One thing that always puzzled me was how the gas engines in hybrids were so efficient. Technology Connections has a great video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI
tl;dw: constant RPM and a weird stroke geometry where the power stroke is longer than the other strokes to extract more energy from the expanding gasses.
Yes, but it doesn't mean the overall system is better because of losses during the power conversion. It's usually better to have the engine driving the wheels directly which is possible with a continuously-variable transmission (CVT).
Glad you discovered the gem he is! What made me appreciate his expertise first? Most people use a dish washer wrong. His video will break it all down to help one understand how to use the typical dish washer in the right practical ways in which it was engineered.
Hopefully it’s better than the second gen. Gas engine front only puts power to one wheel and electric rear only puts power to one wheel while the other two sit idle.
Bad state for a mild 4x4 unless you keep it on pavement.
I forgot which marketing name it was, but one of Honda 1-motor systems that used the motor in clutch pack had a major design oversight that it can't handle a traffic jam in an incline, which happens in (of all places)Japan; the HV battery runs out and the car needs to be towed and/or driven at higher speed to both cool down and fill back up. Generator plus traction 2-motor systems feel stupid but it's necessary to cover those situations.
I remember one review of Mazda CX-90 hybrid (not plug-in) that reviewer genuinely didn't know why Mazda put such a small battery in there that's not enough for anything.
I drove a little Toyota Tahoe with the same tiny battery and the reason is clear -- it replaces first gear. So you can have much simpler and reliable transmission, and be more efficient at cities stop signs.
What's the Pareto principle, but for cars? My cx90 battery range is just over 35km... so in US that's a round trip of 10mi, i.e. 70% of all US car trips[0].
It does the daily commute a few times over, or one day of errands. It does a full charge overnight anywhere with a standard plug; but I have enjoyed EV only parking and fast charge when I'm on the road. I've only used gas for intercity trips, and then it still gets better milage than my 6-speed mazda 3 sedan. And it tows! My partner and I got a short camper trailer and we've spent this last summer doing campouts we never would have bothered with a tent.
Very versatile vehicle, I'm super satisfied with mine.
My cx90 convinces me that neighbourhood range evs are to cars what the air fryer is to ovens. I would ditch the beater mazda3 for ev kei car if I could. The petrol and Detroit 3 lobby is holding back the future on this continent.
Exactly, as owner of one of the latest versions of Nissan cars with e-Power, I just can say that it is extremely inefficient, especially during winter, plus it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany (it misses the "E" at the end of the car plate).
For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.
Non-plugin hybrids are just regular gas cars. It would be bizarre to give them any sort of preferential treatment in anything, though their rules are already strange to begin with (giving tax advantages to PHEVs and EREVs, which are almost exclusively used as pure gas cars).
We had the X-Trail AWD version of this. The plus side was getting around 850km to a tank of petrol.
However, the EV-only range was very poor and the engine was quite harsh sounding when it spun up.
Super happy to get rid of it and switch to BEV.
- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery
- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.
Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.
I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV.
We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).
Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.
> Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)?
Because it sells well? Because it's what a significant portion of people want?
> Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles
"Where", yes. "When" is a big question mark. If the transition will take several years to complete, which many bet it will, it makes perfectly sense to offer a car that people is willing to buy in the meanwhile.
The Chinese brands that you mention also offer hybrids: indeed most BYDs I see in the streets have the "DMi" tag, which is BYD's codename for hybrid. And they are investing in fuel engines, too. Only short-sighted euro burocrats think that since EV are the future we should immediately stop selling and innovating fuel cars.
The EV cars in UK have a green panel on the license plate so they're very easy to identify.
FWIW in most European countries I think sales of new fuel cars are scheduled to be banned within the next 5-10 years, so that puts a date on it I guess.
I read a thing recently that in the UK the used price of EVs is soaring now too due to the increase in demand. Diesel especially is really expensive now so people are looking to switch. At least in the UK there are more charging stations now than gas stations - totally viable to drive an EV anywhere and find a charger, you even get e.g. 350kw chargers in grocery store car parks now. I think the transition is well underway - I can't think of a reason you'd not but an EV if you were in the market for a new car in the UK. The only thing I guess is not having off-street charging at home, but more and more lampposts have chargers in them now et. It's only 400 miles between London and Edinburgh (about an 8 hour drive give or take) and some current EVs can do that without stopping.
There is really no excuse for it I think, apart from just not wanting one for your own personal reasons.
You can get a permit for a gun easily compared to a permit for a modern crossbow in some countries and in others crossbows are e.g. entirely forbidden for hunting.
I think these kinds of vehicles are fine for countries were fast charging networks are still not widespread. I drove a rental X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great given the quality of the powertrain. Of course a low displacement manual can get better fuel economy, and an electric will be cheaper, but if you are driving 800km on a country with little charging infrastructure, powertrains like this one or Toyota's eCVTs make sense.
Where did you get the 10L/100km figure from? I saw closer to 7L/100km when driving it, and the 2.2 diesel on the older X-Trails has about 100 less horsepower.
Machine guns are just paperweights if arrows are dime a dozen but 6.8x51mm is still at advanced stages of development. EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem and gas filling experience remains more than tolerable.
I am always a bit confused by this argument. You have to drive to a gas station to get fuel but it's not okay to drive to a specific place to charge. Most of the gas station where I live already have a few charging points backed by a big battery. Maybe that's not everywhere but I am not sure they are as rare as they are made out to be.
This prompted me to check how the UK Costco rollout of EV chargers is going, which seems to be proceeding slowly and is not all that much of a discount at £0.50/kWh. Type 2 plugs so slowish?
Most of the public chargers around me are level 2 - hours is correct. Though most are in places where I would expect someone is parking there all day anyway - the parking ramps downtown, campgrounds, and beaches. I don't know what the grocery store with level-2 chargers is thinking though - the range you can get level 2 charging during the typical grocery run isn't worth it. (if the chargers were on the far end where employees park it would make sense, but they are customer parking only)
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
Yes, AC chargers aren't meant to be the equivalent of "get gas and get back home". They're sometimes called "destination chargers". You plug your car in because you already need to be there.
If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.
Problem is level 3 chargers are a lot less common than level 2 - at least where I live. Some of those chargers are free which is nice when I happen to be in that area anyway, but most are not.
I think a lot more places like grocery stores and restaurants and what not should probably prioritize 50kW-ish DC fast chargers. Not so big you need to radically change the electricity at the property (some systems even have batteries to spread the load out), but still fast enough that customers hanging out for half an hour to a little over an hour will get a very solid charge.
EV charging needs to sort out the one thing they didn't have to innovate on: payment.
All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers the same way you'd supply candy bars have been sorted out and work perfectly, but paying with a credit card is often impossible? You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.
Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.
In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there.
- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).
- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these)
I've been driving a non-Tesla EV for several years now in the US, and have gone on many road trips. I sometimes make a point to try out new DC fast chargers around me, even if I don't really need the charge, just to see what their experience is like with a lot of the newer networks.
I haven't had to use an app to deal with payment for a fast charger in years. Practically all the major networks these days have ways to pay at the dispenser with a credit card.
The last time I used an app to charge was with some chargers at my office which were free for a few hours for tenants in the building, the app was needed to add my car to my approved account and once added it auto-detected and the app wasn't needed.
My car doesn't exactly go to Europe very often, its a pretty challenging drive. So I don't get why Europe having a different plug really makes that big of a difference in the end. Would it be nice if we could just have one world plug? Sure, but not too many cars from North America are going to accidentally find themselves in Europe without much planning.
As for charging protocols and plugs in the US, I've never really had too much of an issue. For a while it was pretty much just choose a non-Tesla charger and it'll be compatible. These days in this mixed period, lots of chargers support NACS and CCS, even Tesla. I got a free adapter from Ford but outside of using it once to test it out I've never used it.
My information is 6 months old: I borrowed an EV to travel around while visiting friends in the US. I've never had any issues paying with a credit card at a gas pump, but had an O(0.1) success rate with the EV charger. But I guess wherever you are the payment is sorted out better.
The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure. As I said, it was one of the few things they could just copy from the working model.
>The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure
You definitely have enough info to figure this out, but let me walk you through it.
What is the profit margin on the business of transporting or distributing commodity energy like electricity or a tanker full of gas? Not very good. It's a commodity, so you can't do much to improve your margins without someone else undercutting you.
Modern Businesses in America do not like the small profit margin of selling commodities. They like the "tech" standard of insisting that an app is a "Platform" or community and being able to extract whatever rent you want from it.
So they tried to control a "Platform" through the cars. It somewhat failed because it's finally a bridge too far for consumers, just barely.
Basically, a classic horror story of consumer rights is "What if your ford car only worked with ford gas?" which was not something possible to really do back in the early 1900s, but companies saw an opportunity to do exactly that with EVs, and they don't care that it made things worse and slower to roll out and harmed adoption, because there was a chance of infinite money!
In SoCal at least, public chargers are barely cheaper than gas, even with gas at $6.30/gal. Electric only makes economic sense if you can mostly charge at home.
