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Comment by mustafa_pasi | Hacker News Reader

>Hybrids were a mediocre half-measure

That is not true. Hybrids can be greener than an full EV. To make EVs palatable, automakers realized they need to use huge batteries with 400+ miles of range. But the average daily commute is much much less than that.

The result of which is that you waste a lot of money and CO2 emissions to produce a battery that is 3x too big.

A hybrid with a range extender and 1/3 of the battery, can better accommodate the needs of daily commuters while actually being cleaner than an EV since the CO2 emissions from EV manufacturing is almost entirely due to the battery and it takes years (two to three depending on your commute) to offset those emission even against a new ICE car.

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This assumes the engine, fuel infrastructure, and weight of the ICE engine is free. It also assumes that the electric infrastructure cannot be fully converted to carbon neutral sources. Lastly it assumes that battery technology will improve at a comparable rate to ICE technology which has been extremely wrong in the last 10 years.

Well, the fuel infrastructure already exists, and the weight of the ICE engine is at least partially offset by the smaller battery.

I'm extremely skeptical of any claim that hybrids are better for the environment than EVs in aggregate, but for specific use cases over certain timeframes the difference may be small.

This assumes that a hybrid has to have a smaller battery to fit the ICE engine and/or that the ICE engine has equivalent weight/density.

On the one hand, volume versus weight an ICE engine is generally "lighter" than if that equivalent space were tightly packed with battery cells.

But on the other hand a car is not going to tightly pack the equivalent volume, most modern EV designs are a "skateboard" layout with all the batteries on the floor of the car. The front hood of the car is typically at that point unused space and many modern electrics place there now a "frunk" ("front trunk" or "froot"/"front boot" if you prefer Britishisms) for "bonus" cargo space.

From that perspective, a hybrid has "free" space for a gas generator by taking "back" the frunk space, but they have to shrink the battery because of the added weight of the gas generator. (The skateboard has the physical space either way, it shrinks to keep the overall car weight below an aerodynamic threshold, not to yield space for the gas generator.)

Yes. I have a lot of problems with the assertion ab ove you. It takes carbon to produce a ICE car too

It takes carbon to produce a BEV as well. And somehow BEVs are a lot more expensive (up to 40% more, when there are no subsidies) to produce than HEVs, which suggests more resources and energy is spent on producing a BEV.

For many people that initial price difference is high enough that buying a BEV instead of HEV makes totally no economical sense - so likely the lower emissions from usage are not going to offset higher emissions on production, for the whole lifetime of a car.

The BEV economics work only if you drive really a lot on long distances, but that's unfortunately the area where BEVs lose to HEVs on convenience.

Not one that's already on the road.

I think that you’re assuming that the hybrid in mind has plug in, otherwise you’re not really making the case for using gas to inevitably charge the battery (regenerative braking still requires having had some speed generated by gas). As far as I know, the vast majority of hybrids that Toyota makes are not plug in.

regenerative braking doesn't care what mechanism you used to get to a speed. If I want to charge the battery, I can press a button and the gas engine comes on and charges the battery directly. Regen is just to reduce loss due to wasted kintec energy.

The non-plugin hybrids are just as environmentally friendly as full electric cars, because they have 10x-20x smaller battery and that makes a huge difference in initial emissions. The OP likely wrote about PHEVs which indeed have batteries 3x-5x smaller than BEVs.

If you count in all the related emissions, hybrids seems to be the greenest cars you can get now:

https://greenercars.org/greenest-meanest/greenest

Huh? That link suggests the top two greenest vehicles are EVs, and 7 of the top 12 are EVs, with 3 of the rest being PHEV, and the bottom two are standard hybrids.

What am I missing?

Fair point - but they are very close. The fact that at least some hybrids are more green than some full electric cars tells something.

But this ranking doesn't include the other factors like price tag or convenience (range, time to refuel). If you additionally count these factors in, it turns out hybrids are the fastest way to get emissions down by bringing environmental friendly cars to the masses. They are a solution that exists today, and they are a plug-in replacement for ICEs. I can see hybrid cars very frequently on the streets, but fully electric cars not so much - so the effects on lowering emissions is bigger for HEVs than for BEVs. And you don't need to donate them to convince people to buy.

