Comment by Toutouxc
6 hours ago
I used to like hybrids, and obviously series hybrids are the coolest kind of hybrids, but now that I’m driving a budget EV, I honestly don’t see the point anymore. Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs.
Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
> I used to like hybrids
I think that is a transition issue with most tech.
Like when film cameras were first transitioning to digital there was a lot of reasons you wouldn't just glom onto digital. Early digital cameras had low resolution (or files were huge), bad dynamic range, either terrible lenses or didn't work well with slr lenses, etc.
I remember when tesla came out with the first EVs the batteries had ridiculous/expensive capacity compared to other EVs (compare 90kwh to a leaf with like a leaf was 24kwh). Hybrids made sense because EV range was either poor or expensive or both. And charger infrastructure was barely getting started.
Now it is different.
> bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute
If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.
If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).
If you're in the city a car shouldn't even be a major consideration (ideally).
That's true for majority of cases, but a small percentage of Tokyo that needs to visit places taxis and trains don't go is still a large number.
Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?
A car should always be a major consideration for someone's needs. Especially if you have a family with young children or are disabled. Discounting cars as useless because mass transit exists is a terrible idea.
Robotic WHAT? That's crazy, if it's what I'm imagining. Is Tokyo that much crowded?
It’s not some Japan-only technology. You see them in New York City too.
20 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8
You park your car in a stall, get out of your car, and then the stall closes and it moves a platform under your car and stores it someplace. You punch in your claim number, pay your parking fee, and then it gets your car and puts it back in the stall.
They're in places other than Tokyo as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog
One was featured in the old Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift movie. That was probably the first time I had seen one, about 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8
https://roboticparking.com/how-it-works/
...as one example.
Unlike bumfuck nowhere, Tokyo offers decent public transportation. Right?
I agree I don’t like having both engines, more to fail. BUT I could see a world where you basically have basically an EV with a smaller battery pack (150 mile range) and basically a swappable $300 generator. I saw swappable so that if anything goes wrong they just swap it for $300, and credit you back async any recovery value. Just electricity generation from it, for rare needs of longer range. I think in theory, it could be a good way to get a cheaper EV supporting rare bursts of range and low maintenance cost.
But I’m not even sure regulators would allow such a design. Even then I’m not sure it’s worth it.
But I am totally done with ICE car maintenance. I want nothing to do with it anymore.
A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.
I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.
To put it in perspective why a 5kWh generator isn't a range extender: my lightening has a range of 331 miles and 135kWh battery. If we assume a spherical cow (60mph, and I get every single one of those 331 miles), the truck buns through the battery in 5.5 hours, which equates to 24.5kWh to keep up.
In actuality, at highway speeds I'll burn through 80% of the battery in 3 hours which equals a run rate of 36kWh. If we ran a 5kWh generator the whole time and assume perfect charging efficiency, it'd extend the time to charge by 28 minutes.
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The bmw i3 range extender engine only generates 19kw of electricity. It doesn't allow you to "fill up and drive anywhere" like a car. It is more like a bigger battery.
I think the solution is actually what we have now - high-power dc fast chargers spread around the country.
Why not towable gas generator trailers that you can rent for long trips.
Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).
Alternatively, put a battery in that trailer. See for example https://far-a-day.com/en: “Like an external phone battery, but for your car!”
Years ago I saw some one who had sawed off the back end of a late 1980s Chevy cavalier (or similar) and turned it into a portable generator trailer for his EV. This was so long ago it was probably an EV conversion of some kind.
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> for rare needs of longer range.
Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.
Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.
(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)
Yeah... My 7kwh generator is the size of a large wheelbarrow and weighs a good 250 lbs.
Not to mention, loud as all get out at that size.
It also needs a decent amount of maintenance to keep it running (or it needs to run frequently).
Personally... Ev with a swappable battery seems like a much better solution.
The only reason this even sorta makes sense right now is that we're in a really weird transition period where gas is available everywhere and it's still hard to find batteries/chargers.
