The whole argument of hybrid vs EV strikes me as very point in time despite the phrasing in the discussion as being some sort of pivotal deciding battle for all of history.
The reality is ICE in general, hybrids doubly so, are extraordinarily complex machines with over 100 years of highly funded research invested.
EVs are incredibly simple machines with a limited amount of research applied mostly by a few companies that are very young.
The engineer in me sees the complexity argument as insurmountable. Over time ICE improvements will be flat as diminishing returns set in two decades or more ago. Their complexity isn’t going down, every improvement adds a more complex manufacturing process and complex machine - either in terms of materials or process.
EVs are almost certainly on the other path where their machine becomes simpler in exchange for a more complex science, but the science is effectively the same science that yielded modern computers - solid state, in the end, in a manufacturing process that can scale absurdly. The machines if built with intention will effectively never break or need maintenance beyond a few simple parts. The disposable parts are 100% recyclable.
As t->inf the age of fire is already over, and the age of maxwells equations is starting in earnest. As we put down our distilled flaming dinosaur juice and take up fundamental forces, these discussions will feel anachronistic rapidly. The infrastructure discussions are simply engineering and investment challenges, which will yield, as the complexity of the underlying machine has already doomed the ICE.
> The engineer in me sees the complexity argument as insurmountable.
The programmer in me dislikes complexity too, but if we apply your argument to cell phones vs land lines, we can see that simplicity doesn't always win.
If you could only drive electric-based cars around your own neighborhood, the usage modes would also be entirely different and they never would have taken off either. (As, case in point, did effectively happen in the era of electric golf carts. It wasn't until they got real cars with real car range that things were comparable enough to challenge the status quo.)
Apples and oranges. If in 1980 we kept our phones with us and expected a cable connection even while driving or in the middle of a field, we would think cell phones were a much less complicated solution.
Presuming you mean infrastructure, land lines have the added complexity of all the property negotiations and intrenched interests that are often corrupt, often dysfunctional monopolies and sometimes both. Putting a device on a pole is relatively simple.
Lot of base stations start to be on buildings and those get same complexity. With downside that the building does not really gain anything as signal is going wrong way from them...
Oh except the building owner gain money. The usage rights for towers are generally leased. I’d note the ability to install one tower for a cell that covers a large region is a much simpler negotiation than rights to connect every building everywhere with wires.
point point global bipartite graph connectivity with switching is incredibly more complex than RF cells. The last mile is where the complexity in telephones lie. It’s not in the complexity of the (again) science it’s the number of moving parts. Stringing wires between everything everywhere that can never be broken is much more complex than concentrating the wiring to backhaul lines at towers and devices connecting to the tower and negotiating over a cellular switching protocol. By using connectionless RF for the last mile you’ve dramatically reduced the aggregate machine complexity by orders of magnitude and improved the capabilities (truly untethered) dramatically.
Just to serve as a translator for this guy who aren't acronym enthusiasts throwing around high-falutin' words such as "bipartite graph"
ICE = "Internal Combustion Engine"
RF = "radiofrequency"
Dude said:
(1) engines are more complex than battries. So that means battrie cars will do really well on the long term, being simpler and all. The complexity makes engines (also known as "frozen water") more expensive to make, less reliable, and more tedious in general.
(2) stringing a bunch of wires is complicated, and you ain't got to mess with that noise with a cell phone because it don't need no wire and is therefore simpler
> The infrastructure discussions are simply engineering and investment challenges, which will yield
I agree with this to a large degree, but it's somewhat beside the point. Those challenges haven't yielded yet, and the state of things in the now are what's important when deciding what sort of car to buy.
Few people are going to buy a car that increases the problems in their day-to-day lives on the hope that those problems will be resolved in a few years.
Given that ICEs are produced in the millions and are quite reliable with very low maintenance requirements, I'd say you are overstating the complexity concerns.
Yes they are complex mechanical things by some measures, but really not more so than say, a mechanical clock. Intermeshed gears, cams, cranks and that sort of thing. The materials and durability demands are different sure, but these problems have been solved.
Many of the other things that are complicated in modern cars are the same in an EV: automatic climate controls with flaps and dampers, the air conditioning system itself, which is even more complex on a battery EV that has to manage battery temperatures, antilock braking systems, automated suspensions that adapt to road conditions, lane-keeping, automatic parking, variable power steering, etc.
I’d note that mechanical clocks have almost entirely been replaced with solid state clocks for effectively all the same reasons.
I’d also note you’re only considering the manufacturers perspective. As a consumer of cars, the complexity of the machine results in a long list of expensive regular maintenance, of which almost none of applies to EVs.
Finally I’d note that saying both have a basis of complexity that’s unchanging doesn’t in any way change the point that ICE then have a ton of additional complexity. Just because at our current scale and research the unit cost of the complexity is about as small as it can help doesn’t mean it has a better future. The complexity of EVs will drop as well, and faster, since it’s still an immature technology and supply chain. I think BYD demonstrates clearly that EVs are already cheaper end to end than ICE, and it’s mostly political and infrastructural work. The political side falls apart in face of economics, and the infrastructure side resolves over time just as oil infrastructure did.
I think the real inflection point will be when gas stations start installing fast EV chargers that captures convenience store traffic and conversion better than the pumps, which are already basically break even or worse margins.
Interesting. I maintain my car conscientiously, but I pay almost zero attention to the climate system because given the climate in my part of the US, a working climate system isn't actually important enough to me to spend time or money on maintaining.
If the focus is only the machine and its complexity (and perhaps reliability), then yes. However that's the wrong thing to assess and measure. Consumer concerns are s cost; infrastructure pains; and battery concerns.
Cost is self-evident: Manufacturers need to broadly address affordability and they've been slow to do so.
Infrastructure pains: Chargers are not ubiquitous--charger hogs, who want to eek that last 10%--and not every home/owner can charge (apartment dwellers). Pro-electric owners are doing a disservice, by pretending that this problem doesn't exist or that this problem is solved. This is what Hybrids solve.
Battery concerns: By stats, the % of battery fires and the % of ICE fires are on par. This is where pro-electric owners tend to stop their argument, but it's the details that matter here.
When an ICE model has a tendency to start a fire at home--especially without warning--that's a major recall and considered a defect. When a battery is dangerously damaged? How does one even reliably assess whether battery damage is negible or a risk?
All of these are point in time issues. Cost, I would note, is ICE manufacturers trying to preserve Tesla margins. BYD produces cars that are pretty good at a cost point unacceptable to an American car manufacturer, hence the protectionism and continued high prices that are demonstrably already unnecessary.
I don't agree: It's not something that should be taken for granted.
Battery safety issues may be resolved in a satisfactory manner but that's not a guarantee. If the batteries can be made safer, then great. If it requires civil engineering and planning, then that's a bigger battle.