Also a lot depends on where you get electricity to charge the BEV from. In theory you can charge only from renewable energy sources, but in many areas you still burn fossil fuels, and in these areas hybrids are way more ecofriendly:

https://www.climatecentral.org/news/a-roadmap-to-climate-fri...

> I think that you’re assuming that the hybrid in mind has plug in, otherwise you’re not really making the case for using gas to inevitably charge the battery (regenerative braking still requires having had some speed generated by gas).

This logic is plain silly. You're not simultaneously on the gas and the brakes at the same time. The weight of the batteries and electric motors pales in comparison to the whole vehicle.

Average age of a car as of 2016 was 11.6 years and climbing, so it seems like the vast majority of those in operation would easily hit the offset threshold.

The more important number would be "average age of a car when it goes out of operation," but yeah, I highly doubt it's that much lower, if any. It should be similarly climbing.

Wouldn't it have to be higher?

Yeah, I have one car that is 21 years old and the other is 17 years old. They still drive great and have no issues. I truly don't understand people that get new cars every 2-3 years. Not having a car payment for decades is great. Plus our insurance is super cheap.

2-3 years is leasing territory (which some people do because they enjoy changing vehicles often.)

Car safety is much much better now than they were 5+ years ago however so it is not unreasonable for someone to change cars that often. I'd certainly not want to be in a 10yr old car in a highway accident if I could help it.

(Also, some newer cars are just nicer to drive with creature comforts people care about)

if you grow up with old unreliable cars, you dont want to repeat that experience.

That sounds like a maintenance problem rather than an old problem. If you stay on top of maintenance old cars can be just as reliable as a new car (and potentially even more reliable since new doesn't necessarily mean bug free).

But old and unreliable are not necessarily dependent metrics.

> Hybrids can be greener than an full EV

Any cite for this? It's not totally implausible to me, at least given current power generation.

My entire commute is covered by a 22 mile battery. I've put 600 miles on the battery this current tank of gas. I've not used gas yet.

While perhaps not typical, the compromise can be a massive improvement.

Same here. Got a Volvo XC60 T8, last time I filled up with fuel was in March. Almost all my local journeys are covered in EV mode entirely and I drive pretty much daily. And last year I was able to do a cross-continent journey without worrying where to charge on the way.

Having said all of the above - even according to Volvo's own stats, something absolutely stupid like 60% of all buyers never ever plug these in, it's just a tax dodge scam for a lot of people. But if you are one of the people who do, it works fantastically well.

Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today. My next car might be a hybrid, but I can’t really consider a BEV until I see that a large majority of apartment parking spaces have chargers.

>>Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today.

Well, I'd love to believe this, but the matter of fact is that the tax structure around hybrids is completely messed up here in UK.

When I got my Volvo, basically as a company car you could either get the highest non-hybrid model, the T6, with about 300bhp and pay like 30% tax on it every year, or get the T8 hybrid, with 400bhp, and pay zero tax on it every year. And of course the government never checks whether you actually ever plug your hybrid in or not, so if you never do it's actually much worse for economy and emissions than the T6 which is much more to tax. It's insanity.

Thankfully, it does seem like the EU at least is moving towards trying to quantify real-world emissions with the clear goal of wanting to ensure the homologation measurement reflects reality.

I wouldn't be surprised if the rated fuel efficiency decreased and emissions rose for plug-in hybrids in light of data showing relatively little usage of the battery.

Call me crazy, but I think you should be taxed on your actual usage. Just like your annual inspection reads your odometer, it should just read the petrol vs EV distance from the built-in computer and you should get a tax bill in the post. Got a plug in hybrid and drive it nearly always in EV mode? Great, zero tax for you. Got a plugin hybrid but drive it exclusively on petrol? You'll be taxed the same(or more) as a regular petrol car.

The issue with standardised tests for this stuff is that it really depends on individual usage. We should be punishing polutting usage of the car, not what the "average" it can do, since it's meaningless.

Note that to some degree we already have this through fuel duty. It's only the VED which is changed. There's an argument that VED should be based on factors _not_ linked to exhaust emissions, and that fuel duty should be used to that effect.

+1 I have a plug-in Prius and I haven't put gas in the tank since January, when I drove 10 hours to visit family.

> A hybrid with a range extender and 1/3 of the battery, can better accommodate the needs of daily commuters

You are describing the Chevy Volt (hybrid).