This isn't a tech problem, it's an infrastructure problem. It should be treated that way.
You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...
It's not exactly what you're describing, but I think it will become more common as battery technology growth slows down.
I’m not sure why you’d offer a drop in option if you can just build it into the car. Extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) / Range Extender Electric Vehicle (REEV) do exist on the market already.
A more practical solution is to just rent out a small generator on a trailer.
Unless I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re getting at.
Basically a modular trunk add-on, with an air and exhaust pipe?
> swappable $300 generator
It's never that simple, but it could be. Modular standard parts that could be installed on a standard chassis design would be great. So have a small generator or an additional battery, maybe even a fuel cell. Probably never happen but it would be the nirvana of car design. Standardization would drive scale and it could work really well. That approach did wonders for the PC industry.
UK has some of the most expensive electricity in the world, and I can't charge at home without paying the council north of £1000 to cut a cable gully in front of my house (which I'm not even guaranteed a parking space outside of). Public chargers are at least 2x higher cost than home charging and can be up to 20x.
Despite this, I bought a cheap used 2020 Nissan Leaf and hopefully will never look back. This year it makes a huge difference but last year it would be barely a few percent cheaper than petrol. I'm a nerd and I'm happy to do some extra planning for road trips, but I don't think the average person will look at an EV like this. Range anxiety essentially limits you to ~60% of total range capacity (you're not going to sit at a service waiting absurd amounts of time to charge the last 20%, and you're not going to risk getting so low that if the next charger is faulty it will strand you).
I do agree that hybrids are nuts, and only make sense for a small demographic. I also suspect that they are a green scam as I read that most PHEV owners don't bother to actually plug them in, so the impressive ~100 MPG figures are actually worse than ICE. I'm not a car guy but even I can recognise that the hybrid engine provides absolutely zero satisfaction, especially with a CVT.
So yes, people are buying hybrids because of inflated MPG marketing, virtue signalling, whatever government benefits you get from a "green" vehicle (not much, our government isn't serious about EVs and hates anyone having a car) but most importantly the fact that every service station in the country can fuel it, in a few seconds.
> so the impressive ~100 MPG figures are actually worse than ICE.
If you have a specific example of a hybrid that gets worse mileage than a comparable non-hybrid ICE I'd love to hear it, because that directly contradicts my lived experience.
At various times, I've owned a 2003 Prius and a 2012 Honda Fit. The Prius was larger, had better acceleration and routinely got nearly twice the MPG of the Fit.
That was ~20 years ago; I believe newer models of Prius use different battery chemistries. On the occasions when I've driven a newer model, it got better mileage than what I experienced back then.
Compared the old 2020 Leaf the current model has around 387 mile range, which I think is enough that I wouldn't worry about range.
They also charge a lot faster now it's using a CCS connector.
There's plenty of other models providing that range too such as Renault Scenic.
I don't think hybrids are worth the extra complexity at all now. All those little moving engine parts are going to wear out sooner or later.
ps Is it bad that I still laugh at calling a place "bumfuck"?
Also city dwellers with street parking and it’s hard charge, so a pure EV is a bad fit.
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
I thought this but after 3 years I can say it is unfounded. the only reason I ever think about my state of charge on the city is when I need it to be low so I can use street parking that requires me to charge.
We really need more slow charging stations for folks to just park at. I’d have assumed that the economics would have been favorable to charge by the day/night rather than by the minute.
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Is the hybrid car then just a social cover for “I want gas savings, but where I live doesn’t have EVSEs?”
It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWqweWjsbU
You got the time arrow the wrong way around. Those mechanical digital clocks predate the LED ones by a number of years.
They worked on the same principle as the old mechanical signs at airports and train stations.
So it was mechanical first with the motors, then the LED display and then LCD and then the current TFT etc.
I recently got a hybrid because I wanted better gas mileage--no more, no less. Without subsidies, I can't get the math to work for an EV.
