Comment by gwbas1c
4 hours ago
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.