And GM quit making them because the Bolt (all electric) is so much cheaper to produce. Consumer convenience or emissions is irrelevant.

Hybrids are, unfortunately, a dead end because everybody is assuming that they are going to get swept away by all-electric once the infrastructure is in place. They're right--but everybody is assuming that will take 10 years when in reality it will take more like 25.

> And GM quit making them because

...they couldn't compete with the offerings, including plug-ins, from firms with established track records in the hybrid space; especially Toyota.

Only when you take for granted the whole infrastructure of mining millions of years old ferns, shipping them around world in pipelines and ships and trucks to burn them in tiny explosions many times a second to get wheels to turn.

Which, taking a step back, if franky ridiculous.

Why not use a battery and the planet-wide instant power delivery system we built and are using for most of everything else?

I think people get blinded by status quo bias.

Imagine we were operating with 100% EVs today, would people be advocating for adding in gasoline tech as hybrids?

That's why I like this (10 years old, wow!) Nissan Leaf ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn__9hLJKAk

It is obviously ridiculously over the top, but I think it paints interesting analogy.

You don't think lots of people would love range extenders? Giving up half a frunk for an extra 200 miles of range can come in handy.

How much more would people be willing to spend on avoiding a 30 minute charging break? I mean you have to pay for quite a bit of extra complexity in the car. That can't be cheap.

I feel like the population that both drives very long distances regularly and is willing to spend a large chunk of money of make the trip a little faster is pretty small. Plus it would be pretty hard to find gas stations if most people drove EVs.

In my mind the main use case is someone that doesn't have all that much battery range. They could buy a long range battery, but it would cost a lot more than the range extender.

If you don't have a long range battery, you might have to stop every 60-80 minutes of driving to charge. That will get annoying pretty quickly, especially since it's not like a smaller battery takes all that much less time to charge.

So I would expect the long range battery market to be quite big, and a range extender would have a good chance at grabbing many of those users.

Even if gas stations are somewhat uncommon, you'd only need to find one every 200-300 miles, and the worst case scenario is just that you go back to pure electric mode. You could also fill up a 5 gallon can for another huge chunk of extender range.

A single tank could save you an hour of waiting to charge.

This of the externalities.

To get "gas ranger extender" you still need oil drills, tankers, pipelines, refineries, tanker trucks, gas stations.

Without gas cars, we can retire all that infrastructure.

> Without gas cars, we can retire all that infrastructure.

Well, we can obviously reduce it if we reduce gasoline consumption from the status quo (true with moving to hybrids, especially plugins using gas mostly for range extension), but since its not used exclusively for autos, we can't retire it even if we replace all autos and do nothing else.

I don't think that many people really want them (well, are willing to pay for them), given that they are so rare.

BMW charged $4,000 for the Range Extender option in the i3, at that price, the manufacturer may as well just put in a bigger battery.

If I compare the battery pack for an i3, $4k of battery only gets you 25 miles of range. That range extender with a couple more gallons of tank could give you 200.

The battery pack costs $16K list price, but that price includes engineering, structural and support costs, so putting an extra $4K of batteries into it would give more than a 25% increase in range.

The range extender only adds around 70 miles of range:

current 2018 EPA estimates ding the more powerful i3s from 114 to 107 miles. BMW hasn’t cited an estimate for the REX model, which currently stands at 180 miles with the help of a 647-cc twin-cylinder engine.

The range extender adds 70 miles because it has a two gallon tank. Changing that to a six gallon tank won't change the price or meaningfully impact the convenience.

I don't think that small 38hp range extender could power the car for much farther, it's not powerful enough to run the car indefinitely at highway speeds (there's a lawsuit against BMW for the car slowing to 45mph while using the range extender), it needs some battery capacity to fully power the car.

They could put in a more powerful motor than that small scooter motor, but then that costs and weighs more, and then the car becomes a plug-in hybrid rather than a battery electric car with range extender.

And there seems to be low demand for plug-in hybrids as there aren't many options.

When I bought my Honda Accord Hybrid, I looked at the Clarity plug-in hybrid but decided against it. It didn't drive as nice as the Accord, cost nearly $5000 more, plus I was doing some regular long distance travel at the time, the accord has a ~500 mile range, the clarity has a ~340 gas+electric range, though the plug-in range would cover my commute.