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Driving hybrid still burns gas, generating CO2 which is destroying the world. Why would anyone pick it when EVs are available is beyond me.
It's not that simple. A pure EV needs ~10x as much battery as a PHEV. So for the same amount of batteries produced, you could make 10x as many vehicles PHEVs as EVs. Not all vehicles can be EVs due to practical issues.
Which results in more total electric miles driven replacing gas? I don't know, but "gas is destroying the world" is a brain short circuit.
EVs are more expensive. Hope that helps.
Yes, EV's solve one of the many negative impacts of cars. It's not some magic bullet.
They still depend on minerals that require destructive mining from equipment that runs on fossil fuels, still use rubber tires, still has tons of plastics that are made with petroleum, still dependent on a power grid mainly sustained by fossil fuels...
We should be thinking bigger than this, even. Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit whenever possible. If it's not possible, try to move somewhere where it is.
We must be willing to be slightly inconvenienced for the greater good instead of arguing about which type of car to drive. People don't want to have that conversation, though.
Are they though? I mean you also don't have a gas station at the curb but you get by. Maybe you just need to charge at a public charging point. Just because you have an EV doesn't mean you absolute NEED to charge at home for it to make sense.
Public charging is almost as expensive as gas though
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I kinda think home charging is important. You never know when the public charger will have no spots.
I can fill my 35L tank, pay, and be on my way in about 2 minutes. That gives me about 750km of autonomy. That's why I don't mind not having a gas station at the curb.
I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.
It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.
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Typically the driving distances are pretty short in a city, so you don't have to charge that often.
The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.
I'd correct this to be "a smaller sized EV" versus "the smaller size of an EV" as many of the EVs on the market are surprisingly big. Without pointing to the obvious behemoth truck/SUV EVs, my Tesla MY is considerably larger than a lot of CUVs on the market and has a much worse turning radius. What it does do well is stop and start fast meaning I can be more decisive and navigate through messy NYC/BOS traffic with more confidence than in my CRV, and regen braking + having lower "idling" costs does improve its city-profile.
That's the irony of EVs. They're most useful in cities--short driving distances and less emissions in dense areas, but easiest for the consumer to use in the burbs where driving distances are longer and emissions are less of an issue.
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Funnily enough, I’m a city dweller with street parking.
How many cities offer both abundant street parking and abundant charging stations?
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I generally agree: I've owned two hybrids, and their high complexity leads to maintenance problems. (Toyotas seem to be the outlier.)
IMO, if you have a place to charge it, go EV. (I have a two-car garage for mine.) Otherwise, stick with ICE until the charging situation improves.
This isn't born out in the data, non-plugin hybrids are more reliable than ICE according to Consumer Reports.
> Hybrids, which combine a gas engine, electric motor, and battery, have 15 percent fewer problems on average than gas-only cars.
> EVs and PHEVs have about 80 percent more problems on average than gas-only cars.
A lot of EV/PHEV problems likely come down to them being much newer designs with issues that still need to be to work out, but hybrid vs. ICE is pretty clear. The e-CVTs, HV accessories, and simpler, less-stressed engines (no turbos which are quite common in efficiency focused ICE) enabled by hybrid drive-trains are big boons for reliability.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
Anecdotally, I've never heard this. I have an American hybrid from 10+ years ago with 90K miles and it's been super reliable. (Knock on wood...)
Given that you only really need 240 volts (or maybe 3 phase longer term), I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.
It's already happening in some places, maybe one day it'll be mandated.
I briefly worked with some people trying to "solve" this in the US. There's two major obstacles:
1: The power company is slow as molasses making new connections.
2: The networking protocols used for billing are "creative" and unreliable. This is why many EV charging stations don't work or don't take credit cards. (Basically, the protocol has too many options and spends far too much effort on pointless certificate exchanges.)
Building on that...
> I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.