The stupid thing is, yes, modern petrol and diesel cars are stupidly efficient[0], it's not uncommon to see 50-60mpg in a golf-sized car almost regardless of whether it's diesel or petrol.
[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......
50-60 miles per U.K. gallon. Or 11-13 miles per litre.
20 miles per us gallon is terrible, but it’s more like 25 miles per U.K. gallon, which isn’t much below what by 1984 Nissan mid sized car used to get 27 years ago.
I tend to use 45mpg/10mpl now, as both my old micra and my newer Skoda got about that. That’s about 37mpg (us).
Manual 2005 micra which I drove until last January was reliably 6.3l/100km. No aircon but did have electric windows. And a cd player.
Manual skoda kamiq which I drove until May was about 6l/100km
Those are real “how many miles did I drive, how many litres did I put in to fill the tank” figuresc although tend not to do a lot of inner city driving - because that’s what public transports for.
Nice to see the packaging improvements, but the modularity of the original leaf motor enabled them to be come a budget staple motor choice for ev conversion
This is coming out end of year in the U.S. in the 2027 Rogue. There will also be a gas powered 2027 with a CVT. It will be interesting how they compare, and also how the series hybrid compares to Rav4 or Corolla Cross with a parallel hybrid.
> To further improve fuel efficiency and output, ZR15DDTe engine uses Nissan's unique STARC*2 concept paired with a large turbocharger.
If we are able to consider fixed RPM operation and are willing to endure turbomachinery, I don't know why we wouldn't just go all in on a gas turbine. You can reduce the number of moving parts dramatically and accept a much wider range of fuels.
Being able to engineer everything around a one fixed operating speed makes a huge engineering difference. Reciprocating engines are responsive to load and speed changes, but there are trade offs in many other categories.
You can also make a gas turbine power module quite small relative to the alternatives. Replacing the it at major service intervals could be made economically viable.
I suspect that the improvement in efficiency is small enough at the scale of an automotive power plant that it wouldn't be worth it.
Reading around suggests that in order to achieve decent efficiency from a gas turbine, you need quite a few supporting systems that only really make economic sense at larger scales (like the 10's of MW scales, not the 100's of kW).
(Although just from a fun technology angle I'd love to see a gas turbine in a car).
The trick in this scenario is the fact that you can run it at a constant RPM + load for a reasonably long duration. The cost of warming up a recuperator and other masses is amortized across a dependable schedule each time. The controller can ensure that the turbine (assuming the drive is long enough) will run for a minimum duration given a certain battery charge level.
The reason this stuff didn't work before is because we couldn't run the turbine this way. Now we have viable energy storage technology and can make some of the most difficult variables into constants.
That would be very cool. I wonder if you could get it through legislation though. I think all the legislation is based around reciprocating IC engines.
You might as well just use a small regular petrol/diesel engine.
The argument about fewer moving parts is often made. But generally turbines are more expensive to make. They require much more precision engineering and probably require more maintenance.
This has been tried, but back in the day the automatic transmissions weren't really up to it, and they don't really like thermal cycling. And they're noisy. Exact opposite of modern stop/start petrol engines for urban driving.
I also suspect all attempts to keep doing combustion engines for mainstream driving are going to get gradually overtaken and lapped by BEVs.
It was tried in the 60s and 70s, most seriously by Chrysler, and the emissions and drivability weren't great because it was in the "we need to get it working good before we go back and mop up all the other stuff" phase or R&D. The fuel crisis plus the state of automatic transmissions at the tie kept it a back burner item so development was slow and not a priority nor did other OEMs invest seriously.
Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.
Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.
I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.
>Think if it like this - is the turbine exhaust hot? Then you are losing energy.
Turbines for land uses have heat exchangers to get a lot of this back. Even after those the turbine is still lighter for a given power output and lifetime. But normal engines are a lot cheaper.
In my mind the alternative to a box car is something like the 8th generation Corolla liftbacks, or station wagons. If they were a little larger, I think they could compete with SUVs with regards to the trade-offs between style and space. I think that station wagons and liftbacks have more room for style than SUVs do.
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'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.
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).
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
> For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.
It makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.
Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560. Let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.
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.
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.
You have to get out of the car, unscrew the cap, the pump takes a bit to get started, pumps go at like 30 liters per minute if you're lucky or 10 liters per minute if you're not, the screw the cap on, then you have to pay, which typically means walking inside, standing line line for unknown amount of time, pay. You probably can't get gas in less than five minutes.
Why are accusing people of being disingenuous and then lie about such easy to disprove thing?
"Structure your life around charging" You emotional EV haters are ridiculous.
It's really not like that. It may seem like that from things you heard a few years ago, but even then, in the last four years, I haven't experienced any of this. Your car tells you when you'll need to charge on a road trip, and those chargers are at places that have food, or a bathroom, so you stretch your legs for a few minutes or eat something. Outside of road trips, it's not even a consideration.
Around me gas is $4.00/gallon right now, and the public fast charging station closest to me is $0.39/KWh. It’s actually cheaper to burn gas unless you get less than ~30mpg (at least for my EV which gets about 3.2M/KWh). But I charge at home at about $0.14/KWh so it’s much cheaper than gas.
Given the proliferation of public charger competition, I haven't run into this in the last two years. In 2023, I think I waited 10 minutes once in a rural area.
It was always an issue, but he ended up moving to a more surban place. If you drove to work daily and they had charging it wouldn’t be an issue. Rapid charging isn’t that quick.
Though at my old office they started limiting time at the chargers. The city has recently started having public chargers.
One of the selling point of electric is you always start out with a full ish charge.
I’m on my bike on most days I commute. I like it better. Except in the winter where the lack of plowing of these separated bike lanes forced me onto public transit, which I don’t love. My car (2010 element) is gas but I only fill every 3 or so weeks.
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.
Probably not. Often that 15a is shared with several others nearby. In many cases there is a light sensor on one light that controls them all. Sometimes the transformers that supplies them isn't big enough for more load.
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
There’s a genuine technical issue: the AC EVSE protocols (J1772, NACS, etc) have several safety features that are far in excess of anything you’ll find in a regular 15A NEMA receptacle. I don’t think it would be wise to gave high traffic NEMA receptacles on fully weather-exposed streetlights.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
AIUI, Tesla really screwed the pooch here. For the original Model S, Tesla really really wanted the US model to tuck the charge socket under the little hinged reflector, and they couldn’t figure out how to fit the Type 2 “Mennekes” connector their. So they invented their own socket (which evolved into NACS), and the Tesla one is rather inferior to Type 2, at least when used for AC charging.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
European Model S has Type 2 in that location, only ones that don't fit is the Type 2 CCS with giant DCFC pins below the regular Type 2. NACS is just Tesla doing Apple.
NACS is far less clunky than CCS. And don’t get me started on ChaDeMo - my best guess is that whoever designed it thought that big heavy awkward gasoline nozzles where cool and wanted their EV chargers to be at least as massive.
ChaDeMonis basically dead now other than for existing cars. A typical U.K. service station will have 20 ccs chargers for every chademo, and nobody is deploying the latter for new places.
Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.
I think massive CHAdeMO plugs might have been for ultra rapid charging that never rolled out. There are brochures of 350kW+ watercooled CHAdeMO charging test equipment floating online, noted as plug limited to 200kW, dated at least as far back as 2015. That was when Tesla was still rolling out V2 150kW. So the plug overall dimensions and pin sizes are probably way overspecced for what it is in practice.
3 phase has a property that the total power is (with fully balanced loads and no harmonics) constant. But n phases, equally spaced in phase angle, each an RMS voltage V from ground, with RMS current I per phase in phase with the voltage to ground, gives power n•V•I. (I’m assuming that n>=2 so that there is no neutral current.) There’s no savings for n=3 vs n=2.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
> Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs
Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.
It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.
It wasn't a matter of aiming low. NACS is arguably the perfect connector for the North American marketplace, once you discount the temporary inconvenience of migration. And the only other option on the table was a migration to CCS1, which would have been an objectively worse choice in literally all respects. CCS1 is more cumbersome, more fragile, and never enjoyed any numerical/incumbent advantage, peaking at 31% of deployed vehicles and plugs.
Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.
There is not enough street lamps to charge a meaningful fraction of cars. I mean, look at the streets, there is so, so many cars, parked everywhere they can fit.
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
And how many amps does the street light draw? And how many are on the same circuit? How much extra capacity is there on that circuit to charge a car? I'd bet it's close to zero.
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.
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.
Hybrids have much more efficient ICE motors, which generate less CO2 than the motors of traditional cars. The amount of CO2 is further reduced by energy recovery.
TFA links another page where it is explained how the ICE motors used in Nissan hybrids have surpassed 50% efficiency, which is an efficiency that in the past was reached only in huge 2-stroke Diesel engines for ships.
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.
Kind of true in the downtown areas of many large cities, but becomes pretty untrue once you get further out there.
Whenever I travel for work I usually try to first experience what its like walking, taking transit, and then finally take rideshare/taxis. I often find a lot of the cities I've been to, you end up practically relying on rideshares unless you're down to walk through spaces which are very unsafe for pedestrians and have some rather long walks. I often end up renting cars on second trips to those cities.