There's also a matter of sunk cost and market forces: ICEs are fantastically complex machines, but also well-known. Most if not all of the edgecases have been worked out over the decades; and the cost to support the old infrastructure and supply chains are all known quantities.
With EVs, manufacturers will need to build batteries or have redundant suppliers; which is also an unknown quantity and cost. You mention BYD, but given how China is dumping EVs and batteries below cost; the cost isn't exactly a useful metric.
One hopes EVs take off for the sake of climate change, but there are real roadblocks that may stall uptake of EVs.
I live in a cotton mill built in the 1800s. It's a historic property registered with my state, and we can't make many changes to it. Even the concrete pavement is designated as "historic" (everyone finds that ridiculous). Given these parameters, we've only managed to install two EV charging stations for well over a thousand residents. It's wholly inadequate for the 20+ Teslas we have on campus.
The problem for me is that I have ADHD. It's extremely easy for me to forget things like removing my car from the loading zone, so there's no way in hell I'd be compatible with going in and out to constantly move my car around. I'd either never get my car charged, or I'd piss off everyone for leaving it parked in charging for days.
Even if the governing body somehow relented and we could install dozens of charging points, it still wouldn't alleviate the problem for me. There's no way I could organize my life around the ceremony of charging.
EVs just don't work for some people. The math might look right on paper, but the shape of reality has more dimensionality to it.
Your point is fair, but this is a problem to be solved, not to throw up our hands and say it is impossible. EVs work for many people and use cases today; those for which they don't are the body of work to work towards solutions.
I recently worked, for free on my own time, to help a condo association to plan and install infrastructure to support 200 charging stations across two buildings with ~100 units. Total time investment was ~8 hours. A few folks paid to plug into that infra, but those buildings are now future proof.
If you want help, I can reach out; let me know. We will electrify all the things, because we must [1].
How about another problem: supply of electricity and then its price? For those of us who don't drive but use electricity, we are going to experience much higher prices of electricity when the masses are forced to drive electric cars. I don't think much thought has gone into planning for this huge demand.
The other problem i see with electric cars is the how long it takes to charge. I'm sure people will respond and say that's just another problem to solve but I just don't see charging ever being as fast as filling up at a gas station. Clearly the activity of using an electric car is going to be different from how an ICE powered car has been used. Has anyone written about this?
> An analysis by KPMG says the U.S. currently has enough generating capability to charge 80 million EVs during overnight hours—hence the need to control when cars are charged. The Edison Electric Institute estimates there could be 26 million EVs on the road by 2030, up from about 3.2 million today. [1] [2]
Most people will charge overnight (either at home or the office), the average daily round trip commute is ~40 miles (1-2 hours of charging at a level 2 charger to replenish this range, depending on current available). Fast DC charging can be performed in 15-20 minutes, depending on state of charge of the battery and the charging station. My Tesla, when supercharging at the grocery store, is finished faster than I finish shopping (for example).
Thanks for the links. I should have included AI in my Doomsday scenario. AI is very power hungry. Of course AI server farms will not be spread out the way electric charging stations are but will be more concentrated but I do know tech CEO's are already looking at Canada to supply the expected electricity demand. That suggests to me there isn't enough capacity in the USA to meet that forecasted demand.
>My Tesla, when supercharging at the grocery store, is finished faster than I finish shopping (for example).
Where I'm at, the number of charging stations at the grocery store is already inadequate. They are always full. I see people with electric cars wanting to "get a spot" with a charger and there isn't any. This is what I mean about the lack of planning. The govt assumes that the market will meet demand but I just think mandating all cars be electric and relying on the market to meet that sudden demand is naïve.
Conversely, it is silly that we simply default to combustion vehicles because they are easy and we are lazy. Work is hard, and nothing in this thread described cannot be solved with existing technology. Maybe we could be less lazy? Maybe!
People hate this idea, but this likely one of the biggest improvement we can make on how we utilise excess power.
Imagine everyone plugs in after work, start charging whenever peak ends, either 9PM or 11PM. By 3AM most of the cars are done charging, yet there's 4 hours of off-peak capacity left not utilised. Whats worse, we'll see massive peaks around 9PM if we do not manage charging on wider scale.
I think a big barrier is that people used to ICEs want to charge EVs the same way they fill up with gas.
One of the things I had to “unlearn” was wanting to charge to 100% every time. There are many arguments for not doing this, one of which is charging speed.
Another thing I found is that driving an EV makes road trips more enjoyable and less draining because it forces me to take breaks. But it took me a while to fully embrace that.
Increasing the supply of electricity is trivial, especially today with the advent of cheap and reliable solar. As more EVs join the grid, more capacity will be added, the same as any other technology. Crypto is a great example – Bitcoin scaled up to eating a noticeable chunk of all electricity in the world without anyone batting an eye.
Nobody is being "forced" to drive an electric car – people are buying them because they have much better performance than traditional cars. Quieter, faster, lower maintenance costs, etc.
I spend way less time refueling my car since switching to electric, as many owners will tell you. I just plug my car in about once per week before going to bed.
> Your point is fair, but this is a problem to be solved, not to throw up our hands and say it is impossible.
I don't think anyone is saying it's impossible. They're saying it's a problem right now, and that's a large part of why so many people avoid EVs.
If someone figures out a way to mitigate that problem tomorrow, then the equation changes. But tomorrow isn't here today, and people have needs to met today.
And if the problem is solved and people still choose hybrids or combustion vehicles? You can solve All The Problems and humans can still make irrational, suboptimal choices. What is good enough to make the lizard brain cozy with the EV choice? Not rhetorical! Genuinely interested in the thought.
Here's my lizard brain issue: owning and using an EV requires more planning / is less flexible at least while liquid fuel is so easily accessible.
With liquid fueled vehicles, I can park them wherever at home. If I had an EV, I'd need to pick a spot and always park it there when I want to charge it. If that's inside the garage, I need to keep the garage clean or I can't charge, etc. It's better if I charge with 120v cause I can plug it in anywhere, but then charging is slow. Even if I usually park my liquid fueled vehicle in the garage, I can park it outside for a week or two if I take a big delivery for a group buy and need to have everyone else come and pick it up.
If I move, I have to be picky about where I move; if there's no charging infrastructure, my car turns into a pumpkin.
If I go on a long trip, I need to plan for charging on the way and my destination. From experience with my PHEV, I need to be extra careful because some chargers are impossible to use because their payment system doesn't work; some chargers are impossible to use because they've gone wireless (I seriously saw a charger at a mall that had no cable, wtf).
Driving a liquid fueled vehicle, if the gauge works, I don't need to plan for fueling unless driving through undeveloped areas and there's usually signs like 'no services for 78 miles'. Even without a working gauge, if you keep a gas can, running out of fuel in a developed area is easy to recover from, especially now when you can open a map on your phone and know which way to walk.
