It helps a fair bit. The regen in my first Gen Insight is worse than in my second Gen Prius, which is worse than the regen in my first Gen plug-in Prius, which is worse than my Model 3.
At some point, the extra weight cannot be offset by more/better Regen and better fuel efficiency on gas where applicable, but going from a few kWh hybrid to a 10-20 kWh hybrid will usually be a net positive even with additional weight, all other things being equal.
Really? Why? adding a plug adds a couple pounds but other than that, the plug is neutral and the battery is a win since regenerative breaking is really useful.
Batteries are heavy, and even the weight for a modest sized (15-20kWh) one used for a PHEV is heavy enough (+500-700lbs) to impact the fuel economy enough where it is a net negative even accounting for regular hybrid recharging/regen braking.
You're better off with a significantly smaller regular hybrid battery (1-2kWh) or none at all instead of lugging around the weight of a discharged PHEV battery that'll never reasonably be close to charged from regular driving (unless your regular driving includes ~200 miles only steep downhill braking to fully charge the PHEV battery).
But wouldn't aggressive regenerative braking negate the weight penalty? The hybrid Toyotas I've driven are pretty weak here, but the Chevy Bolt I drove had very strong regenerative braking.
As for cost, well, that's what the subsidies are for.
A Prius Prime has a 161HP/120kW electric motor and a 13.6kWh battery.
Regen braking is usually able to capture 15-30% of the motor's output power.
You'd have to be at full regen for about 22 minutes to fully charge that battery. That's not a realistic driving pattern for a significantly large majority of people.
Even with an extra 200+lbs, having a bigger battery is better for Regen and offsets the additional weight to some extent.
If someone is a super conservative/disciplined driver, they can get the same mpg from a hybrid with a smaller pack, but most people don't want to hypermile their cars.
sure, but 90% of a car's energy goes towards fighting air resistance which doesn't change at all. (and ~20% of the ~10% energy penalty for accelerating gets returned when you brake)
Is this true? I recall reading that a large portion (75%?) is due to air resistance at highway speeds, but this is obviously much much lower at low speeds. I would be surprised if driving around town (which is where PHEVs are probably used a good deal, and where there's lots of stop-and-go) resulted in 90% of the energy going to fighting air resistance.
Exactly. For highway driving mass isn't all that relevant (it is to road and tire wear, but not for acceleration, after all you really only accelerate once). But in city driving mass is very important and air resistance is hardly a factor.
You still need other additional equipment to use the bigger battery. Electric motors aren't light either. Having bigger motors without power to use them is also a waste.
That is false. A Prius is a HEV and can't be charged and mine uses 40% less fuel than a similarly sized gas vehicle. Additionally, a PHEV typically gets at least 30% better fuel economy than a gas vehicle.
I rented a PHEV Chrysler Pacifica and I was disappointed that whenever it thought I was giving it too much throttle, it would kick itself out of EV mode and start the engine. There was no way to force it to use only the battery until depleted.
Why is that a bad thing? Was the transition clunky, leading to a bad driving experience? Or were you just strongly preferring to stay in battery-only mode at the time?
I’m not at all a car guy, but it’s possible that I follow EV-related tech more than the average car buyer. I thought it was fairly common knowledge that PHEVs will often engage the combustion engine, particularly at high speeds or under high acceleration (or even to prevent the gas in the tank from getting too old). I’ve never owned a PHEV but I always conceptualized it as an exaggerated version of the auto stop/start that most modern gas cars have, where you don’t really have direct control over the gas engine usage.
I have a Ford PHEV, and it never kicks on simply due to speed. If you accelerate very sharply it will turn on, but that almost never happens in my experience. And there is nothing that I'm aware of that causes it to use gasoline in order to prevent it from going stale.
It is not remotely like an exaggerated version of auto stop/start. You have control over EV-now, EV-later, and automatic settings. Some PHEVs are stingier on the EV-limited top speed, but in my Ford I can go with the flow of traffic on 280 without triggering the ICE.
The Pacifica is a bit different from other PHEVs in this way because the goal of its design was apparently for it to be super simple for soccer moms etc, and as such it doesn't have any modes, you can't say only use the battery or only use the engine, etc.
Presumably the primary reason is that PHEVs have much larger batteries and additional charging hardware and thus cost significantly more.
And I suspect car manufacturers have found that car buyers don’t understand the tradeoffs and advantages of PHEVs. If I’m right about that, it really is a shame, because PHEVs really should be an excellent way to fit the vast majority of people’s driving needs and also squeeze out the most electrification per unit of global battery production.
Sounds like an infrastructure problem if you need to go further than that just for work. But given you're French, vous êtes, selon toute probabilité, complètement d'acc.