Sufficient determination reads as a lot of free time and few responsibilities. It's not realistic, even in a city like Seattle, for anyone outside of maybe their 20s.
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.
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.
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.
> It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down
This alone would be a deal breaker for me - get home from work and plug-in to get ready for a long drive later that evening or the next morning only to find that the charging was slow and I wasn't fully charged? No thanks.
No residential charger, whether that's home or apartment building, is powerful enough to charge your vehicle that fast. You would need to go to a supercharger or equivalent.
Besides why would you drain your battery during the day, go home, and then drain your battery again? That's a lot more mileage than you realize.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There used to be a really classic old website called Mr. Sharkey (you can see some of it on archive.org). He was into a number of different weird and wonderful hobbies. One of them was a VW Rabbit powered by something like a 24hp DC motor and lead acid batteries.
One of the most interesting projects he did was to build a trailer from the front clip of a similar VW Rabbit, engine and transmission etc. He then used this trailer in a pusher configuration to take the electric VW Rabbit on extended trips. The engine was controlled by a hand throttle in the car. Apparently the handling was surprisingly acceptable in this configuration.
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.
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.
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.
You don’t if where you’re coming from has a charger. But for instance, she drives two hours away to another city and stays overnight and drives back in the morning and there isn’t a charger near her hotel there.
I drive two hours to a different city to see a hockey game, and there isn’t one by the arena, and I want to drive back two hours.
You’re charging somewhere and it’s rarely convenient in the Midwest.
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.
> "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.
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.)
Yeah but if the charger is 15 minutes out of your way, or it’s not got one open, or whatever. There’s real time other than charging in public frequently.
Depends a lot on terrain. Las Vegas to SD is brutal for elevation. Only 332 miles but I had to stop to charge twice in order to arrive with at least 20% charge in my 330mi range EV. Maybe I could have done it on 1 stop but I didn't want to risk getting my family stranded.
That is a fair point. Although ABRP tells me I should be able to do it with a single 11 minute stop, only bringing SOC up to 55%. But to be completely honest, I have not driven the route, so ABRP estimate is the best I have to work with (it is usually a good match for me).
Ohio probably does not have a hill higher than ~1500 ft within a three hour drive :).
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.
Part of the difficulty in understanding the problem for others is that they simply don't drive very far, very often. Our pickup has a range of over 750 miles with a full tank. It's not unusual for the tank to have to be filled two days back to back: my wife drives a lot. When you're driving that much, the last thing you want to do is stop if you don't have to.
It looks like this is common, but it is not. It's insanely rare. But because people with these .1% edge cases comment every time they can, they look more prevalent.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't really see a lot of public chargers here in the NE USA, but it's also highly likely I'm simply not looking for them either.
Taking an hour out of my day a few times per week to charge an EV someplace public also sounds like a huge PITA. However, I agree that it's worth it for environmental reasons. I would probably also learn to like it. It's like going to the laundromat. Nobody likes it... but it's also an excuse to chill out and read a book for an hour or two! (or whatever)
ya chargers are sneaky, i bet they are there, you just dont notice them. itll be a couple of stalls off in the corner of a lot. its def not perfect yet either, there needs to be more.
totally
agree it would be a little annoying and things like workplace chargers or more chargers at apartments would
make all the difference here, but its also zen, and like maybe a reason to get out of your house and find something to do is actually good for us. or ya know just chill in your car while it charges and watch tv.
but id still take an ev for total lower level total level of annoyance when you factor in everything from driving experience, maintenance, longevity, comfort, noise, smell, no gas stations, environment guilt. the overall user experience for evs is just better for most things and the for now annoyance of charging logistics is the trade off.
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.
Way back there was a news story about one of those, in which the owner didn't pay the licence fee for the software, so the software company bricked their parking garage with loads of people's cars inside.
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.
Walkable towns and cities should always be a major consideration for human needs. Especially because most people go through stages in their lives of being young children, sickness, injury, having young children, ageing and losing ability with age in a way that isn't traditionally considered 'disabled' but functionally is. Relying on being able to afford and drive a car as a neccessary part of life is a terrible idea.
Even in Japan there are plenty of places that public transit does not reach. Or, public transport is incredibly rare.(Only one bus in the morning and afternoon, and nothing else, for example)
Walkable "towns" stop working when you need to leave town.
I do not have a car, because I do not need one. The same does not apply to my friend who is a forester.
Transit options are a major consideration, and cars are absolutely part of that. They aren't cheap, and assuming it's just a car company issue is daft and disrespectful.
Yeah, so few households that still own a car but don't use for commute choose cheaper ICEs that require no attention during weekdays. Then company cars driven weekdays when necessary remain ICE for familiarity as well as various EV chicken and egg problems.
The canonical American setup of a house with a garage where you can charge your car is exceedingly rare in Tokyo. Most people live in apartments and don't have cars, and even suburbam houses rarely have garages. If they have cars, they're parked in the apartment garage or a monthly contract parking lot, neither of which has charging.
It's a solvable chicken and egg problem, and China cracked it, but for time being Japan is way behind the curve in EV adoption.
The trays that hold cars are either passed between different rails or rotated around like a paternoster lift(the Prague city hall weird elevator thing). It's just incompatible with the concept of a cable, and a third rail or giant bus bar docking plug upgrades for those systems would be too costly and risky.
Maybe that might have happened already if Japan was as insane as it was in 1995, but it just costs too much right now.
You’d think they could have a connector which lined up fairly easily when storing them and building a new one. Have a standard 30kW supply which automatically plugs in, then powers an on ramp charger. Not every ramp/spec would need the electic, only cars that need charging.
Yeah, they do exist but IIUC, real world deployments are rare. I totally forgot about this when writing the original comment, but a lot of these systems can't take many SUVs and all Tesla vehicles(including Model 3) mainly due to width and also to height. Maybe that is a compounding factor for rarity of those upgrades.
I don't know, but people do buy cars so long their financial and parking situations allow. Many seem to be used for non-daily/non-daytime purposes(Home Depot/IKEA/Costco, kids/pets/luggage too loud/bulky/stinky for trains, had a bad day and must hit touge at 2AM, whatever). ICEs probably fit those use cases better than commuter EVs as they are, which are built around constant trickle charges and regular driving.
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.
I don’t consider that an edge case, that’s just another person who can’t charge at home. A huge percentage of people will never be able to charge an EV at home. People associate EVs with home charging because that’s why the early adopters would get them, but it’s not supposed to be a prerequisite for owning one.
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
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.
I watched a technology connections video that explained Hybrids in a way I hadn't heard before. Basically the gist was that because ICE cars need to be able to handle a wide range of operating conditions (accelerating uphill, creeping in traffic, coasting at 60), there are design constraints on the engine that a hybrid engine doesn't have. A hybrid battery can smooth out rapid bursts of power and recharge during less intense moments. The result is a hybrid engine can run in its most efficient speed most of the time (and apparently have a different design altogether that is more efficient somehow)
Ultimately even after conversion losses a hybrid can be more efficient than just directly driving the wheels. I think most people understand that part but the reason behind it was never obvious to me.
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.
So if you compare a diesel to a petrol-hybrid, and you use the diesel's NEDC rating and compare it to the hybrid's WLTP rating, then number bigger!
Lets make a real comparison: The NEDC combined rating for the 2025 e-POWER is 5.4l/100km (FWD). The 2018 diesel version you linked uses 5.6l/100km, and the petrol 2018 version uses 6.2l/100km.
For a truly fair comparison you could have looked at the non-e-power versions from 2025, which come in at 7.4l/100km.
e-POWER listed data is massaged NEDC rating. Real life users report closer to 7L combined cycle for 2025 e-POWER model, and it goes all the way to 10L pure long highway driving (no recuperation). In contrast diesel model does the sticker mileage.
I should have been more specific - PHEV vehicles with significant battery capacity.
I think the Prius is something like a "traditional hybrid" or "mild hybrid" (I don't fully remember) which comes down to battery size and how exactly it moves the car.
My point is basically: modern PHEV hybrids are supposed to be used by charging the battery and filling the tank and their MPG ratings come from a carefully determined protocol of doing that, where as owners treat them as traditional/mild hybrids and just fill the tank.
I imagine that regen braking will push that battery charge up a bit but just doesn't overcome the added weight of the large battery plus motor, engine, transmission etc to get the really great MPG rating.
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
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.
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.
If you live in large parts of the USA, by which I mean pretty much anything that is not the eastern seaboard or California, and you need to go anywhere remotely rural, charging infrastructure is absolutely not reliable.
I have an EV, which is amazing in my metro area, but I regularly take trips where I would not feel comfortable finding a place to charge, despite what EV locator maps might tell you. If you show up and that charger is not working, which is not uncommon, you might be stranded.
I don’t see why the future shouldn’t be bike + public transport + EV. That’s what I’m personally going for. In fact, unless EVs disappear from the market for some reason, I will never buy an ICE car again.