There's a car I'm interested in being revealed next month, but it's almost certainly EV only, so it's going to be a no. I don't want to have to think about how to fuel my vehicle.
Also, market rate EV charging out and about seems to be about 2x home electricity prices near me, which means I'd be grumpy if I charged away from home.
The new Scout. My first car was a 1978 Scout II, and I'm actually car shopping at the moment, so it could work. This week they said they're going to have a reveal October 24.
I am dumb enough to buy a first model year vehicle. I had the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica (which I ditched earlier this year because of signs of engine failure), and I have a deposit on a Lexus TX (currently under stop sale because of a pending airbag fix), but I'm still shopping if I only have a deposit down.
People still buy mechanical watches despite the fact that a solid state watch tuned to an atomic clock via gps is in every way better. In fact they pay a ton of money for the luxury of a worse device! But as a proportion of all clocks mechanical clocks are effectively non existent.
> a solid state watch tuned to an atomic clock via gps is in every way better.
It's not better in every way, or that's the only sort people would buy. It's better at timekeeping, but timekeeping isn't the only reason why people buy watches.
EV and non-EV cars both do, and the choice to have and own a "classic" non-EV {muscle car | spaceship fin styling | 1930s steam powered racing car, etc.} is similar to the choice to have a "classic" mechanic watch .. which would be the point made in the comment you replied to.
In the overall big picture of timekeeping and transportation the proportion of fully wooden complication watches and Mad Max interceptors would ideally be relatively low.
( but rolling coal will remain popular for some years to come )
And the thread overall is about EVs being drastically simpler machines give them an insurmountable long term advantage to the point that ICE will become anachronistic, and hybrids are even worse than ICE for their complexity. The environmental angle is a non-sequitur.
I would note that EVs are much more likely to have a minimal environmental impact over time as the requisite is electrical storage, not a specific way to store electricity. As electro magnetism is a fundamental property of the universe the ways we achieve that are limitless. Carbon based fuel is pretty much the only meaningful ICE option so there’s not much to improve on there beyond marginal efficiency gains. (I mean I guess we could use liquid fuels like oxygen and hydrogen but that seems unlikely). N.b,. Hydrogen fuel cells are still electric vehicles.
> I would note that EVs are much more likely to have a minimal environmental impact over time
That would be the ideal goal but we (globally) have good way to go yet.
> I mean I guess we could use liquid fuels like oxygen and hydrogen ..
Pragmatically it'd be hydrogen (maybe) in transport trucking on established routes (to minimise infrastructure) and green hydrogen products (ammonia | methanol) for bulk carrier distance transportation to generate central station power (in, say, European winters) for use in EV's.
There's no Engineering (civil | mechanical) upside to hydrogen liquid|gas in mass numbers of small personal vehicles - too slippery to handle with stringent safety requirements to avoid issues with a billion small deployments.
However, I assure you, the power and telephone company have dispensation to drill holes and run lines. These are regulatory constraints that are basically not real but are convenient functions to induce a behavior, but are easily and summarily dismissed when the political will exists to achieve some outcome. These constrains are point in time and aren’t fundamental like the complexity argument - which is reality based. The constraints you live under may be your emergent reality, but it’s not actually reality.
How in the world do you remember to put gas in your car? Are you getting stranded on the side of the road with no gas all the time? Don't drive? How in the world do you manage anything else in your life? You are painting a picture that having to remember (or be reminded) to do anything in your life is 100% impossible.
Putting gas in the car requires taking an immediate action and then being done. Charging an EV requires plugging it in for an extended time and then remembering to retrieve it (when the charger is a shared resource). I could easily believe that the former is easier.
With modern chargers you effectively park at a strip mall, go pee and get a coffee, then get back in your car and continue your journey until the coffee makes you pee again.
Right, which means you have to make time for it. Sure, you can make up stuff to do while you wait, but it's still a long enough amount of time that you have to work it into your schedule. Filling a tank is quick enough that you don't have to do that. You can just fill your tank on an as-needed basis without planning for it.
> The engineer in me sees the complexity argument as insurmountable.
At the same time, the engineer in you/us also needs to understand the circumstances of supply and demand. The completely better technology is unaffordable for a large group of consumers, so the transitional technology is selling better.
From TFA:
"Hybrids are also sort of hurting EVs, aided by competitive pricing that is cannibalizing EV sales. Battery-powered cars and light trucks will account for just nine percent of industry deliveries in the U.S. this year. That’s down from the previous forecast of 12.4 percent.
"some Toyota dealers tell [...] that customers are waiting two or three months just to take delivery of a new hybrid.
"eventually EVs will take over, but customers and infrastructure just aren’t there yet. Until then, hybrids are a fantastic middle ground.
Electric cars have a lot more proprietary systems and complex software that are difficult to investigate. Let alone repair. I personally think ICE vehicles will remain attractive due to proven reliability and repairability.
I sort of agree, but I don't think maxwell has much to do the future of EV's. The silicon and motors have been about as good as they can possibly get for years now. They are only single digit percentages away from being theoretically perfect. If the move to EV's were dependent on them improving, ICE's have a sound future.
The future of EV's depend on one thing: the price of batteries dropping. Once they drop another 50% it's all over. Maybe it's already all over in China.
Batteries are anything but simple. They are effectively nano engineered chemical factories done at massive scale, a scale so big they use 1km sq factories (about 0.4 sq miles) to produce them. Unlike maxwell and silicon, batteries haven't seen decades of cumulative R&D. Right now the press reads like they are at the wild west stage, with new chemistries and production techniques popping up every month.
So yeah, we are at a point in time, but that point in time is being driven by developments in applied chemistry, which is driven by chemists and chemical engineers, not electronics.
Not strictly applies to EVs but Teslas unboxed process is fascinating. Because you need to assemble all car parts separately, you cannot have continuous hydraulic lines hence brakes, steering, fuel, etc are electric making assembly a little bit easier, cheaper and faster.
Legacy auto is falling back to combustion because they are unwilling to eat the short term pain of moving to EVs. BYD faces no such lack of will, and legacy auto will get dragged regardless of this short term bump in hybrid uptake (VW is considering layoffs and plant closures in Germany, which was previously unfathomable [1]). I will make no prediction about Tesla sales, but they are still a contender so long as management doesn't incur irreparable harm to the org; they can also balance between auto and utility scale storage when needed from a manufacturing and revenue perspective. Rivian also has potential, but is not on sturdy ground yet.
TLDR Bet on folks not saving anything for the swim back.
"Legacy" auto is falling back to combustion because that's what people overwhelmingly want. The majority of people can afford neither the financial, nor the ability costs that come with electric only vehicles.
Buying or leasing an EV has always been the biggest hurdle for the middle class. With the fed rate cut and soft landing nearly here, I expect we're going to witness an inversion on this hybrid sales trend as affordability finally takes.
