Comment by CGMthrowaway
9 hours ago
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.
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.
How has this played out in Norway? (If you know) They're at 90% EV market share, right?
We don't know the business model in Norway.
In US, gas stations barely make any profit on gas, its all from the convenience store, beer, water, lottery tickets, trinkets, souvenirs, etc. Costco, HEB, Walmart, etc also have gas and can run it as a loss leader for customers to compete with Amazon. As the number of gas consumers go down, gas stations everywhere will start shutting down, except the Costco/HEB/Walmart, because gas stations can't compete with those prices.
The U.S. saw over 210,000 stations in the early 1990s, dropping to around 145,000 by 2022, and potentially as low as 115,000 by 2020, according to various data points. Some estimates suggest a potential 50% reduction in traditional stations by 2050 in some regions: https://boosterusa.com/from-the-experts/the-inevitable-death...
Norway cars on the road, December 2025:
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Might be 90% of current sales. Still a lot of ICE cars on the road.
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Good question, I have no idea.
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.
44 million US households have no garage, including ~2/3 of renters
Sounds like a market opportunity for kerb-side, low speed, charging points.
Not to mention parking garages for daytime parking at work.
Not to mention mall parking lots.
The garage is an obvious starting point, because your car spends a lot of time there, but there are lots of opportunities elsewhere.
Once upon a time 44 million households didn't have electricity. Things change.
Hence the urgent need for charging infrastructure: Incentives to install charges in homes and rental unit garages and at curbsides.
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> 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.
I dont have a garage, but there are at least 15+ curb side chargers in 250 meters walking distance of my house. No problem charging my Tesla.
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When will EVs be for them?
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Yes it's so easy - Just tell the butler to put it on charge when you arrive home.
> 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.
People can't possibly be driving 200 miles a day, that can't be real.
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> BEVs require you to add a plug to your garage to get a rapid refuel
You hardly ever need a rapid refuel in your garage though. That's where your car spends most of its hours.
And most of the world has 220/240v mains supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country. Regular wall outlets can charge a car fast enough outside North America.
>> 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.
For foreign (read Chinese) cars a big piece of the price charged to US customers is the tarrifs (taxes) which US customers pay.
Elsewhere in the world EV prices are steadily coming down. They're not as low as ICE yet, and maybe never will be, but a nice entry level ICE car here is circa $15k, and a nice EV entry level is circa 25k.
Factor in fuel and maintenance costs and the real price is getting very close....
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.
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.
This comes off like "I never understood why not everyone still uses landlines".
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.