I have tried moving two adults about 750 km in a day in an EV repeatedly, the last time was just a few weeks ago from Czechia to Italy and then back a week later. I imagine the EV will be even less noticeable with kids, because we’ll need to stop even more often because of them.
I agree in general, however there is one small issue here. First I have an EV and love it. I would not buy another gas car for myself or my wife. The issue is I need to purchase a car for my kid who is in the process of applying to medical school. Depending on where they go, an EV could be an issue. It is not that the school will not have chargers, it is that they will be living in an apartment which will likely have no place to charge. This is the reason I am looking at a hybrid.
Same here. I'm on my 2nd EV, and will be getting my 3rd soon. Driving an ICE car would feel like using an old flip phone instead of a smartphone.
But for my daughter, she will be off to college soon. You can't guarantee apartments will have chargers. And the school she'll mostly likely go to is close enough to drive to/from, but far enough that it would need at least 2, maybe 3, recharges for an EV. It just isn't practical.
An EV isn't right for every scenario, even if for many it is.
It adds at least an hour to a long trip already. Plus, it isn't guaranteed that the stops will be in optimal locations for the route, so it could likely be 3 stops.
The biggest issue with fast charging on trips that I've encountered is actually getting to the chargers only to find all of them in use and a queue of cars already waiting to charge. So that 30 minute charge turns into 30-60 minutes of waiting for a 30 minute charge.
Fast charging for a trip is still not anywhere as easy as finding a gas station. Stopping for 30-90 minutes every 3 hours of driving make those long trips feel maddeningly longer.
As a follow up, went with a full EV. She is now away at a train camp for her EMT cert and there are nothing but slow Level 2 chargers around there. The good news is the car range is over 300 miles, so she will good. The nearest Level 3 faster charger is 45 miles away which is no issue for her trip home.
I guess you don’t travel by car except for work commutes?
I’m a few years into PHEV ownership now, and I’m so glad I didn’t get an EV. Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger. And chargers are VERY sparse everywhere I’ve been.
With my RAV4 Prime, I get 40-50 miles of EV range, enough that most days I use zero gas. But if I want to hit up the beach or mountains, or take a cross-country trip, or drive up to PA or VA to visit my girlfriend’s family, there’s zero hassle to find a charger. It just reverts to a normal hybrid once you run out of electric-only range (around 20% of the battery’s actual capacity).
It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”
I'm from the flat parts of the US midwest. Interesting stuff can be hundreds of miles away. There is absolutely a culture of cramming the family in to the car or RV the moment a long weekend starts and driving late in to the night to reach the destination, getting a day or two there, then hauling ass to get home in time to be back to work/school the next day.
That said, I also daily drive an EV and have no trouble road tripping it. I'm older, I can't just drive 500 miles only stopping for gas and restrooms like I used to, so a 15 minute stop every 1:45 or so is no big deal.
Back when I had a gas car it was a Fiesta ST, which is a great daily driver but a terrible road trip car, so I was already in the habit of renting a car if I was going to be on the road for longer than 8ish hours. This car is more comfortable so I probably won't rent if I'm not in a hurry, but if I feel the need to knock out 1000 miles as quickly as possible the option will always remain.
I don’t commute and I use the EV almost exclusively for trips, including a few countries over, but my EV also isn’t replacing the unique US model of “I spend half my waking hours driving a tank around 3rd world charging infrastructure”, so I can’t relate to some of the answers here.
In all seriousness, you're correct in re: to probably 90%+ of the population. There are definitely still areas where an EV can be challenging as your only vehicle, but those are places with pretty specific circumstances. They're deeply rural, they demand a lot more miles driven per user per year than most areas, there's more practical applications that EVs just aren't good enough at yet and there's a weird cultural resistance to EVs in a lot of those places. Even that's changing, though. It's just slower. Honestly, it's developing a lot faster even in these holdouts than I thought it would.
> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
Curious what you're using for comparison for "performs better." There are lots of 300-400+ HP EVs when you consider the cost of a RAV4 Prime ($41.5K-$50K USD)
I agree it's a bit privileged to expect people to start converting over to EVs wholesale, especially with the current political climate that's disincentivizing new EV production and charger networks. Moreover, as others point out, if you can't charge at home, the math and logistics stop being quite so favorable towards EVs.
However, as someone who made the jump to an EV a few years ago, if you can manage it it's more reasonable than a lot of people think. I too live in the Triangle of NC, and my current EV cheerfully gets me to the beach every year and up to visit family in Virginia without breaking a sweat. This year, I used ABRP (A Better Route Planner app) to plot out the beach drive and it was as smooth an experience as I've had making that trip. Yes, we had to stop for a charge (because I hadn't charged fully before we left), but I had the chance to grab a snack and stretch my legs for fifteen or twenty before setting out again, so I honestly didn't mind. A lot depends on where people need to go, but thus far I haven't found a lot of places where the chargers are so sparse I really had to worry about it.
I would have to stop once for 10-15 min to cover that 400-mile round trip in my EV (Hyundai Ioniq 5). I've driven 900-mile days, in the winter, through snow, without issue, in the same car. It takes marginally longer.
> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
My own anecdote is that I vastly prefer driving an EV on road trips. The lack of noise and gear shifts, regen braking, etc., all make it a much less draining experience.
> This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”
This is a very different story for countries that don't have high import tariffs on Chinese vehicles. EVs there are fast becoming the cheaper option.
Trains are where it's at. Surface, metro, tram. Eventually insurance rates will come down for people who travel by train when everyone realises that being distracted as a train passenger doesn't kill or injure others or cause years worth of salary in damages.
There is a zero hassle to find a charger for most EVs. The car tells you where to go, it is generally built into the navigation. You would not need to limit yourself to places to stay with a charger.
> Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger.
I bought an EV just under a year ago and because I park literally right next to my electrical panel I figured I'd probably end up installing a 40 amp EVSE within a few weeks. Here we are, again nearly a year later, and I'm still using the standard 120v L1 cable the car came with because it's plenty. The only time I'm getting below 50% are on road trips where fast chargers are easy to come by.
As a matter of fact the last two vacation rental homes I've stayed in have been in North Carolina, one on Topsail Beach and one near Black Mountain. The one near Black Mountain actually had a 14-50 outlet outside specifically for charging cars or plugging in RVs but both had plenty of 5-20 outlets around the outside
> 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.
Or do not have a garage, driveway, nor any other parking spot besides on the street, so can't charge at home.
That's still (usually) the public paying for it. Parking permits are generally hilariously cheap compared to the market value of the land they reserve.
> Parking permits are generally hilariously cheap compared to the market value of the land they reserve.
The "reserved" land is a street: what else is it going to be used for except transportation?
The house I'm in was built before cars were even invented (1890s) and there were streets then, but even as early as 1907 cars were being used (there are photographs of my neighbourhood with them).
The people that complain about 'free parking' conveniently forget that land owners pay property taxes, vehicle and fuel taxes, and other taxes which go to maintaining the public roads. So it's not free. And society built a lot of infrastructure which requires most people to own a car in order to survive in it. That sort of bitching is the classic case where you shift blame to individuals for systematic issues beyond their control. And how much blame people get depends on class of course.
> The people that complain about 'free parking' conveniently forget that land owners pay property taxes, vehicle and fuel taxes, and other taxes which go to maintaining the public roads. So it's not free.
A common resource that is unmetered just ends up being abused. There's lots of data on this, e.g.:
And I'm not sure if the various taxes that are paid actually cover the costs of all the roads (never mind the externalities causing climate change). Certainly there is a lot of public utility to paved roads/highways such that some level of 'subsidy' is probably warranted, but I think that congestion pricing needs to be done a lot more too:
Plenty of people in Seattle just run the charging cable from the house across the sidewalk with one of those little ramps over it. And we've got a whole bunch of chargers on electricity poles, they are starting to proliferate around neighborhoods.
> Plenty of people in Seattle just run the charging cable from the house across the sidewalk with one of those little ramps over it.
That only works if you park your car on the same side of the street as your house: that is not true in my case. That charging cable would be running across the road itself.
Our utility poles are also on people's property, so the charging cable would lay across the sidewalk.
>the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs
Hybrids are less expensive than EVs. They are complicated, I suppose, but the evidence is quite clear they are more reliable than pure gas designs, so this is not an issue in practice.
>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.
I have never seen a car behave like this and am fairly sure you haven't, either. It is telling that even your strawman argument is emotional.
>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.
Even under circumstances ideal for an EV, a plug-in hybrid will win. Way cheaper, way more flexible, and just as efficient for the large majority of driving.
We bought an EV 1.5 years ago. Yes, hearing gas vehicles start up around you is definitely a thing, although where I am I think it's mostly not hybrids but cars equipped with start/stop feature that shuts off the engine at stop lights. You can also hear if someone punches the throttle around you - even at freeway speeds you'll hear their engine rev up as the transmission shifts, and if you want to you can put your foot down and accelerate before all that shifting is done and before they've even begun to accelerate.
