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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs)

The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.

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> The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro.

How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?

There’s a wide range of “reasonable times” a car can get to 70 mph and the differences can definitely be noticed by normal drivers on public roads.

Doesn't matter. Consumers like the specs, and showing off how quick they can get to 40mph on a residential street.

I guess that’s a rhetorical question? Because clearly many people do actually prefer a BMW to a geo metro, despite the price difference.

There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer).

Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.

I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration?

It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideration for the trajectories of other vehicles?

It’s not that difficult, and I live in an area with notoriously short on-ramps. You’ve still got plenty of road to match the speed of the cars on the highway and shift your position so you land between two cars. Accelerating as you’re about to merge just makes that more difficult, especially with a short on-ramp.

Yeah, sometimes people don’t know how to drive and stop or slow down on on-ramps. I don’t care how fast my car can accelerate; if the person in front of me isn’t reaching the same speed as the cars on the highway, I’m going to stop much farther back on the ramp, wait for them to do their thing, and resume proper merging once they’re out of the way. I don’t want to have to deal with flooring it and trying to time everything while accelerating.

Have you ever driven a plug-in Prius (the Prius Prime here in Québec)? It's got wonderful acceleration when using the all-electric mode.

What opportunity do you have for dramatic acceleration driving legally on a public road? 0-60 in 3s vs 20s how much time can that really add up to shaving off your drive?

I borrowed (actually traded; swapping with my truck) a ~2016 Prius for a month and hated driving it.

Merging is slow; I ended up flooring it and only reaching ~50 mph by the end of the onramp. Bay area ramps are, however, very short. Try the SB 101 Rengstorff ramp in Mountain View, it's horrible. In fact, that very ramp is why I replaced my 2002 Saturn LW200 with a 2010 BMW 135i in 2012.

The Prius also can't maintain speed up hills. I would engage cruise control and find myself dramatically slowing down on any uphill segment. By contrast none of my cars have this problem - the 2010 BMW 135i, the 2022 Chevrolet Bolt, and the 2000 Chevrolet Silverado all do just fine. Of the three, the Bolt is my favorite to drive.

That is, of course, not an indictment of PHEVs in general, just the Prius in particular. It's under-powered for unremarkable basic driving. Hopefully the Prime and other models newer than what I drove are better.

Sounds like the car you drove was defective.

I have an auris which is mechanically identical to a Prius. I have not driven those exact roads but I have never struggled going up hills and it will hit 60mph from a standstill in just under 10s, so with a rolling start of say 20-30 getting onto the onramp you are at 60 or so in 6 or 7 seconds. If your onramps are so short that you can't drive for 6 or 7 seconds before merging, then I guess that is a different problem.

Maybe, but I doubt it. It wasn't throwing any codes and I notice other Priuses also sagging by 5-8 mph on uphill sections of 280. Nowadays I habitually change lanes if I see a Prius in front of me just prior to an incline.

The official spec sheet says ZVW30 Prius has a 73kW(99PS) engine and a 60kW(82PS) motor, so combined it's a 130kW(180PS) system if it was possible to do so. 130kW is about as much as a Caterham Seven and slightly less than fast motorcycles. Take a Porsche 918 and it does 0-60 in 3.2 and goes around the ring in 7 minutes... with a 450kW(600hp) + 210kW(280hp) hybrid drivetrain.

There is nothing in hybrid configuration that makes a car slow, if not faster, not just Tesla quickening but actually overall faster. It's definitely Prius product design problem that is creating an impression that hybrids are slow ugly cars.

You don't have metered on-ramps? These are ones with a traffic light at the start where one has to come to stop at the light and then accelerate to match your speed with the traffic.

Very rare in UK at least .. and the few that exist are only active when traffic is at a near standstill.

Yeah, they are the same in the US, only metered when there is a lot of traffic. Which exacerbates the need for acceleration because you need not only match the speed before the ramp ends but also find a hole in the heavy traffic.

Why do you need to accelerate so much if the traffic is so slow?

Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but bad traffic here means stationary or less than walking speed. There is no need for hot rod acceleration in these situations!

Don't need to accelerate if the traffic is slow, need to accelerate if the traffic is heavy i.e. a lot of cars driving on the same road at 60-70 mph.

In my area, if the ramp meters are on, traffic on the highway isn't moving faster than 35mph and might very well be at a dead stop. Why would I need hyper-acceleration?

I am perplexed by the insinuation that an average power car is less safe than a sports car on public roads. Everything I was taught shows that proper driving technique is paramount, and I would have to see data supporting a contrary assertion.