Legacy auto can only do this for as long as they don't have to hack and slash to compete against upstarts. US legacy auto is likely to leave China [1], and European automakers will face similar pressures as China comes up to speed as the Clean Tech manufacturer to the world [2]. Global light vehicle TAM is ~90M units/year. Tariffs in the US and Canada are avoided by building in Mexico, for example. China is going to flood the world with cheap EVs [3], broadly speaking. This destroys export TAM for US and European automakers, which will force them to shrink due to revenue destruction.
I would strongly agree that prices for EVs must be driven below combustion vehicles (we cannot expect people who cannot afford EVs to stretch to buy them; price compression and government incentives are material here), but legacy auto must be driven out of the market if they choose to avoid the electrification transition to maintain their profit levels. If I have to argue why (the emergency that is climate change), there is likely very low value in further discussion. Less profits, as many EVs as possible in the hands of people who drive [4].
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-26/xi-s-chin... ("Fast forward to 2024, and China has become the world’s largest auto market and sells more electrified vehicles than any other country, with 9.5 million cars delivered last year. It also controls the majority of the battery supply chain. Homegrown champion BYD Co. dethroned Volkswagen to become the best-selling brand in China and in the last quarter of 2023, surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest producer of EVs. China also overtook Japan as the largest auto exporter, sending 4.14 million units abroad with 1.55 million of them being EVs or plug-in hybrids.")
> Profits at the “Big 3” auto companies—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis— skyrocketed 92% from 2013 to 2022, totaling $250 billion. Forecasts for 2023 expect more than $32 billion in additional profits. CEO pay at the Big 3 companies has jumped by 40% during the same period and the companies paid out nearly $66 billion in shareholder dividend payments and stock buybacks.
Based on the data, we can afford it, if we stop enriching those folks ^ I just don't care for the lies that we cannot. If legacy auto must die for the EV transition to accelerate or succeed, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ them's the breaks. These are choices. If legacy auto (both US and EU) makes poor choices, China will force their hand regardless.
The real headline seems to just be "Toyota and Honda still don't know how to sell EVs to Americans, have mostly sort of given up for now, and surprisingly aren't being punished in the market for it."
> Hybrids are also sort of hurting EVs, aided by competitive pricing that is cannibalizing EV sales. Battery-powered cars and light trucks will account for just nine percent of industry deliveries in the U.S. this year. That’s down from the previous forecast of 12.4 percent.
Ah, lies, damned lies, and then statistics. The industry forecast of 12.4% may have been too aggressive (which rectum did that number even come from, by the way? The manufacturers still haven't even committed to 12.4% growth on the supply side, they aren't making EVs that fast), but 9% is still a strong year-over-year growth and a faster growing rate than the hybrids mentioned in the article. The statistic here seems to be that Prius sales aren't shrinking. They aren't growing. They don't seem to be "hurting EVs" they seem to be continuing plain ICE sales. But it's not statistics is an easy math field or anything.
I don't know why hybrids weren't standard issue 10 years ago. Federal fuel efficiency standards should have mandated them, but instead they spent years locked in a political / culture war battle over this.
Plugin hybrids don’t make economic sense. The 2024 Prius Prime costs $5000 more than the regular hybrid. If you are generous and say 9/10 days you drive fewer than 40 miles, so you won’t use any gas, then that means you save about .8 gallons of gas per day. Again being generous with the range.
With average gas price that means you are saving $2.64 per day (assuming your charging is free which it is not). That means it would take over 5 years to make back the plugin premium. On top of that, you get worse mileage than the regular hybrid when you are using gas.
Edit: You’re also still paying for oil changes, transmission changes, and any other regular or unexpected maintenance on the ICE drive train with a plugin hybrid.
Yes, I think this has been a huge missed opportunity. Making hybrids the standard car is a big win for fuel efficiency. Then shifting towards plugin hybrids with a 40-50 mile EV range has the opportunity to radically reduce emissions without giving consumers any concerns about range anxiety. Do this shift over the course of a decade or two, use that time to build out charger infrastructure, _then_ start pushing towards pure EV's.
I agree, practically every consumer ice vehicle should have a 50 mile all-electric range at this point.
I think this is very doable with sodium ion in advanced lfp.
I think the issue for investors with a car company is that it represents a lack of ability to handle the evening transition and so it really does Mark your company as a dinosaur and keeps them from properly innovating and transitioning.
With sodium ion and advanced lfp, the cost of a very very capable EV is going to permanently drop underneath an ICE. There's simply too much simplification of the drivetrain in EVs once batteries become cheap.
I just meant a 50 mpg style hybrid like the Prius, not even a plug-in. There's a ton of sub-30 mpg ICE cars and trucks out there still, which boggles my mind.
Why do they cost more? Is it the additional hardware needed for the charging? I have a hard time believing that hardware is $5k. I have an easier time believing that the car manufacturers are gouging people interested in this solution space.
This seems like an easy win for legislation: we just mandate that every consumer vehicle has to have a 35-mile minimum all-battery range with plug-in capabilities; the same way we mandate that consumer vehicles have to have catalytic converters.
Mandating something doesn’t make it free. You mandate plugin then you just mandated that all cars cost $5000 (at least) more plus you removed downward price pressure from nonplugins so they will cost even more.
It’s an entire second drive train and fuel system. It’s going to cost money.
I also forgot to add in the fact that you still have full ICE maintenance costs with a plugin.
No it's not the same, I think you are taking cues from the current generations of hybrids which (aside from the Volt) are at best 20 miles all-electric and generally have full car drivetrains doing primary or heavily supplemental power.
1) A decent plugin hybrid has the EV drivetrain: fantastic low end torque and sufficient horsepower to do highway speeds, but without an oversized battery. With a bit of rocket equation, it should be 1/3 the size for a 50-100 mile all-electric EV, or less, considering that 500 mile EVs exist
2) the ICE part gets to run in atkinson cycle and at the ideal RPM for maximum efficiency: it exists to recharge the battery. I almost wonder if a lawnmower motor could generate enough recharge rate (especially if you had a "long range" mode where the recharger kicks in almost immediately after the first 10 miles to start recharging) considering the higher efficiency of modern EV drivetrains.
3) the braking is mostly regenerative, so out goes most brake maintenance. The engine runs at ideal RPMs, and only on long range trips, so the oil life is much longer: the ideal is the engine only runs on long distance trips, and close to 90-95% of miles (certainly in an urban setting, rural would still be heavily served by a battery if its 50-100 miles) are in all electric. It's pretty basic math, if the engine only runs 5% of the time and runs in highway efficiency only, then it's maintenance lifetime is probably 20x longer than a normal engine's use.
4) hopefully it would eventually transition to a fuel cell for more efficiency, flexible fueling, and zero-pollution (aside from carbon in the case of hydrocarbon fuel), which I think if hybrids were mandated 25 years ago would have had an outside chance of happening within 10 years.