Regarding fuel costs - it's much cheaper to operate our EV than a comparable hybrid but this absolutely relies on access to a home charger and is dependent on local gas and electricity prices. A comparable hybrid might get 35 mpg, we get around 2.5 miles/kWh (these are minivans) - and so our breakeven point in electricity cost (using $4.50/gallon gas cost) is $0.32/kWh. In my area, electricity is fairly cheap, around $0.14/kWh and I use a plan that lets me pay $0.07/kWh at night when I charge. That's offset by me paying slightly more for other things in the day so my effective cost might be closer to $0.10/kWh, which is still 1/3 of the breakeven point. On long road trips I will likely pay above that but that only happens a few times a year.
Our experience on long highway trips, which practically tend to be repeated cycles of 2 hours of driving and 20 minutes of charging is that they have been more comfortable and we felt better at the end of the trip despite it taking longer door-to-door. This is based on a couple 1400 mile round trips, one w/ 2 people in the vehicle and another w/ 4 and a full load of stuff.
The EV experience is superior to ICE or hybrid. Smooth, silent, quick, you can run the A/C in your garage w/o stinking up the place. The flip side to range anxiety (which is a real thing at first but goes away) is that our EV is always ready to go in the morning and I never end up smelling like gasoline. Yes, my lawn mower is battery powered too.
Given how Americans have not prioritized running costs in vehicle purchases in the past and trucks/SUVs heavily outsell cheap economy cars, I think as more folks see how good the experience is, they'll buy EVs over gas cars even without understanding the math above.
most people don't understand hybrids i believe, and this video [1] (aptly titled) explains well how they work.
plug-in hybrid don't make sense to me based on the op's experience, but the regular hybrids (where you don't charge the battery) makes perfect sense today, more than ever arguably. same tech as f1 cars fwiw (not that this season they are being very favoured)
> "Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs."
I watched the recent Technology Connections video[1] on the Toyota hybrid drivetrain, where he claims that people misunderstand the purpose, and I had. I assumed it was to use battery for stop-start city driving and engine for everything else, but no, it's about fuel efficiency. Only the battery and motor can move the car. Regenerative braking reclaims some energy, and the engine charges the battery.
That means it doesn't inherit the most expensive parts - an ICE car needs the engine sized large enough for the most power-demanding situations, but this can use a smaller engine because the battery can boost it when power demand is high (acceleration). That means the engine is cheaper and smaller than a pure ICE car and the battery is cheaper and smaller than a pure EV. The engine can run on the Atkinson-cycle which is too gutless for an ICE car, but is more fuel efficient. This is why it might need to start the engine after pulling away, because it needs to keep enough battery charge to have power available for boosting the weak engine.
Because it's always motor-moved it has no gearbox or transmission, which is simpler and cheaper than I had imagined two drivetrains would be. And the mechanism is very clever.
I personally do understand how Toyota’s hybrid drivetrain works, I’ve driven it a lot, seen the consumption figures and I think it’s a great technology. Still, seeing how well my EV works on any kind of trip (5km to 750km), a hybrid Corolla simply doesn’t offer anything that I’d want.
Ironically, these solutions would be perfect for boating use, if only they used a diesel engine instead. Regular ICE will not go away anytime soon in marine world and I don't think they see the sales potential here if they developed their powertrains with that usage in mind as well.
Aren't boats typically highly geared direct drive? Hybrid only really benefits when you have lots of changes in speed or are using it for torque conversion as in diesel-electric trains.
An every-day diesel-electric locomotive solves the gearing (torque) problem, and can let the engine run at the most-efficient speed that can produce the required power output. The required output power is dynamic, so in practice the diesel engine runs at a variety of speeds along a given route across the plains or over the pass or whatever.
It's hard to make an engine that runs at peak efficiency at a range of speeds and power demand. But batteries are added, the picture can change quite a lot.
The engine can be built and sized to run efficiently at a fixed speed, and its power output never needs to exceed whatever the generator that it drives is able to convert to electricity.
So when it runs, the combined engine+generator set can be run full-assed. No half-assing required. It's a binary state. On, or off. Full-staff, or flaccid.
By reducing variables in this way, all of the fuel that is burned gets converted to electrical power as efficiently it can be for the process at-hand. (It's also easier to quiet an engine that runs at a fixed speed than one that runs at variable speeds; things get a lot simpler when there's only one set of identified frequencies to bother with.)
While the engine is on, some of that electrical power can get used for driving an electric motor for propulsion and the rest can go into a battery.
If it is on and the vehicle is stationary, then all of that electrical power can go into a battery while the engine is remains at full-chooch.
When the battery gets full-enough and/or demand is low-enough, then the engine can just turn completely off. In this mode, all of the electrical power used for propulsion then comes from the battery.
It works. There's even some boats[1] that use these concepts.
It's just an unusual arrangement for now. (It may always be an unusual arrangement if the goal is to eliminate localized combustion of fuel, but we keep being reminded over and over on these pages, whenever a headline about vehicular electrification comes by, that we aren't quite uniformly there yet.)
I’m moray the government subsidies rural petrol stations because demand is falling (about half of stations have closed in the last 15 years). About 40% of cars on the road are electric now, and that’s increasing rapidly as 95% of new cars are electric.
It will be interesting to see how much more subsidy ICE cars require as they disappear over the next 10 years.
Around me (Ohio, USA), nearly every car I see is gas-fired. I only see an occasional EV; they tend to stick out, and they're very unusual.
Things look different when I travel to different areas of the US, though. Poorer areas have even fewer EVs than I see around here, while wealthier areas have a lot more of them.
It's a little bit unusual for me to encounter an EV at all during my ~daily driving (often about 40 miles, all said).
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For my part: My lifestyle requires a minivan that can serve as a work truck. There are zero EV options for that here.
But if I could get one with 250 or 300 miles of capacity, then I'd have a new goal. :)
Probably not all that rural by US standards, but it is by UK standards.
The EV rollout is still early stages here too. If we had regional electricity pricing (contentious question!), Scotland would have cheaper electricity and potentially at zero on many occasions.
These EREVs are going to last one cycle; the solid state battery tech is going to decimate their principal and you will be forced to choose between EREVs that cost slightly less than EVs and still inherit all complications of a hybrid powertrain or just go with the BEV for a few thousand more.
>>EREVs/series hybrids don't get better fuel economy
They sure do if 80% of your driving is done purely on battery, which is how nearly every Volt owner I know operates. Once every couple weeks they'll exceed their EV range, let the gas engine take over, and be done with it. The fuel is sipped so infrequently the car will require a "maintenance mode" to run fluids through the ICE but the car is still perfectly useful for a last minute blitz to St Louis or whatever.
I love the Volt. I personally have an i3 REX and I love it even more because it is absurdly lightweight and RWD.
>>Just get an EV
What about renters who don't have access to level 2 charging? The small battery in an EREV can be easily topped up with a normal extension cord (20 amp rated) run out of a rented house or apartment to the car.
Alternately, what about people who can only afford or have the space for one car? Not everyone wants to own the small city EV + ICE road trip car wombo combo, nor do people want to spin the roulette wheel of charging infrastructure that is still barley adequate, especially in the flyover states.
For most people's regular driving, level 1 charging is often adequate to cover their daily needs. They can just plug it into a wall outlet. (If they have one that can be used for this; many apartment dwellers do not.)
A Chevy Bolt EV gains around 5 miles per hour when charging at 12 amps from a 120v socket; it's similar to an i3 in this way.
If it's home half of the time and it sits plugged in for 12 hours every day, then it it can gain ~60 miles during that time.
60 miles per day is not enough to cover everyone's needs all of the time, but it's more than enough for all kinds of folks who would otherwise be afraid of having some kind of electrical upgrade required before considering an EV.
Now add a gas-powered range extender to that Bolt EV and it could easily be the only car that a person would have to own, subsisting just fine on 120vac charging most of the time and requiring a top off of fuel any time an unexpected errand comes up or a road trip is tendered.
The solid state battery people continue to inch forward to 500Wh/Kg.[1]
That's about 2x lithium-ion.
There are now a small number of prototype cars on the road with solid state batteries. There's even a Dodge Charger, from Stellantis. But nobody has solved the production cost problem yet. CATL has a summary of their approach.[2]
This is the real win, but it's hard to make it work in production. Eventually it will displace hybrids, but not before 2030.
China's regulators have recently issued an official definition of "solid state battery".[1] This applies to advertising, and, importantly, to investment fund-raising. Semi solid state batteries, with gels or some liquid, do not qualify.
They will officially be called “hybrid solid-liquid battery.”
The test is simple and tough. Heat a cut battery to 120C, and the weight must not decrease by more than 0.5%. Once the standard takes effect, only batteries passing that test can be called "solid state". Nobody has this yet outside of lab samples.
This will help avoid fake solid state battery claims such as the Donut Labs fiasco [2]
I frankly don't understand how people who rent can use EV. The closest charger is 10 minutes away drive one way, not always available, takes a long time to charge, and I am talking about a big metropolitan area. Clearly EV proponents don't see all the consequences of owning an EV for the majority of people.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadtl;dw: constant RPM and a weird stroke geometry where the power stroke is longer than the other strokes to extract more energy from the expanding gasses.