Because if everybody plugs in at roughly the same time (think of everyone arriving home from work in the evening,) load will go much higher than the electrical service can handle. No modern apartment building or parking garage simply has enough wiring and transformers to handle all that: It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down to keep the load low enough so it doesn't trip a breaker somewhere.
Limiting factor appears to be distribution network capacity. Probably also production capacity.
Where I live many requested powergrid connections are put on hold permanently due to lack of capacity.
My live-in girlfriend has a Tesla that she has had for six years. We live in northeast Ohio, not a small population.
Each of us once a week have to drive far enough that we would public charge and the inconvenience is enough that we are getting a hybrid.
A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.
Something has to be very wrong if you're charging at all on a three hour trip, or taking an hour to charge. Do you have one of those mythical Canada-only stripper models that Tesla created as a dodge around regulations? One of those with a degraded battery is about the only way you can find yourself with a range barely over 100 miles.
I just recently did a 422 mile trip. Needed one 11 minute recharging stop.
My EV could probably make a 3 hour highway trip without charging, but it would put me dangerously close to empty when I arrived.
What do you spend the additional hour on? Charging for the ENTIRE 2hr trip, starting with an empty car, would take less than 30 minutes in my very average EV. A quick boost good enough for 100km (60mi) at 130 km/h (80mph) takes about 9 minutes. 1 hour of cumulative charging (well spaced) gets me about 750km (466mi) of range. Starting with a charged car gets me well into "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers, still on one hour of charging.
One hour of cumulative charging, well spaced, means at least 1.5 hours of actual lost time (exit highway, drive to charger - remember that most US highways do not have service areas as such, so you are interacting with regular local traffic for fuel stops, start/end charging, get back to and on highway) and probably more like two. Same drive with ICE-speed fueling has more like 30 minutes down time (if it’s just me).
If you have children or pets along, you will stop more, but then the question is whether the charging areas have the amenities that fuel stations do - available snacks, restrooms, pet relief areas, and at least the Tesla superchargers I have seen generally do not have the same level of availability for those.
Also, 750 km is well within single-day driving. I did 950 km each way in June, with pets and wife, and it took a touch over 11 hours each way (Google Maps estimates 9.5 hours of actual driving time without stops), and I don’t know any other American who would turn that into a two-day drive unless they couldn’t leave early in the morning. Though I’m sure they exist. There really wasn’t a good place to stop after just doing most of the drive. Either halfway, or all the way, or sleep in some awful hotel and eat up the better part of two extra days of your time off. (I get more time off than most, but I have to take a full week at a time - a break is a full week, or two full weeks, or three, but not extendable by an extra couple of days.)
> "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers
Yeah this is what gets lost in most conversations. The fraction of the population doing marathon road trips is actually pretty small. The average is more like 400-500 miles a day. That's a single stop at lunch time, rinse and repeat each day.
How badly has that pack degraded if you have to charge after 2 hours? We have a 2021 Tesla Y and can drive for 4 hours before needing to charge--assuming we start fully charged. The math doesn't seem to be mathing here.
OP is leaving something out of this story, because a 2hr trip is around ~130 miles. An EV with "300 mile" range can fairly reliably do 260 miles, and worse case, a quick 5 minute fast charge can get you the rest of the way home.
They might have an early model with a really small battery pack like the Model S 60. That car charges from 10% to 90% in about 40 minutes: very slow by modern standards.
> A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.
Even if you’re driving at 80, that’s a 160 mile trip. What Tesla does your gf have? What’s the range?
I disagree. Basically anywhere an ICE engine is used for whatever reason, it should be a hybrid instead. There are good enough reasons not to use EVs but there are zero practical reasons to not use a hybrid.
>Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
In NYC it's a nightmare to own an EV and rely on public charging.
I love the simplicity here. Another edge case - apartment management company doest allow installing EV - despite legality. Just bureaucracy is mind-boggling in EU. I'd rather have a hybrid that gives me 18-22 km / liter. We had one neighbour in the area who won after 3 years of fighting bureaucracy - Coming up with a proposal for the board meeting that happens once a year and taking all the feedback points, and working through the insurance companies to amend their standard practices.