Do the math like I did. Go watts to watts to watts with the most efficient gas engine there can be. You’re not going to get much of an improvement. You’re still burning gas to charge a battery to turn into forward motion.
You're pretending in-city inefficiency doesn't exist? The atkinson cycle doesn't exist? Turbocharging and combined cycle tricks (which can be used to boost efficiency / approach or exceed carnot limits I believe), other heat recovery/reuse (especially for A/C and heating), compact rotary engines, more precise combustion and timing, all of that can't be employed for a charging engine?
I'm not pretending anything. A 3500 lb object moving at 60mph requires 57kw to to keep moving at that speed. If you have an engine producing less than that, then you're going to run out of energy, no matter how efficient it is. You brought up a "lawnmower motor" which produces at most 1/3 of that if you're talking about a gigantic riding mower. If you put a motor smaller than the wattage requirement then you can end up stuck with a full tank of gas, and a dead battery running your gas engine to slowly charge your vehicle.
To the point of "ideal RPMs", my ICE car already does that on a flat highway and it doesn't suddenly double or triple it's mileage. It gets about 33, while the overall average is about 26. Go test it yourself. Find a stretch of highway where you can maintain 60mph without fluctuation, and see what "ideal rpm" means.
My point in all of this has been lost anyway. My point is that the more efficient you make the gas engine of a plug in hybrid, the less important is the battery component.
Plugins are not a bridge between ICE and EVs, and they are definitely not superior to either. They are a distraction.
>> I also forgot to add in the fact that you still have full ICE maintenance costs with a plugin.
Hybrids significantly reduce wear and tear on the ICE engine. The Prius is one of the lowest total cost of ownership vehicles ever made. It still amazes me that Prius-style non-plug-in hybrids aren't standard equipment at this point across the entire vehicle fleet.
With a plug-in hybrid, ICE maintenance costs are even lower, assuming it's actually plugged in, which apparently many aren't, per an EU analysis that lowered the effective WLTP mileage based on actual usage. The ICE in a regularly charged plug-in hybrid gets used so infrequently that they have "maintenance cycles" built in that fire up the ICE just to circulate the lubricant and gasoline.
When I was shopping for a sedan in 2016, part of it was trunk space. You also pay more for a more complex drivetrain that has higher maintenance costs. I already shut off my car's feature to stop the engine at stop lights because I'd rather pay for gas than engine, starter, and battery wear.
I would note that "hybrids" in China (where plug-in-hybrids have gone to 16% of market share, up 700bps y/y) is a fundamentally different architecture than hybrids in the west. In China (see Li Auto [1] for example) hybrids are Battery Electric vehicles (ie no gearbox, fully electric motor) with a small gasoline generator and tank to recharge the battery. This is "best of both worlds"... you get the electric motor, which is much more efficient / cheaper than an ICE transmission. Then the gasoline generator is just tuned to maximize efficiency (~44% efficiency to electric, vs the mid-30s on an ICE motor) so the net efficiency of the hybrid is far superior to a Prius-plug-in type structure. These are termed Electric Range Extender Vehicles ("EREV"s), which is type of a Plug-in Hybrid since you can charge by plugging in the battery or by filling in gas.
Really surprised haven't seen these EREVs in the west, although Hyundai is supposed to launch in US in 2026. Could be game-changer when that happens...
Yes! Difference is the current-gen EREVs are in a different league of performance with the advancement in electric powertrain and software. Think change between a Model 3 and a Chevy Bolt...
I live in a old building in a city with a lot of old buildings. People mostly park their cars in the streets , with a special zone permit.
I would love to have an EV only car, but there is basically zero charging spot , public or otherwise, made available by the city in the streets (where we park our cars).
As long as cities do not improve their urban environments with A LOT of charging stations everywhere, then pure EV is not practical.
I live in London. My local council (Camden) equipped every other lamp-post with a Siemens Ubitricity (now owned by Shell) EV charger 2 years ago. Problem solved.
Please explain to me how being in the wilderness camping or fishing without a charge network close by is the clear choice?
Please explain how waiting an hour to charge your vehicle or doing “micro” 20 minute top ups followed by 35 minutes of driving followed by another 30 min top up is the clear choice versus a 5 minute fill up?
Please explain how to get charging when you don’t own your own house and street parking cannot accommodate charging your car overnight?
Please explain how EV is the clear choice when you do have your own house and still cannot get a charging solution installed?
Please explain how one can get a used gas car and repair it and do maintenance for years before hitting the cost of a new EV is the clear choice?
So are EVs the clear choice for affluent, urban people with discretionary income and time to waste when traveling? Are they for people who shouldn’t travel or dislike it? Where’s the clear choice here?
All these points must be answered! In my view, some of these come down to if the owner can afford the upgrades. (I know, they should do their homework before buying!) Also these questions are about the learning curve of owning an EV, some may not have the patience or, dare I say, the ability to grasp everything.
Also, the repair angle hasn't been properly addressed, is there a repairman near me? We all know the dealerships are wolves when taking your car to them.
The experience of charging a car without access to the Tesla charging network (using Electrify America-type chargers) is garbage and actively getting worse, because they aren't maintained properly. If a pump is broken at a gas station, it will be fixed within days, whereas it's not uncommon to see the same chargers out of service for months, even after reporting them.
EVs are often the clear choice for those that exclusively can charge at home or at a supercharger, but pretending there aren't all kinds of drawbacks for common use cases is unhelpful.
Chargers should need a lot less maintenance than pumps. They are over-sized, ugly electrical outlets with maybe extra capacitors and a bit of battery. Most of the "maintenance issues" that take the dumb things down are payments software goofiness or vandalism. The charging networks just need to calm their apps for the first bit, and regular, simple visual inspections for the second bit. The reasons pumps get fixed within days is because they make more money and also require regular inspections by law because they are a fire hazard or worse if left broken. The "Supercharger" network has regular inspections because it makes the most money right now. Right now we don't want to regulate the charging networks and a broken charger isn't a fire hazard or public safety danger to force regulation, so we have to count on "it makes more money if it is working" and it is Electrify America (et al) that are doing a terrible job at competing with "Supercharger" basics. (The "free market" is supposed to do that all on its own, right?~)
But also, the big reason that there isn't the same money in chargers as in gas pumps is how different the equation with home charging available to many, even if not available to "all". It's a different market/ball game from gas pumps no matter what, because electricity is not a centralized fuel source in anything like the gas model, no matter how much you dress up chargers in gas station drag.
It doesn't matter what economic theory you dress it up in: chargers are often broken for months, and clearly not only are people not acting on a visual inspection, but aren't even acting on specific reports.
As I understand it, the model for gas stations (in the US) is making small margins on gas, and huge margins on candy bars and bottles of water. There's no reason that can't be the same for chargers - indeed there's space for lounge style business models instead - no-one wants to sit in their car out by the dumpsters at Target for 30 minutes.