A.k.a. Atkinson-cycle (1882): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_cycle
And yes the Atkinson cycle helps
So many questions.
Both offer direct, mechanical engagement that avoids the continuous friction slip of a clutch.
I drove a little Toyota Tahoe with the same tiny battery and the reason is clear -- it replaces first gear. So you can have much simpler and reliable transmission, and be more efficient at cities stop signs.
It does the daily commute a few times over, or one day of errands. It does a full charge overnight anywhere with a standard plug; but I have enjoyed EV only parking and fast charge when I'm on the road. I've only used gas for intercity trips, and then it still gets better milage than my 6-speed mazda 3 sedan. And it tows! My partner and I got a short camper trailer and we've spent this last summer doing campouts we never would have bothered with a tent.
Very versatile vehicle, I'm super satisfied with mine.
My cx90 convinces me that neighbourhood range evs are to cars what the air fryer is to ovens. I would ditch the beater mazda3 for ev kei car if I could. The petrol and Detroit 3 lobby is holding back the future on this continent.
[0] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10318
For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.
Works like (?) an EV, it isn't an EV.
You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.
- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery
- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.
Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.
I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.
Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?
Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).
It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.
Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV.
You got your answer.
We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).
Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.
Because it sells well? Because it's what a significant portion of people want?
> Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles
"Where", yes. "When" is a big question mark. If the transition will take several years to complete, which many bet it will, it makes perfectly sense to offer a car that people is willing to buy in the meanwhile.
The Chinese brands that you mention also offer hybrids: indeed most BYDs I see in the streets have the "DMi" tag, which is BYD's codename for hybrid. And they are investing in fuel engines, too. Only short-sighted euro burocrats think that since EV are the future we should immediately stop selling and innovating fuel cars.
FWIW in most European countries I think sales of new fuel cars are scheduled to be banned within the next 5-10 years, so that puts a date on it I guess.
I read a thing recently that in the UK the used price of EVs is soaring now too due to the increase in demand. Diesel especially is really expensive now so people are looking to switch. At least in the UK there are more charging stations now than gas stations - totally viable to drive an EV anywhere and find a charger, you even get e.g. 350kw chargers in grocery store car parks now. I think the transition is well underway - I can't think of a reason you'd not but an EV if you were in the market for a new car in the UK. The only thing I guess is not having off-street charging at home, but more and more lampposts have chargers in them now et. It's only 400 miles between London and Edinburgh (about an 8 hour drive give or take) and some current EVs can do that without stopping.
There is really no excuse for it I think, apart from just not wanting one for your own personal reasons.
But hey each to your own.
10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car.
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.
All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers the same way you'd supply candy bars have been sorted out and work perfectly, but paying with a credit card is often impossible? You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.
Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.
In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there.
- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).
- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these)
I haven't had to use an app to deal with payment for a fast charger in years. Practically all the major networks these days have ways to pay at the dispenser with a credit card.
The last time I used an app to charge was with some chargers at my office which were free for a few hours for tenants in the building, the app was needed to add my car to my approved account and once added it auto-detected and the app wasn't needed.
My car doesn't exactly go to Europe very often, its a pretty challenging drive. So I don't get why Europe having a different plug really makes that big of a difference in the end. Would it be nice if we could just have one world plug? Sure, but not too many cars from North America are going to accidentally find themselves in Europe without much planning.
As for charging protocols and plugs in the US, I've never really had too much of an issue. For a while it was pretty much just choose a non-Tesla charger and it'll be compatible. These days in this mixed period, lots of chargers support NACS and CCS, even Tesla. I got a free adapter from Ford but outside of using it once to test it out I've never used it.
My information is 6 months old: I borrowed an EV to travel around while visiting friends in the US. I've never had any issues paying with a credit card at a gas pump, but had an O(0.1) success rate with the EV charger. But I guess wherever you are the payment is sorted out better.
The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure. As I said, it was one of the few things they could just copy from the working model.
You definitely have enough info to figure this out, but let me walk you through it.
What is the profit margin on the business of transporting or distributing commodity energy like electricity or a tanker full of gas? Not very good. It's a commodity, so you can't do much to improve your margins without someone else undercutting you.
Modern Businesses in America do not like the small profit margin of selling commodities. They like the "tech" standard of insisting that an app is a "Platform" or community and being able to extract whatever rent you want from it.
So they tried to control a "Platform" through the cars. It somewhat failed because it's finally a bridge too far for consumers, just barely.
Basically, a classic horror story of consumer rights is "What if your ford car only worked with ford gas?" which was not something possible to really do back in the early 1900s, but companies saw an opportunity to do exactly that with EVs, and they don't care that it made things worse and slower to roll out and harmed adoption, because there was a chance of infinite money!
I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?
[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......
20 miles per us gallon is terrible, but it’s more like 25 miles per U.K. gallon, which isn’t much below what by 1984 Nissan mid sized car used to get 27 years ago.
I tend to use 45mpg/10mpl now, as both my old micra and my newer Skoda got about that. That’s about 37mpg (us).
Manual skoda kamiq which I drove until May was about 6l/100km
Those are real “how many miles did I drive, how many litres did I put in to fill the tank” figuresc although tend not to do a lot of inner city driving - because that’s what public transports for.
If we are able to consider fixed RPM operation and are willing to endure turbomachinery, I don't know why we wouldn't just go all in on a gas turbine. You can reduce the number of moving parts dramatically and accept a much wider range of fuels.
Being able to engineer everything around a one fixed operating speed makes a huge engineering difference. Reciprocating engines are responsive to load and speed changes, but there are trade offs in many other categories.
You can also make a gas turbine power module quite small relative to the alternatives. Replacing the it at major service intervals could be made economically viable.
Reading around suggests that in order to achieve decent efficiency from a gas turbine, you need quite a few supporting systems that only really make economic sense at larger scales (like the 10's of MW scales, not the 100's of kW).
(Although just from a fun technology angle I'd love to see a gas turbine in a car).
The reason this stuff didn't work before is because we couldn't run the turbine this way. Now we have viable energy storage technology and can make some of the most difficult variables into constants.
The argument about fewer moving parts is often made. But generally turbines are more expensive to make. They require much more precision engineering and probably require more maintenance.
I also suspect all attempts to keep doing combustion engines for mainstream driving are going to get gradually overtaken and lapped by BEVs.
Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.
Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.
I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.
You can extract more energy by adding stages but that increases weight.
While a small and light weight diesel engine is already very close to the theoretical limit.
Turbines for land uses have heat exchangers to get a lot of this back. Even after those the turbine is still lighter for a given power output and lifetime. But normal engines are a lot cheaper.
Cost, reliability.
Two motors and e-Pedal driving is the cherry on top imho (e.g. in the 2027 Rouge).
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.
Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.
The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.
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
For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gas-taxes-state/
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/08/07/governor-newsom-announces-...
It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.
[0] https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
The above is for most people. There are exceptions in both states where gas makes more sense.
It makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.
Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560. Let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.
That sounds very high. The most common lease cap is 10k miles per year.
Also, 10K seems like a common base lease arrangement, but up to 15K is common. On top of that its not like most cars are leased.
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 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.
You have to get out of the car, unscrew the cap, the pump takes a bit to get started, pumps go at like 30 liters per minute if you're lucky or 10 liters per minute if you're not, the screw the cap on, then you have to pay, which typically means walking inside, standing line line for unknown amount of time, pay. You probably can't get gas in less than five minutes.
Why are accusing people of being disingenuous and then lie about such easy to disprove thing?
"Structure your life around charging" You emotional EV haters are ridiculous.
In April it cost about 14p mile off the motorway for petrol, 17 on the motorway (higher prices). Today it’s another 3p due to Iran, so 17/20p a mile.
Home electric costs 2.5p a mile at night, 8p during the day. public charging is around 15p on a slow overnight charger and 24p on a fast charger.
It was always an issue, but he ended up moving to a more surban place. If you drove to work daily and they had charging it wouldn’t be an issue. Rapid charging isn’t that quick.
Though at my old office they started limiting time at the chargers. The city has recently started having public chargers.
One of the selling point of electric is you always start out with a full ish charge.
I’m on my bike on most days I commute. I like it better. Except in the winter where the lack of plowing of these separated bike lanes forced me onto public transit, which I don’t love. My car (2010 element) is gas but I only fill every 3 or so weeks.
This should really be handled in the car and through the charging cable.
Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.
That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.
The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.
This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.
And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.
Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…
Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.
Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.
May save you 5-10% on the bill.
There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.
Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.
When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.
But that’s all history now.
Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.
Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.
It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.
Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.
(For reference, I'm in a CCS2 marketplace.)
US power supplies tend to be 1kW though for constant load (1.5kW rather than 2kW) so even worse.
But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.
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.
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.
TFA links another page where it is explained how the ICE motors used in Nissan hybrids have surpassed 50% efficiency, which is an efficiency that in the past was reached only in huge 2-stroke Diesel engines for ships.
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.