While we can construct edge scenarios where a fast car can get you out of trouble (mostly when overtaking) I'm willing to bet that's a marginal effect that is trumped by the inherent danger of very powerful cars in the hands of inexperienced drivers - i.e 100% of the first time buyers who never drove one.

Seems more like a rationalisation for wanting a cool toy, "don't worry honey, those 500HP will mean the world when merging to drop the kids to school".

Yeah this sounds to me like a lot of "whatabout"ing.

"I can't drive anything that does less then 3s 0-60s because <insert some flimsy reason>". If you want a fast car, just come out and say it. Driving a high performance car can be exhilarating - I have a second/weekend fast car for precisely the reason that I enjoy it, but I don't pretend it is required or that it is particularly responsible or socially acceptable to boot it away from the lights or go accelerate like shit off of a stick when merging with faster traffic. My hybrid does 99% of my driving, and the other is strictly a weekend guilty pleasure. I've never been in a situation in normal driving where the hybrid couldn't do something my weekend car would have handled (apart from just blow someone off at the lights if they have pissed me off)

The arguments here against PHEVs and EVs etc used to be towing speed boats up mountains every week (it was never made clear why people were taking speed boats up a mountain so frequently! Surely there is not much water up a mountain...)

I guess people need new arguments now that range and towing and charging are solved issues for 99% of people's needs.

I am sure someone will now reply about their journey out to meet their parents in the country with no chargers on the journey there etc etc... Did you try driving your speedboat there instead? :)

The person I was responding to said the difference was impossible to notice on public roads. I gave an example of a situation where it is noticeable and everyone decided that I meant it was a situation where it’s necessary (despite explicitly saying that it isn’t necessary).

It’s the kind of thread that makes me really wish people on the internet would read what’s written, not what they’d like to think was written.

I still don’t really understand how you can end up in that situation. It seems contrived. With proper driving technique, it shouldn’t be possible. Granted, mistakes happen, but I’ve never been in a situation where the difference was noticeable or relevant.

The argument here is about comfort, not impossibility. Someone who is comfortable driving a 5s 0-60 car just won't buy a 10s 0-60 replacement. Not because it is impossible to get to places in the latter but because it's uncomfortable.

If you want these people to replace their 5s cars with hybrids you need to offer 5s hybrids.

> If you want these people to replace their 5s cars with hybrids you need to offer 5s hybrids.

These are readily available.

Driving for fun on public roads is safe, legal, and popular. You won't wish it away.

Many I've seen in Europe are pretty fast - Merc 350e for example has 0-62mph of 5.9s and top speed of 155mph. BMW 330e is 6.1s and 140mph. Granted some are slower, but no one ever bought a brand like Toyota etc expecting high-performance, so it is not surprising if they are slower (FWIW my Toyota non-plugin hybrid is actually pretty fast from a standstill, but won't win any races beyond 20mph)

6s to 62mph is pretty nippy - if you need faster than 6s 0-62mph then you are likely in a fairly small niche group.

Looks like the base Tesla 3 is 0-62 in 5.8s and 140mph top speed so pretty comparable.

A model 3 performance does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds with some guys going faster on a track with sticky tires. Someone looking at a Benz (at least in the US) isn’t buying the base model 3.

The Benz starts at $54k in the US, that’s definitely model 3 performance territory.

In the UK, a Tesla 3 performance is £60k. A base Tesla 3 is about £43k. An equivalent Merc 300e is £45k.

Base Tesla 3 and base 300e appear to be mostly the same price and mostly same 0-62 performance at 5.8s and 6.1s.

My Volt has 300lb/ft of torque and accelerates quite lovely. Sport mode is a fun drive. Much more pep than the VW diesel I used to have. And the car drives for 80-90km on battery without touching the ICE. I go months without filling. I drive 93% electric, only using gas for road trips. You've looked at the wrong PHEVs.

> You've looked at the wrong PHEVs.

You’re looking at a PHEV that no longer exists.

Our Pacifica plug-in hybrid minivan is fantastic. We go months without refueling.

>The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal.

The Chevy Volt was pretty sporty (damn the suits who killed it), and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE

>The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes

Well there's your problem. The fact that EVs are toys is making you think PHEVs are also toys. There are PHEVs currently on the market that can compete with the Ford Focus and the Honda Accord.

I've carpooled in a Prius and a Honda Civic Hybrid. Both of those cars seemed to be extremely capable of accelerating to pass other cars on the freeway. I was riding in the Prius one time and my friend was complaining about the Prius being slow, when we got stuck behind a car going 60 mph. Beep boop, he idly jumped up to 80, passed the guy, dropped back to 67, and went back to complaining that his car was slow.