And the Clarity was rated 40mpg highway, while I get around 50mpg @ 60-65mph with the Accord Hybrid (drops down to 44mpg at 70-75mph)

From what I read looking into the situation, it is barely enough to run the car at highway speeds in general. The lawsuit is mostly because the US version of the software won't turn the range extender on until the battery is almost completely empty. If you could turn it on at 50% battery you'd have almost no problems.

Why not can you imagine having the freedom to change your car nearly instantly and go wherever you want. No range anxiety

In a sane world, it would take less time to recharge an EV, not more. Good industrial and government leadership, working together, would have given us a swappable battery standard by now.

The new 800V EVs only take 15 minutes from ~20% to 80%.

Which is 10 minutes longer than it takes me to refuel my IC vehicles from 5% to 100%, and 14 minutes longer than it should take.

It's funny how HN'ers will fight to the death arguing for swappable batteries in cell phones, where they offer vanishingly few benefits, and against swappable batteries in motor vehicles, where they could potentially make all the difference in the world.

Swappable batteries aren't viable without a new business model. If you buy an EV today, it comes with a battery with a ~10 year warranty, and replacing that battery after the warranty ends is a pretty expensive affair.

Nobody with a new battery is going to want to swap it out for a old, potentially degraded battery. But everyone with an old battery would be happy to try to swap their way into a new battery.

Instead, I think you'd need a model where the battery isn't included in the price of the car, and you have a monthly subscription to rent a battery from either the dealer or a third-party. That way you aren't attached to the specific battery you're using, and the subscription fees go towards replacing old batteries as needed. The subscription would either be a base fee + price per replacement, or a base fee for rental + unlimited replacements.

Nobody with a new battery is going to want to swap it out for a old, potentially degraded battery. But everyone with an old battery would be happy to try to swap their way into a new battery.

Great, this old schtick again. News flash: nobody cares whether or not they own their car battery. With modern BMS systems, you would basically pay by the coulomb.

But yeah, I think this particular ship has sailed, at least for the near-term future. Huge missed opportunity. Refueling an EV should be as quick and easy as swapping out a BBQ propane cylinder -- which is also something you don't care if you own or not -- at your local convenience store.

Electric vehicle batteries are quite different from phone batteries and propane tanks. They are heavy, large, expensive and far from being self-serviceable. To build and operate a large network of conveniently located swap stations would require a huge financial risk because the swaps would be necessarily more expensive per unit of energy restored than the charge stations, meaning the swap stations would only capture a portion of charge business.

Perhaps in the future, total swap automation and inexpensive battery restoration or transport will reduce the risk of building the network and EV sales will finally become viable for the small minority who don’t want to take periodic breaks during the occasional long trip.

10 extra min after 4-6 hrs of driving isn’t significant unless you’re doing a Cannonball Run. And they can go even higher voltage in future.

Imagine how cheap gas would be if no one wanted it.

I’d guess it’d be obscenely expensive without economies of scale based on current demand and distribution.

As far as “no range anxiety” people in that world would just be making similar arguments, “what if there’s no nearby gas station”, “what if it’s out of gas”, “I can’t just plug-in anywhere” etc.

That argument about gas was a major argument against gasoline cars back in the day. It took major infrastructure investment to build out the gas network.

At the time there was no good alternative with existing infrastructure in place.

Today with EVs and modern battery tech that isn’t true.

> I’d guess it’d be obscenely expensive without economies of scale based on current demand and distribution.

Then swap out gasoline for diesel. If nothing else, I can get vegetable oil at the grocery store at a price that isn't too bad.

> As far as “no range anxiety” people in that world would just be making similar arguments, “what if there’s no nearby gas station”, “what if it’s out of gas”, “I can’t just plug-in anywhere” etc.

That's not how (plug-in, and surely these would be plug-in) hybrids work...

Fractional distillation. You are going to get what you are going to get. Unless you find suitable alternatives for all oil products, gasoline will still be produced in the same quantities.

Somebody will find something to do with the unused byproduct gasoline. I consider filling up my car to be a noble use instead of just burning it.

Yep, burning bio batteries and funding Putin/MbS. Why not download power from your roof, free?

This doesn’t make sense. The battery is 100% recyclable, and if you never use it’s full range the battery literally lasts longer. This sounds like ICE shilling devoid of the actual facts

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