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 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.
Whenever I travel for work I usually try to first experience what its like walking, taking transit, and then finally take rideshare/taxis. I often find a lot of the cities I've been to, you end up practically relying on rideshares unless you're down to walk through spaces which are very unsafe for pedestrians and have some rather long walks. I often end up renting cars on second trips to those cities.
NYC, sure.
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.
It's already happening in some places, maybe one day it'll be mandated.
Where I live many requested powergrid connections are put on hold permanently due to lack of capacity.
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.
This alone would be a deal breaker for me - get home from work and plug-in to get ready for a long drive later that evening or the next morning only to find that the charging was slow and I wasn't fully charged? No thanks.
No residential charger, whether that's home or apartment building, is powerful enough to charge your vehicle that fast. You would need to go to a supercharger or equivalent.
Besides why would you drain your battery during the day, go home, and then drain your battery again? That's a lot more mileage than you realize.
> 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...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
It's not exactly what you're describing, but I think it will become more common as battery technology growth slows down.
Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).
One of the most interesting projects he did was to build a trailer from the front clip of a similar VW Rabbit, engine and transmission etc. He then used this trailer in a pusher configuration to take the electric VW Rabbit on extended trips. The engine was controlled by a hand throttle in the car. Apparently the handling was surprisingly acceptable in this configuration.
Edit - Found the link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121105135914/http://www.mrshar...
I think the solution is actually what we have now - high-power dc fast chargers spread around the country.
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.
I drive two hours to a different city to see a hockey game, and there isn’t one by the arena, and I want to drive back two hours.
You’re charging somewhere and it’s rarely convenient in the Midwest.
Etc
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.
I don't think my car even has a large enough petrol tank for that. You Americans drive way too much.
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.)
I just recently did a 422 mile trip. Needed one 11 minute recharging stop.
Ohio probably does not have a hill higher than ~1500 ft within a three hour drive :).
Yeah if I’m willing to regularly charged to 100 and drive it down to 10 I can get another hour.
Even if you’re driving at 80, that’s a 160 mile trip. What Tesla does your gf have? What’s the range?
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)
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.
I don't really see a lot of public chargers here in the NE USA, but it's also highly likely I'm simply not looking for them either.
Taking an hour out of my day a few times per week to charge an EV someplace public also sounds like a huge PITA. However, I agree that it's worth it for environmental reasons. I would probably also learn to like it. It's like going to the laundromat. Nobody likes it... but it's also an excuse to chill out and read a book for an hour or two! (or whatever)
totally agree it would be a little annoying and things like workplace chargers or more chargers at apartments would make all the difference here, but its also zen, and like maybe a reason to get out of your house and find something to do is actually good for us. or ya know just chill in your car while it charges and watch tv.
but id still take an ev for total lower level total level of annoyance when you factor in everything from driving experience, maintenance, longevity, comfort, noise, smell, no gas stations, environment guilt. the overall user experience for evs is just better for most things and the for now annoyance of charging logistics is the trade off.
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
Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742
(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)
...as one example.
Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?
Walkable towns and cities should always be a major consideration for human needs. Especially because most people go through stages in their lives of being young children, sickness, injury, having young children, ageing and losing ability with age in a way that isn't traditionally considered 'disabled' but functionally is. Relying on being able to afford and drive a car as a neccessary part of life is a terrible idea.
Even in Japan there are plenty of places that public transit does not reach. Or, public transport is incredibly rare.(Only one bus in the morning and afternoon, and nothing else, for example)
Walkable "towns" stop working when you need to leave town.
I do not have a car, because I do not need one. The same does not apply to my friend who is a forester.
Transit options are a major consideration, and cars are absolutely part of that. They aren't cheap, and assuming it's just a car company issue is daft and disrespectful.
It's a solvable chicken and egg problem, and China cracked it, but for time being Japan is way behind the curve in EV adoption.
Maybe that might have happened already if Japan was as insane as it was in 1995, but it just costs too much right now.
Indeed this seems to be an available product:
https://www.ip2.co.jp/parking/kikaishiki/products/ev-chargin...
https://www.tokyo-gas.co.jp/news/topics/20220930-04.html
With this being a retrofit
https://www.mhi.com/jp/news/1101285025.html
So it just seems to be a commercial question of demand rather than a technical question of feasibility.
About 75% of houses in Amsterdam own zero cars, and thus most of the rest have two.
Ultimately even after conversion losses a hybrid can be more efficient than just directly driving the wheels. I think most people understand that part but the reason behind it was never obvious to me.
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.
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.
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.
How about one of the e-power nissans from the article?
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/2025/3381665/nissan_x...
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/2018/2605130/nissan_x...
Lets make a real comparison: The NEDC combined rating for the 2025 e-POWER is 5.4l/100km (FWD). The 2018 diesel version you linked uses 5.6l/100km, and the petrol 2018 version uses 6.2l/100km.
For a truly fair comparison you could have looked at the non-e-power versions from 2025, which come in at 7.4l/100km.
I think the Prius is something like a "traditional hybrid" or "mild hybrid" (I don't fully remember) which comes down to battery size and how exactly it moves the car.
My point is basically: modern PHEV hybrids are supposed to be used by charging the battery and filling the tank and their MPG ratings come from a carefully determined protocol of doing that, where as owners treat them as traditional/mild hybrids and just fill the tank.
I imagine that regen braking will push that battery charge up a bit but just doesn't overcome the added weight of the large battery plus motor, engine, transmission etc to get the really great MPG rating.
Pathetic.
In NYC it's a nightmare to own an EV and rely on public charging.
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.
I have an EV, which is amazing in my metro area, but I regularly take trips where I would not feel comfortable finding a place to charge, despite what EV locator maps might tell you. If you show up and that charger is not working, which is not uncommon, you might be stranded.
If you live in a European city, you should be using a car for commuting.
In the setup you are describing the EV would only be used for long trips. EVs are just not great for that.
But for my daughter, she will be off to college soon. You can't guarantee apartments will have chargers. And the school she'll mostly likely go to is close enough to drive to/from, but far enough that it would need at least 2, maybe 3, recharges for an EV. It just isn't practical.
An EV isn't right for every scenario, even if for many it is.
The biggest issue with fast charging on trips that I've encountered is actually getting to the chargers only to find all of them in use and a queue of cars already waiting to charge. So that 30 minute charge turns into 30-60 minutes of waiting for a 30 minute charge.
Fast charging for a trip is still not anywhere as easy as finding a gas station. Stopping for 30-90 minutes every 3 hours of driving make those long trips feel maddeningly longer.
I’m a few years into PHEV ownership now, and I’m so glad I didn’t get an EV. Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger. And chargers are VERY sparse everywhere I’ve been.
With my RAV4 Prime, I get 40-50 miles of EV range, enough that most days I use zero gas. But if I want to hit up the beach or mountains, or take a cross-country trip, or drive up to PA or VA to visit my girlfriend’s family, there’s zero hassle to find a charger. It just reverts to a normal hybrid once you run out of electric-only range (around 20% of the battery’s actual capacity).
It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”
That said, I also daily drive an EV and have no trouble road tripping it. I'm older, I can't just drive 500 miles only stopping for gas and restrooms like I used to, so a 15 minute stop every 1:45 or so is no big deal.
Back when I had a gas car it was a Fiesta ST, which is a great daily driver but a terrible road trip car, so I was already in the habit of renting a car if I was going to be on the road for longer than 8ish hours. This car is more comfortable so I probably won't rent if I'm not in a hurry, but if I feel the need to knock out 1000 miles as quickly as possible the option will always remain.
In all seriousness, you're correct in re: to probably 90%+ of the population. There are definitely still areas where an EV can be challenging as your only vehicle, but those are places with pretty specific circumstances. They're deeply rural, they demand a lot more miles driven per user per year than most areas, there's more practical applications that EVs just aren't good enough at yet and there's a weird cultural resistance to EVs in a lot of those places. Even that's changing, though. It's just slower. Honestly, it's developing a lot faster even in these holdouts than I thought it would.
Curious what you're using for comparison for "performs better." There are lots of 300-400+ HP EVs when you consider the cost of a RAV4 Prime ($41.5K-$50K USD)
However, as someone who made the jump to an EV a few years ago, if you can manage it it's more reasonable than a lot of people think. I too live in the Triangle of NC, and my current EV cheerfully gets me to the beach every year and up to visit family in Virginia without breaking a sweat. This year, I used ABRP (A Better Route Planner app) to plot out the beach drive and it was as smooth an experience as I've had making that trip. Yes, we had to stop for a charge (because I hadn't charged fully before we left), but I had the chance to grab a snack and stretch my legs for fifteen or twenty before setting out again, so I honestly didn't mind. A lot depends on where people need to go, but thus far I haven't found a lot of places where the chargers are so sparse I really had to worry about it.
> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.
My own anecdote is that I vastly prefer driving an EV on road trips. The lack of noise and gear shifts, regen braking, etc., all make it a much less draining experience.
> This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”
This is a very different story for countries that don't have high import tariffs on Chinese vehicles. EVs there are fast becoming the cheaper option.