As always, it's countries in the global south that can't get EVs because they are sold locally for twice the price of an ICE car, even when both are made by the Chinese. So hybrids, price wise are a middle ground because they use smaller batteries which are less expensive
Your comment could be featured in the recent Reddit “what are the clues someone has never been poor”.
Just buy the $48k Model Y instead of the $25k Corolla Hybrid, what's the big deal?
> Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.
Whoa, you're leaving out some pretty big demographics.
There are also a lot of people (the majority of people?) for whom EV charging is inconvenient or impossible -- apartment dwellers and people without driveways.
(Yes, yes, some apartments offer EV charging and some people without driveways can just run a charger out to the street)
sure but also you need to be an apt dweller wo home charging options AND have enough of a daily drive that you need to charge that much.
it would be interesting to correlate apartment dwellers with their weekly commute miles.
we could come up with the number that range needs to get to so that the majority of people could only need to charge once a week. I bet current mid-range evs cover a surprising amount of people. Just guessing but i bet the number is like 280miles a week in metro areas.
Then it's probably not really a big deal to find a public charger somewhere you'd be spending the hour or so anyway. you dont see any newish shopping center these days wo a bank or two of chargers but also lots of parks, libraries and other places youd go that dont cost money have chargers now too.
It feels like its worse, maybe not as "convenient" as going to a gas station but also gas stations are pretty terrible places. smelly with who-knows-what fumes, usually pretty grimy, requires handling of toxic chemicals. Its faster but all things considered i dont think its remotely a "better" way to do it.
Are you from a main Spanish city? Because the chargers are being set up but not so fast, and parking is not exactly an easy thing to find for most people.
Hybrids were a great solution 30 years ago. So many companies dragged their feet for so long they’re only putting them in everything now that the writing is on the wall it’s much too late.
Pathetic.
You really think people should get an EV when they don't have anywhere but public chargers to charge?
I really think relying on public chargers isn't a problem for hundreds of millions of people all over the world and I'd like people to consider getting an EV as their next car.
Before the War on Iran gas was equivalently priced to electricity in parts of California, like where I live, so a hybrid made more sense then. Especially as they are usually far cheaper than all electric vehicles
The coolest type of hybrid is obviously Toyota's original Prius design with the power split system. The point of it just to have a really efficient petrol car. If having a petrol car isn't something you want, then don't go hybrid.
Round here Toyotas almost immediately took over the taxi market. They're ideal for that use case: high milage, but stop/start in cities. Not seen many pure EV taxis yet apart from the occasional Tesla.
BEV deployment seems to be following fixed infrastructure. In Europe you can see it spreading out from Norway. Various mundane factors like "do I know there's charge points near where I go" and "does anyone I know drive an EV" affect adoption. That's why I quite like the UK green number plate stripe, it's a near costless bit of official EV promotion.
In Australia (Melbourne), EVs have taken over the taxi/Uber/DiDi services, the city is a 50km radius semicircle, and the airport is a fair distance from the CBD.
The charging network is still being built out, but for these type of services, it's a no brainer.
Just saw my first FedEx EV truck (inner city Melbourne) and all the posties use EV trikes.
I actually disagree. Why do you need a car for city trips? Most often you can take transport, a bike or walk. And in emergency situations take a taxi.
I have a car and use it only to go OUTSIDE the city, road trips and to the mountains / sea. That's why I think a hybrid is still the best option.
You disagree, but my post doesn't say anything about city trips..? I use public transport in the city. I use the car to visit family in the countryside (about 100 km away) and to go on trips and vacations. The EV works beautifully for all that.
I imagine one needs a car when living in the US.
In large US cities, a car is not necessary if one has sufficient health and determination to use alternatives.
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Try public transport or a bike in a city in south america and come back to talk about your experience