I agree though - Electrify America is failing. It doesn't matter why, it's still a huge negative for EV adoption in a large number of cases, and those who claim "EVs are perfect for everyone" need to start communicating that nuance, or it should be assumed they don't understand it and should have their opinion discounted.
Sure, I agree with you, and think that is a lot of what I'm hinting at. I think the business model is wrong for Electrify America. They are building "stations" often divorced from any other businesses. I still think Destination chargers are more important than "along the way chargers" and in general reframing even "along the way chargers" as Destination Chargers should have been the business model (could still be the business model for someone savvy enough to invest in it). It shouldn't have been "Electrify America" it should have been "Electrify McDonald's" (or Applebee's or Sonic Drive-In; that one even already has the form factor of a charging lot). Take a national chain that already wants to be at every interstate exit, encourage them to electrify every parking space in a way that their minimum wage staff can keep an eye on without too much effort, in exchange for extra foot traffic and encouraging people to spend on meals and such while they wait on a charge.
(My belief that Destination Charging matters a lot more than "along the way" is also where I see "EVs are already perfect for everyone, they just don't know it yet". I understand there is a ton of momentum in the existing mindset of a gas car and central gas stations and regular visits to those. I think Destination Charging and Home Charging and Everywhere Else Charging are an entirely different mindset, and it's an education problem that we're stuck trying to recreate the status quo rather than build the new awesome.)
It's nothing to do with "gas mindset" - if I'm driving 1000 miles (not uncommon, welcome to Texas!) I'm going to have to stop to charge even the longest-range EVs along the way twice.
One of those might be an overnight at a hotel (where the chargers are typically broken!), but the second is necessarily going to be somewhere en route. I agree it would be better to have them with amenities rather than in the back lot of a big box store, but that is not the current reality - even superchargers often lack amenities.
This makes EVs very much non-ideal compared to a gas car or hybrid for this use case. No amount of noisy people wanting destination charging and home charging to be The Thing is going to fix that - it's just gaslighting to suggest that it's a mindset problem rather than a real one that must be solved if EVs are to dominate.
I'd avoid using a charged term like "gaslighting" in this particular conversation.
From my perspective, Superchargers lacking amenities is still the "mindset bug" and Hotels allowing chargers to be broken is the "mindset bug". I'm not telling you at all to fix Texas and not drive 1000 miles regularly (though that's certainly not ideal), I'm just wishing there were more things to do with your charging time in the middle of that mess and a better usage of your car's time spent parked at both ends of your journey.
I think we fix the experience by encouraging parking lot owners of every kind, hotels especially, that charging is an amenity that makes a difference to the customer experience. We don't need every interstate exit to have a desolate "charging station" with no amenities, we need charging considered an amenity to parking.
It would be nice to be able to regularly and culturally think of a 1000 mile journey as "I need to park somewhere for ~30 minutes to eat/relax/play/stretch/whatever" and charging just happens while you do that. This could be the revenge era of the Roadside Attraction giving you reason to pick one place to stop and charge over another. 30 minutes of time to spend in a silly museum to the world's largest rubber band ball is a fun use of that time. Sure it would get old doing it regularly, but that's why you want more and more things to be Destinations. Restaurants, Roadside Attractions, Scenic Parks, etc, should all have charging as an amenity. Charging shouldn't be bland "stations" needing amenities, charging should be the reliable amenity to any other detour or pitstop you'd want to do on the road. It should be wall plugs that blend into the background anywhere you might want to park, not "Special Pumps" you have to seek out and wait for because electrons need to pretend to be siloed in tanks like a liquid fuel.
The difference is, I'm saying that it is a problem _today_ that these solutions do not exist, and the lack of those solutions means that EVs are not a viable solution for a lot of people _today_. If these problems are solved, EVs will become more viable for more people, and all EV owners will benefit from the improved infrastructure. However, the infrastructure chicken must come before the EV egg.
Today, it is not a true statement that "EVs are the best choice for everyone", which is what I was responding to. Every one of your comments tries to dispute that, while also pointing to the same problems as I am and making them out to be imaginary - the very _definition_ of gaslighting!
> while also pointing to the same problems as I am and making them out to be imaginary - the very _definition_ of gaslighting!
A) That's very not the definition of gaslighting. Gaslighting is lying and faking events with the intent to abuse someone's state of mind (make them feel crazy, make them feel dependent/codependent, remove them from support networks). Like I said, it is a very charged term, and you should be a lot more careful with it.
B) I've never called these problems imaginary. I think our big difference is not that I don't agree those are problems, but that I think these problems get fixed by everyone buying an EV. I feel that this is an ugly dinosaur egg needs to come first before the chicken situation. The Supercharger network is an okay enough bootstrap tool today that people can switch to EV today (even if they don't think that they can). It won't be the greatest experience, and there will be many useful things to complain about, but it will start to give added perspective they may need to better ask for the right things to make the experience better.
But there are many more chargers than tank stations. And there are a lot of electronic components which could fail due to age, weather or cheapness (economy of scale), the charging station is a complicated product.
One pump will serve many dozens of people per day, way more than a charger.
There is just not enough motivation for business to properly maintain them, I totally agree.
No, it's not. We've got the workings of electric plugs and electric circuits down to a science in the 19th century. Higher voltage complicates things a bit, but not nearly as much as most people think, and again we've had the technology for that for decades and decades at this point.
Most of the parts of an electrical circuit/outlet are solid state and don't hardly age/weather at all. You are more at risk of someone stripping it for parts (like copper wiring and capacitors) than it failing due to age.
We accidentally let "car safety standards" turn a boring electrical outlet into a gas pump-looking plug that looks way more complex than it actually is. A charger is a fancy electrical outlet with a weird costume, and then often over-complicated payment software installed on top. That's most of how "complicated" it is, just over-complicated payment software on USB Power Delivery High Voltage Edition ports.
With all do respect, my wife and I last year drove through the Texas panhandle, then into New Mexico. It was a fantastically beautiful drive. Many times we were in the "middle of no where", there weren't even any telephone or electric poles!This is why our next car will be a hybrid, two sources of energy for the long haul. Our Pacifica has a driving range of around 500 miles, we never were worried about fuel.
Can you send your route? It's extremely unlikely your route was out of supercharger range. There's good coverage on that route: https://www.tesla.com/supercharger
Superchargers don't have giant billboards advertising them, they are often very subtly tucked into a hotel or gas station. But they are there.
From Childress,Tx, we meandered SW towards Lubbuck, which we skirted to the north, then down a zigzag of roads to Denver City, Texas. Then from Denver
City over to the border of New Mexico to Riverside, NM. There are signs saying to gas up because of a lack of stations further up the road all along that stretch. Guess what that means?