A ton of people don’t have access to charging at home due to apartments or condos. Plus if they do it would likely be level 1, which is not exactly speedy.
I wouldn’t spring for a level 2 install for a 10-15 kWh battery.
I’m not sure PHEVs are the panacea many people seem to think they are. In theory most tris are short and could be covered by the battery. In practice do average owners do that?
Level 1 is perfectly fine for a hybrid. It will take ~5 hours to charge, but that's plenty for overnight/at work charging. You don't need 15 minute charging times when you have a 400 mile gas range.
I have a PHEV and love it, but level 1 for a ~14 kWh battery at 120 volts takes more like 12 hours. Level 2 was worth the cost and lets us basically never use gas for most day to day trips.
I haven’t seen detailed data on the distribution of daily mileage in the US, but I’m fairly confident that the average miles driven per day is under 40. A 40 mile range obviously wouldn’t cover everyone’s daily commute, but it certainly wouldn’t be rare. And going 80 miles a day with half of it electric isn’t shabby either.
I think that a lot of it comes down to marketing position and customer education/segmentation.
From a purely technical standpoint, the Prius has a 3.2kWh battery, and the Prius Prime has a 6.8kWh battery. The Prius Prime has a rated range of 44 electric miles, so presumably if you charged the Prius up to the max, it would get 20 miles or so. As an electric vehicle, this is extremely marginal. For people who keep their car in a garage with a power outlet most every night, many people would be able to dramatically reduce their gasoline usage if they started the day with 20 miles of charge.
The only problem is that it's not really an EV. The range isn't good enough where it's an EV except for road trips, and I think that on the Prius the gas engine kicks in above a certain speed or if you mash the accelerator, because the electric motor doesn't produce very much power. The result is that if you were to charge it every night, you might reduce your gas consumption by say, 75% or something.
Then this leads to a psychological problem, where people want to hold certain values, or not. They don't want to hold a value half way. For example, imagine that you thought that eating meat was murder. Would you then want to cut your meat consumption by 75% and feel good that you had reduced the number of murders you were routinely committing?
> From a purely technical standpoint, the Prius has a 3.2kWh battery, and the Prius Prime has a 6.8kWh battery. The Prius Prime has a rated range of 44 electric miles, so presumably if you charged the Prius up to the max, it would get 20 miles or so.
Is that right? The numbers I’ve seen are that the PHEV has a 13.6 kWh battery and the HEV has a much smaller battery, like less than 1 kWh.
My daily driver is PHEV and I love it. I’ll likely drive it till it disintegrates.
But. Very little people would care to charge PHEV on any regular schedule. So you end up getting more expensive car, with bigger battery, that’s driven just as a hybrid.
You can see that with current sales - they often are bought purely because of subsides, and used as normal hybrid.
As an anecdote, I know a handfull of people that exchanged their pricy SUVs for the equivalent PHEV version and where laughing at the fact they where getting roughly 10k of gov kickbacks for doing it, even though they didn't even have anywhere to plug in.
sure, but even if that's true when they sell their PHEV in a few years the next buyer will be able to plug it in and save a bunch of gas (and money). The cars we are making now will be around for another 20 years, so making vehicles that can plug in will mean that 10 years from now (as charging proliferates) they will use less and less gasoline.
There are still some vehicle classes that don’t have a lot of full BEV options. We wanted a small SUV (which, I know), and the BEV choices as far as I was aware were a $75k Tesla or a $100k Rivian. Kia and Nissan had PHEV SUVs, and Chrysler had a PHEV minivan. All were only available in the more expensive trims, but they were still much more affordable.
Annoying thing is that since PHEVs have a smaller battery they don't have fast charging. So you have to have a place to charge them overnight or at work. If you don't can't do that HEVs give you 30% reduction in gas usage vs ICE and save 3-4k over PHEVs
Going all hybrid is cool. Not giving customers a choice of a more powerful engine is not. A good acceleration is improving safety. I don't know why Toyota/Lexus decided to nerf all its cars this year
A simple new inventory search shows 99+ new 2024 Lexus ES350s for sale in my area (CA, USA), so yes I believe it still has the V6. It's just not available on the Camry anymore.
Yeah, I have a combustion Camry and recently borrowed a friend's hybrid Lexus while mine was in the shop and the hyrbid's shortened lag from pedal press to actual acceleration was probably the most notable difference between hybrid & combustion.
From the article: "The hybrid powertrain and a new electronic all-wheel drive system deliver 232 combined horsepower – nearly 15% more than the outgoing Camry with a mechanical all-wheel drive system, Toyota said."
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 53.0 ms ] threadA larger battery won’t do you any good if charged by regeneration unless you’re somehow always driving down a big hill.