I was terribly impressed; my car would've had to put more work in to do that.

The met police use a variety of PHEVs as response vehicles including BMWs and Mitsubishi. Performance is not an issue.

BMW's and Porsche's PHEVs are pretty good, why other companies cannot follow the same formula (add batteries and electric motor to a regular car without crippling the existing drivetrain) is a mystery. It appears most want you to buy their BEV so they intentionally make PHEVs unappealing.

We looked at the BMW X5 Hybrid recently and it’s kind of a joke. There’s a large (24kWh) battery pack but it only gets 31 miles of range on a full charge. The charge itself takes eight hours on a 240V circuit because they only installed a 16A charger (the i3 has a 32A charger.) Meanwhile it’s gas mileage is lower than the equivalent ICE version. It does not feel like a serious effort to move a lot of customers onto EV usage, more like a compliance car. No idea about the Porches but I understand those to be at an even less affordable price point.

The message I replied to was about performance, not range. PHEVs do not have 300 miles electric range, even BMW. I have an 45e and have no problems with it: it fully charges in ~7 hours, I drove about 6K miles last year and filled total 5 times (not full tanks, I live in an apartment building with shared chargers that go out of order for weeks so I fill up when charger is broken and I have less than 1/4 tank), it still has 90% of tank filled in the early November.

I live in a rural area and 31 miles of range is enough to drive into the largest town where everything is, and back again, without the ICE coming on.

That's not a "joke."

31 miles with a small/light/inexpensive battery and reasonably rapid charging would not be a joke, particularly if you also got some gas-only efficiency benefits. But the X5 has a relatively huge and heavy 24kWh battery pack - nearly 1/3 the size of a Model Y, a car that gets 10x the electric range. The result is a substantial cost increase over the gas-only X5, plus gas mileage that is actually worse. Moreover, the internal charger is so weak that you can’t add any substantial range by charging at your destination unless you occupy a charger all day long (the Model Y charges at up to 42 miles/hr on AC, the BMW will add maybe 4.)

In the US, at least, 45e MSRP is 3700 more than 40i xdrive and 45e comes standard with air suspension, which is a 2K+ option on 40i (can't look it up now because it's not even available at this time). I would not call a ~2000 a substantial cost increase on a 60K+ vehicle. But there is more - you get 7500 tax credit from the feds and in some states you get the state credit too so it's actually cheaper than even rear-drive sdrive 40i with the fed credit alone.

In other words, with some luxury features, small sales numbers (easy to take a small margin when you’re selling next to none) and a massive $7500 Federal subsidy it compares with the ICE on affordability. But I would prefer to save those valuable $7500 tax credits for vehicle designs that can actually be built and sold at scale. That’s the problem here: PHEVs are supposed to be a bridge to full EVs, but this thing is an obsolete dinosaur that will barely move the needle on electrification. It’s also fairly obvious that within the extended warranty lifespan of this vehicle, BMW will ditch this design and completely replace it with a platform that is a good EV first, rather than an ICE with some expensive bolt on electrification.

I frankly don't care about the needle of electrification. I responded to your claim that it is substantially more expensive, which had been false in my experience. If BMW will drop this design or the price incentive will change I am not going to be buying a BEV for sure, it's going to be an ICE or hybrid from another brand. Luckily the trend seems to be opposite, the 45e replaced the horrendous 40e and had been a great success so I doubt BMW will be killing this line any time soon.

Traditional automaker tend to get a bit paternalistic and perhaps communist in American terms - the new Camry your team is going to build and sell is going to carry life and moments of its drivers, and their families, and their neighbors waving hands for next decades, each year adding up in tens of millions as the cars are built and shipped - it’s definitely not going to do 0-60 in under 2 seconds because they can’t get around that for better or worse. Maybe even 5 seconds is too much. Is 7.5s too slow? Debatable. Think about kids! Our future!

Tesla is at the other side of spectrum when it comes to it, so they just put what they make because they can. They managed to set the benchmark for BEV so others follow them for BEV products.

Panamera turbo s e-hybrid or the cayenne turbo s e-hybrid certainly doesn’t have “abysmal” performance

I would guess that performance isn’t the main consideration for most folks, but you should check out the BMW 330e and 530e. Both are plug-in hybrids with very respectable performance numbers. You can even get them with the M-sport package (not that it makes them faster, but it makes them a little sportier).

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