There are superchargers in Childress, Plainview right to the north of Lubbock, and Post right to the south. But also that whole route is only 300 miles, less than a charge.
Can you send a list of these chargers? Also, we chose to bypass Lubbuck, our gas or if we had a hybrid would have allowed us to determine our route, not our battery charge.
EVs are not a clear choice for everybody, though. A whole lot of people aren't able to charge them at their home, so they'd be entirely reliant on commercial charging stations. That's a serious problem.
That's the thing, EVs are not the "clear choice" unless you choose to ignore the diverse practical realities. Better propaganda won't change that. Many households I know with an EV also have an ICE to explicitly hedge the cases where an EV is objectively a poor or suboptimal choice. For households that don't need or want to own two vehicles, hybrids serve much the same purpose. EVs are strictly worse in some regions and for some people.
As a simple example, there are no EVs that serve the regional markets where a Subaru is the inexpensive car of choice. Those long-range, high-clearance AWD vehicles are not some weird lifestyle flex in the markets where half the people drive one, they fill a concrete requirement that EVs currently can't fill.
They are almost all Teslas, and they usually use their SUV (the ICE always seems to be an SUV) for roadtrips. Seasonality matters as well, EVs are not a great choice for long trips over the mountains in winter.
It's not a clear choice. I drive 3,000mi round trip once a year. I like to do ~900 miles one day and ~700 miles the second. I stop once on the 900 mile leg for lunch and to stretch legs and use restroom which takes about 20 minutes. I'm not adding another 1-2 stops to that trip. As it'd push that driving day out to >12-13 hours.
For my daily driving I'd probably use little to no fuel at all with a plugin. I have not upgraded my car in 8 years as I'm waiting on a good plugin hybrid. I'd have a hybrid and an EV but not an EV as my primary. Gasoline still packs way more energy per unit volume and is easier to store than electrical charge.
If you out of gas, someone can get you going again with a jerry can. If an EV runs out, you might have to call a tow truck or cancel your trip. IMO range anxiety would be solved if EVs had a "jerry can".
This is why I always thought that swappable batteries was more important than plug-in charging, to be honest.
Properly designed, it would make "charging" as quick as filling a gas tank, would make having an EV a reasonable choice even for people who can't do home charging, and would make such "jerry can" scenarios entirely doable.
It would also disconnect (to a great degree) the value of the car from the state of the battery. I wouldn't buy a used EV because I'm worried about the batteries -- but if the battery were something apart from the car itself, that would eliminate that concern.
Those swappable batteries also need to work in a formfactor and swapping process that a regular, not fully able-bodied person could accomplish the task in a very small amount of time comparable to filling an ICE car with gasoline or diesel fuel to be a real replacement solution.
The 'complexity' and suitability of these vehicles aren't just about the vehicles themselves but the system that they are part of, which includes the related elements of charging/fueling, the process of charging/fueling, the process of operating the vehicles for driving-- which includes how the driver needs to be more conscious of and aware of their driving range, planning for charging/refueling, etc... The vehicles need to fit into people's lives which have their own constraints for evaluating suitability.
> a regular, not fully able-bodied person could accomplish the task
Why? Charging stations presumably would have staff and equipment to do the swaps. There's no need to make it so that literally everyone is physically able to do them.
All I know is that swappable batteries would eliminate a fair number of the problems that make me avoid EVs.
Perhaps it's not feasible, but the current charging situation isn't (for me) either. So, if I'm going to anything electric in the nearish future, hybrids are the only realistic option.
Plug-in hybrids are much more suitable for environments where you simply don't have the charging infrastructure at home. This is also unlikely to change in the near term (10-20+ years) if my home town is anything to go by (Tallinn, Estonia), older apartment buildings barely have enough funds to handle renovating the buildings for better energy efficiency.
EVs are the clear choice if you've got an ICE car as a backup.
I mostly do commuting, grocery runs, etc. EVs are great for that. But then I do road trips about once a year, and an EV just adds to the complexity of planning currently.
Yeah but I think range anxiety is a great name because a lot of anxiety can't just be "explained" away. I've tried for years with certain friends.
People don't like the _idea_ that they could one day be stranded without a nearby charger, or (even though this has literally never happened to me in 6 years), being _forced_ to wait 3 hours to charge your car.
I think NACS will help with this since the Tesla Supercharger network is quite amazing in its coverage and speed of charging. So as other cars get access to it, it'll make owning an EV more palatable.
It's fun to remind people that "range anxiety" was a term in literature a century ago referring to how hard it was to find gasoline (in certain city Pharmacies with certain old fashioned medicines they made in house, in certain city Blacksmiths that used gasoline as a forge starter, and that was about it). Every person that has ever driven a car has some version or another of the range anxiety of making it to the next gas station or not knowing how long of a stretch it will be between gas stations on some interstate. The earliest versions of that were a lot worse when gas stations were a (full service) novelty.
The fun part of the original uses of "range anxiety" was that it was also used in contrast to EVs at the time. You might not know where the next gas station might be, but electricity is easy to spot and you could charge an EV at any friendly house or business you stopped at with an exterior outlet to pick up a few miles to get back to where you needed to be. EVs were the cars where "fuel" was everywhere and plentiful and there were few worries about if you needed to make an extra stop somewhere that you could find a plug.
At some point we're going to see things flip back to that. When gas gets expensive enough, when gas pumps start to close fast enough, when more people have practical experience with EVs and home charging and even Level 1 charging as cheap and ubiquitous (if not the best charging experience; this is where Edison bites us by pushing the main US electrical outlets to be half the voltage of other continents out of losing the AC/DC war) things will flip back to that original "range anxiety" perspective. Gas is the weird, flammable thing that should be hard to find. Electricity is almost "everywhere the (LED) light touches".
But yes, "anxiety" isn't always rational and you can explain that to a lot of individuals, and they may get it rationally, but it will take a lot more momentum to sway the more emotional parts of their brain, especially those tuned to the zeitgeist and feeling a shared "cultural anxiety" here.
(I also think NACS is going to help. It was dumb for us to have two competing plug standards for quite as long as we did. The latest model of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the first non-Tesla NACS "native" car available to purchase and early reviews are quite favorable about that.)
I bought a car back in 2003 and replaced it in 2020. I looked at a bunch of options in 2020 because I really wanted an electric vehicle and ultimately opted for a plug-in hybrid. Between the range and infrastructure a fully electric vehicle sounded like a pain to manage.
Most of my driving is electric because it's around town, but I can go a long distance without any stress or delay. One day I hope I won't feel the need to burn fuel.
The main question is, how the hell did Toyota foresee this? They didn't go all gung-ho on the EV hype train and stuck to their word, even when the others rushed in headfirst.
Is this "Hybrid Hype" a realization, or is it a knee-jerk reaction to China now gaining more ground on the EV vehicles + Elon's latest antics?