There’s a reason hybrids like the non-PHEV Prius models have tiny batteries.
At some point, the extra weight cannot be offset by more/better Regen and better fuel efficiency on gas where applicable, but going from a few kWh hybrid to a 10-20 kWh hybrid will usually be a net positive even with additional weight, all other things being equal.
You're better off with a significantly smaller regular hybrid battery (1-2kWh) or none at all instead of lugging around the weight of a discharged PHEV battery that'll never reasonably be close to charged from regular driving (unless your regular driving includes ~200 miles only steep downhill braking to fully charge the PHEV battery).
As for cost, well, that's what the subsidies are for.
Regen braking is usually able to capture 15-30% of the motor's output power.
You'd have to be at full regen for about 22 minutes to fully charge that battery. That's not a realistic driving pattern for a significantly large majority of people.
https://www.sae.org/news/2023/04/2023-toyota-prius-prime-dri...
Even with an extra 200+lbs, having a bigger battery is better for Regen and offsets the additional weight to some extent.
If someone is a super conservative/disciplined driver, they can get the same mpg from a hybrid with a smaller pack, but most people don't want to hypermile their cars.
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2023-toyota-prius-prime-f...
You still need other additional equipment to use the bigger battery. Electric motors aren't light either. Having bigger motors without power to use them is also a waste.
The current Prius Prime compared to the Prius is interesting because Toyota traded performance for fuel efficiency with the plug-in.
In the last 2 generations of Prius, Toyota kept performance similar and the fuel efficiency of the plug-ins was better than the hybrids.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=32484&...
At this point, having a larger battery/etc should allow better fuel effective even with more weight assuming the same vehicle, performance, etc...
But they're $50,000 and that's too goddamn much so I'll continue polluting with my twenty year old volkswagen
If it's not going to work that way, it's just a hybrid with a few configuration tweaks.
It is not remotely like an exaggerated version of auto stop/start. You have control over EV-now, EV-later, and automatic settings. Some PHEVs are stingier on the EV-limited top speed, but in my Ford I can go with the flow of traffic on 280 without triggering the ICE.
And I suspect car manufacturers have found that car buyers don’t understand the tradeoffs and advantages of PHEVs. If I’m right about that, it really is a shame, because PHEVs really should be an excellent way to fit the vast majority of people’s driving needs and also squeeze out the most electrification per unit of global battery production.
I wouldn’t spring for a level 2 install for a 10-15 kWh battery.
I’m not sure PHEVs are the panacea many people seem to think they are. In theory most tris are short and could be covered by the battery. In practice do average owners do that?
More to the point though, even if you have a 40 mile commute, reducing gas consumption in half is still a massive win.
From a purely technical standpoint, the Prius has a 3.2kWh battery, and the Prius Prime has a 6.8kWh battery. The Prius Prime has a rated range of 44 electric miles, so presumably if you charged the Prius up to the max, it would get 20 miles or so. As an electric vehicle, this is extremely marginal. For people who keep their car in a garage with a power outlet most every night, many people would be able to dramatically reduce their gasoline usage if they started the day with 20 miles of charge.
The only problem is that it's not really an EV. The range isn't good enough where it's an EV except for road trips, and I think that on the Prius the gas engine kicks in above a certain speed or if you mash the accelerator, because the electric motor doesn't produce very much power. The result is that if you were to charge it every night, you might reduce your gas consumption by say, 75% or something.
Then this leads to a psychological problem, where people want to hold certain values, or not. They don't want to hold a value half way. For example, imagine that you thought that eating meat was murder. Would you then want to cut your meat consumption by 75% and feel good that you had reduced the number of murders you were routinely committing?
Is that right? The numbers I’ve seen are that the PHEV has a 13.6 kWh battery and the HEV has a much smaller battery, like less than 1 kWh.
But. Very little people would care to charge PHEV on any regular schedule. So you end up getting more expensive car, with bigger battery, that’s driven just as a hybrid.
You can see that with current sales - they often are bought purely because of subsides, and used as normal hybrid.
https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/real-world-ph...
As an anecdote, I know a handfull of people that exchanged their pricy SUVs for the equivalent PHEV version and where laughing at the fact they where getting roughly 10k of gov kickbacks for doing it, even though they didn't even have anywhere to plug in.
If you can charge at home or at work, then BEV's and PHEV's are great choices.
If you can't charge at home or at work (which is a lot of people) then a PHEV is added expense for no added benefit.
Camry does have V6 this year but it’s gone next year
Unclear this is the case, why do you say so?
Which from a pollution/microplastics standpoint isn't good, we need an improved sustainable tire asap.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/autoshow-la-camry/toyotas-ca...
Meanwhile, I’m sticking to used cars.