance. Even the budget brand cars from South Korea and Ford can figure out the basics of interior/exterior design where customers are happy. That mostly just leaves the price and it's only gone up.

    Car prices have increased well above the rate of inflation over the last decade and even used cars are more expensive than ever. Average new car price is $50k, mostly because EVs are so expensive https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69047202/average-new-car-...

    • >Car prices have increased well above the rate of inflation over the last decade

      This is a fair concern, but also, looking at the rise of average car prices is like looking at the rise of average iPhone prices. That is to say, cars (and iPhones) are providing increasingly premium offerings that didn’t exist decades ago. If you look at the entry levels of both these things, you find that the bottom-line price broadly keeps pace with inflation. And for cars, that’s with the addition of now-standard safety and convenience features. When you match cars feature-for-feature (an unrealistic comparison, as there aren’t really bare-bones cars on offer anymore), you’d see that cars are increasing in price much more slowly than inflation, and in other words, are effectively cheaper. Ultimately, whether car prices are rising or falling depends a lot on how you calculate things.

      I’ll also add that EV pricing doesn’t have to mean insane car costs. The US market has the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf each selling for about $30k new and can be readily bought for half that with used inventory.

    • > The main issue will always be price.

      You're right. There isn't a single legacy auto manufacturer in the US (Ford, GM, Stellantis) that can profitably sell an EV. Yet they make them anyway, and sell them for huge losses ($billions per year) because they have to meet mandates.

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  • I rented a hybrid recently while my car was in for a service. Picked it up, drove home (25 mins on motorway) then returned it the next day. It spent all of that time burning petrol while popping up notices about all the reasons it couldn’t use electricity right now (too cold, too fast etc).

    All ICE cars should have been hybrid from 5-10 years ago but it is a stepping stone we should already be stepping off.

  • A bit sad that you're in the industry and you don't understand why pure EVs are better than hybrids.

    Full EVs: Less moving parts = less maintenance required = less issues to worry about (think no oil changes, no timing belt changes, no spark plug replacements, no belt/filter changes, no exhaust system checks, etc).

    Also zero emissions = better air quality around you.

    Bonus: it's like waking up with a full take of gas every morning

    I've owned my full EV for almost 10 years now and had 0 maintenance done whatsoever (apart from tire rotation and window wiper fluid replacement). I would never go back to an ICE vehicle.

    • I also can't help but think but the decade over decade improvement in EV goodies is going to be steep: more sensors, more ability if not to fully self-drive then to take over this aspect of driving (like backing up), etc.

  • This comes off like "I never understood why not everyone still uses landlines".

  • Its not an unsurmountable problem as Americans think. Just works like how you plug in your phone. Most of the world has electricity at home.

  • My uncle works in the industry and was getting a new car recently. His two options were all electric or all ICE, because from his experience, EHEVs have the problems of both ICE and BEV vehicles.

  • Well, a hybrid doesn't solve the problem. We don't need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we need to zero them out. You can't do that if you sometimes burn gas.

"electrified" is full-electric plus plug-in hybrid.

Does this mean that a non-plug-in hybrid would be in the "pure combustion-engined" bucket, or that they don't make those?

  • I believe the only non-plug in hybrid they make is the 911 with the T-Hybrid system in it. It uses motors to assist performance, but is not a plug-in.

    It’s probably just an incredibly small number of sales?