I bought an EV just under a year ago and because I park literally right next to my electrical panel I figured I'd probably end up installing a 40 amp EVSE within a few weeks. Here we are, again nearly a year later, and I'm still using the standard 120v L1 cable the car came with because it's plenty. The only time I'm getting below 50% are on road trips where fast chargers are easy to come by.
As a matter of fact the last two vacation rental homes I've stayed in have been in North Carolina, one on Topsail Beach and one near Black Mountain. The one near Black Mountain actually had a 14-50 outlet outside specifically for charging cars or plugging in RVs but both had plenty of 5-20 outlets around the outside
Or do not have a garage, driveway, nor any other parking spot besides on the street, so can't charge at home.
The "reserved" land is a street: what else is it going to be used for except transportation?
The house I'm in was built before cars were even invented (1890s) and there were streets then, but even as early as 1907 cars were being used (there are photographs of my neighbourhood with them).
A common resource that is unmetered just ends up being abused. There's lots of data on this, e.g.:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
And I'm not sure if the various taxes that are paid actually cover the costs of all the roads (never mind the externalities causing climate change). Certainly there is a lot of public utility to paved roads/highways such that some level of 'subsidy' is probably warranted, but I think that congestion pricing needs to be done a lot more too:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218725
That only works if you park your car on the same side of the street as your house: that is not true in my case. That charging cable would be running across the road itself.
Our utility poles are also on people's property, so the charging cable would lay across the sidewalk.
Hybrids are less expensive than EVs. They are complicated, I suppose, but the evidence is quite clear they are more reliable than pure gas designs, so this is not an issue in practice.
>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.
I have never seen a car behave like this and am fairly sure you haven't, either. It is telling that even your strawman argument is emotional.
>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.
Even under circumstances ideal for an EV, a plug-in hybrid will win. Way cheaper, way more flexible, and just as efficient for the large majority of driving.
Regarding fuel costs - it's much cheaper to operate our EV than a comparable hybrid but this absolutely relies on access to a home charger and is dependent on local gas and electricity prices. A comparable hybrid might get 35 mpg, we get around 2.5 miles/kWh (these are minivans) - and so our breakeven point in electricity cost (using $4.50/gallon gas cost) is $0.32/kWh. In my area, electricity is fairly cheap, around $0.14/kWh and I use a plan that lets me pay $0.07/kWh at night when I charge. That's offset by me paying slightly more for other things in the day so my effective cost might be closer to $0.10/kWh, which is still 1/3 of the breakeven point. On long road trips I will likely pay above that but that only happens a few times a year.
Our experience on long highway trips, which practically tend to be repeated cycles of 2 hours of driving and 20 minutes of charging is that they have been more comfortable and we felt better at the end of the trip despite it taking longer door-to-door. This is based on a couple 1400 mile round trips, one w/ 2 people in the vehicle and another w/ 4 and a full load of stuff.
The EV experience is superior to ICE or hybrid. Smooth, silent, quick, you can run the A/C in your garage w/o stinking up the place. The flip side to range anxiety (which is a real thing at first but goes away) is that our EV is always ready to go in the morning and I never end up smelling like gasoline. Yes, my lawn mower is battery powered too.
Given how Americans have not prioritized running costs in vehicle purchases in the past and trucks/SUVs heavily outsell cheap economy cars, I think as more folks see how good the experience is, they'll buy EVs over gas cars even without understanding the math above.
plug-in hybrid don't make sense to me based on the op's experience, but the regular hybrids (where you don't charge the battery) makes perfect sense today, more than ever arguably. same tech as f1 cars fwiw (not that this season they are being very favoured)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI
I watched the recent Technology Connections video[1] on the Toyota hybrid drivetrain, where he claims that people misunderstand the purpose, and I had. I assumed it was to use battery for stop-start city driving and engine for everything else, but no, it's about fuel efficiency. Only the battery and motor can move the car. Regenerative braking reclaims some energy, and the engine charges the battery.
That means it doesn't inherit the most expensive parts - an ICE car needs the engine sized large enough for the most power-demanding situations, but this can use a smaller engine because the battery can boost it when power demand is high (acceleration). That means the engine is cheaper and smaller than a pure ICE car and the battery is cheaper and smaller than a pure EV. The engine can run on the Atkinson-cycle which is too gutless for an ICE car, but is more fuel efficient. This is why it might need to start the engine after pulling away, because it needs to keep enough battery charge to have power available for boosting the weak engine.
Because it's always motor-moved it has no gearbox or transmission, which is simpler and cheaper than I had imagined two drivetrains would be. And the mechanism is very clever.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI - "It's a really good idea and everyone hating on it probably doesn't understand it"
It's hard to make an engine that runs at peak efficiency at a range of speeds and power demand. But batteries are added, the picture can change quite a lot.
The engine can be built and sized to run efficiently at a fixed speed, and its power output never needs to exceed whatever the generator that it drives is able to convert to electricity.
So when it runs, the combined engine+generator set can be run full-assed. No half-assing required. It's a binary state. On, or off. Full-staff, or flaccid.
By reducing variables in this way, all of the fuel that is burned gets converted to electrical power as efficiently it can be for the process at-hand. (It's also easier to quiet an engine that runs at a fixed speed than one that runs at variable speeds; things get a lot simpler when there's only one set of identified frequencies to bother with.)
While the engine is on, some of that electrical power can get used for driving an electric motor for propulsion and the rest can go into a battery.
If it is on and the vehicle is stationary, then all of that electrical power can go into a battery while the engine is remains at full-chooch.
When the battery gets full-enough and/or demand is low-enough, then the engine can just turn completely off. In this mode, all of the electrical power used for propulsion then comes from the battery.
It works. There's even some boats[1] that use these concepts.
It's just an unusual arrangement for now. (It may always be an unusual arrangement if the goal is to eliminate localized combustion of fuel, but we keep being reminded over and over on these pages, whenever a headline about vehicular electrification comes by, that we aren't quite uniformly there yet.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_ferry
It will be interesting to see how much more subsidy ICE cars require as they disappear over the next 10 years.
Around me (Ohio, USA), nearly every car I see is gas-fired. I only see an occasional EV; they tend to stick out, and they're very unusual.
Things look different when I travel to different areas of the US, though. Poorer areas have even fewer EVs than I see around here, while wealthier areas have a lot more of them.
It's a little bit unusual for me to encounter an EV at all during my ~daily driving (often about 40 miles, all said).
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For my part: My lifestyle requires a minivan that can serve as a work truck. There are zero EV options for that here.
But if I could get one with 250 or 300 miles of capacity, then I'd have a new goal. :)
Probably not all that rural by US standards, but it is by UK standards.
The EV rollout is still early stages here too. If we had regional electricity pricing (contentious question!), Scotland would have cheaper electricity and potentially at zero on many occasions.
(ID Buzz? Very expensive though)
I’m in the U.K. and couldn’t afford to not have an EV, could cost over £2500 a year more to drive a petrol car.
>>EREVs/series hybrids don't get better fuel economy
They sure do if 80% of your driving is done purely on battery, which is how nearly every Volt owner I know operates. Once every couple weeks they'll exceed their EV range, let the gas engine take over, and be done with it. The fuel is sipped so infrequently the car will require a "maintenance mode" to run fluids through the ICE but the car is still perfectly useful for a last minute blitz to St Louis or whatever.
I love the Volt. I personally have an i3 REX and I love it even more because it is absurdly lightweight and RWD.
>>Just get an EV
What about renters who don't have access to level 2 charging? The small battery in an EREV can be easily topped up with a normal extension cord (20 amp rated) run out of a rented house or apartment to the car.
Alternately, what about people who can only afford or have the space for one car? Not everyone wants to own the small city EV + ICE road trip car wombo combo, nor do people want to spin the roulette wheel of charging infrastructure that is still barley adequate, especially in the flyover states.
A Chevy Bolt EV gains around 5 miles per hour when charging at 12 amps from a 120v socket; it's similar to an i3 in this way.
If it's home half of the time and it sits plugged in for 12 hours every day, then it it can gain ~60 miles during that time.
60 miles per day is not enough to cover everyone's needs all of the time, but it's more than enough for all kinds of folks who would otherwise be afraid of having some kind of electrical upgrade required before considering an EV.
Those goalposts are behind us.
very small, very light (under 30 pounds for a car) with massive power and torque
no stator yoke, less or no rare-earths
This is the real win, but it's hard to make it work in production. Eventually it will displace hybrids, but not before 2030.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/08/20/geely-500-wh-kg-solid-state-b...
[2] https://www.intelligentliving.co/catl-500-whkg-solid-state-b...
The test is simple and tough. Heat a cut battery to 120C, and the weight must not decrease by more than 0.5%. Once the standard takes effect, only batteries passing that test can be called "solid state". Nobody has this yet outside of lab samples.
This will help avoid fake solid state battery claims such as the Donut Labs fiasco [2]
[1] https://www.intelligentliving.co/solid-state-battery-standar...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/home/electric-vehicles/donut-lab-solid-...