Toyota didn't foresee this, Toyota is still just riding the conservative strategy they've been following for 20+ years and the Prius as the hybrid that most matters to the US market. Also hybrids aren't really growing, it's mostly that EVs haven't yet dethroned the Prius, despite Toyota failing to properly invest in it and getting lost in the wilderness of Hydrogen for two decades.
(Honda is the fun one mentioned in the article and is mostly playing catch-up to Toyota 20 years after having also wasted too much time on Hydrogen.)
To me the edge cases were always obvious. For city car something like plug-in Yaris will do the same job. But also manage to cover the trips on limit of range. That is two way trips. Going to somewhere and coming back without stopping, maybe 4 hour drive total on highway...
The engine in a hybrid is simpler and more reliable because it is not directly connected to the wheels so there is less stress on it. The engines in Toyota's hybrids don't even have a starter because the CVT just spins the crank shaft and then they apply spark to the plugs. My Prius is 18 years old and the only thing I've had to do to the engine is change the oil every 10,000 kilometers. The electric side has even less complexity and higher reliability.
I think if they were going to "mandate" what kind of engine to use it should have been the hybrid. This would've given the necessary time to build up the support infrastructure necessary for electric only vehicles. Along with a hybrid mandate they could've included a charging infrastructure mandate.
There's a fundamental synergy in that electric motors get less efficient as you go faster, and internal combustion engines have their most efficient output at significant RPMs.
Using electric at low speeds and ICE at high speeds lets you use the two methods for what they're best at. The Toyota Synergy Drive design (used by many, but not all, hybrids) uses the two electric motor/generators to let the ICE run in its efficient RPM range at most speeds.
There's probably more moving parts than a full EV, but it's probably less complex than a full ICE. You add one motor, but the transmission/transaxle is a whole lot simpler mechanically. And you have access to the liquid fuel network which is mature and ubiquitous.
My PHEV has a two year service interval, so maintenance is not too bad. Ford had a bad batch of transmissions, and mine had to be replaced, but if they had manufactured it properly, it would have been bullet proof. The engine can be even more optimized for the efficient RPM bands it runs in, because the engine control system means it will only rarely run outside those bands.
People who are truly concerned about the environment walk, ride bikes and take public transort. Tesla owners on the other hand use the environment as a "justification" for purchasing a battery-powered computer on wheels that the owner cannot control whilst it performs surveillance and phones home to the mothership.
It may be EV and infrastructure are just not really there. In Italy outside of cities you have to use a car, no questions. You take a state road or extra-urban and battery range easily drop to 250km at most.
There are many charge stations, but often they don't work, or are placed far from needed. Here many have no way to charge at home.
And EV prices are far higher than ICE ones, which are insane theirself.
I would love to see longer range PHEVs or series hybrids. Something that could go 50 miles on battery power and any distance on gas would capture most of the cost/greenhouse gas savings of electric and avoid any range / charging problems.
At 40 cents/kWh at a level 3 charger, electric mode isn’t actually winning in cost vs an efficient hybrid using gasoline.
The jaw-dropper in this story isn't hybrids, it's the section about hydrogen. Toyota is staying the course, now joined by BMW. The writer concludes:
I really hope someone can figure out how to make hydrogen work on a consumer scale because it’s a really neat piece of technology that could make a big difference as we move further away from fossil fuels.
Yes, hydrogen vehicles seem like a great idea in theory but practically speaking it's been a disaster. There's no mention of the dumpster fire in California, the only U.S. state where hydrogen has a foothold. From "Shell Closes Its Hydrogen Stations In California" this February:
There are 54 publicly available hydrogen refueling stations in the Golden State, with a varying number of them regularly listed as “offline” at any given time. As of presstime, for instance, 19 of California’s stations were not open for business. Sometimes as many as half of them are unavailable.
I can't find the article now, but the LA Times or WSJ interviewed hydrogen car owners in California and getting towed seems to be a regular occurrence when refueling stations are out of order.
Depends on the car I'm sure. But hybrid batteries are much lower capacity, and there's a lot less pressure to optimize capacity.
If your EV has a 200 mile range, and you can optimize the battery to get 10% more range, that's useful. If your PHEV has a 30 mile EV only range, 10% more doesn't do much unless that's what it takes to hit a regulatory target. For a non plug in hybrid, a 10% increase in capacity is even less noticable.
I think you'll see more focus on density (space and charge) in EVs because of this; but as EVs commercialize denser batteries, may as well put those in hybrids if the cost or space savings are meaningful.
There's a massive weight trade-off. ICE engines are heavy, even when just used as an electrical generator. Carrying that weight means a lot less weight for batteries (and a lot less capacity). So generally at this point the battery chemistries are about the same, but there's a lot less battery in a hybrid.
The battery in a HEV can only hold enough energy to go a few kms which results in about a 40% saving in fuel used in an ICEV. The battery in a PHEV can go typically 50 kms before it reverts to HEV mode. This can result in an 80% to 90% reduction in fuel usage, depending on how far you typically drive each day.
Sorry but these articles praising hybrids never mention two important things...
1) Hybrid demand is partly driven by the manufactures who need to meet government fuel economy standards.
2) People don't plug in their hybrids, thus the vehicles are not actually meeting those standards in the real world...
>The analysis of the new datasets presents strong evidence that real-world electric drive share is far below the utility factor label rating. Specifically, the analysis finds that real-world electric drive share may be 26%–56% lower and real-world fuel consumption may be 42%–67% higher than assumed within EPA’s labeling program for light duty vehicles.
Does anyone know why they don't? It seems strange to me that you would pay extra for a feature, and then not use it. But maybe these people are getting governmental subsidies that end up lowering the cost below the gas-only version of the same vehicle? So they never really had an intention to plug in to begin with?
The reality is ICE in general, hybrids doubly so, are extraordinarily complex machines with over 100 years of highly funded research invested.
EVs are incredibly simple machines with a limited amount of research applied mostly by a few companies that are very young.
The engineer in me sees the complexity argument as insurmountable. Over time ICE improvements will be flat as diminishing returns set in two decades or more ago. Their complexity isn’t going down, every improvement adds a more complex manufacturing process and complex machine - either in terms of materials or process.
EVs are almost certainly on the other path where their machine becomes simpler in exchange for a more complex science, but the science is effectively the same science that yielded modern computers - solid state, in the end, in a manufacturing process that can scale absurdly. The machines if built with intention will effectively never break or need maintenance beyond a few simple parts. The disposable parts are 100% recyclable.
As t->inf the age of fire is already over, and the age of maxwells equations is starting in earnest. As we put down our distilled flaming dinosaur juice and take up fundamental forces, these discussions will feel anachronistic rapidly. The infrastructure discussions are simply engineering and investment challenges, which will yield, as the complexity of the underlying machine has already doomed the ICE.