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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

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Quality over quantity - and if prices indicate anything it’s a more efficient approach. Battery building is also limited to lithium availability, so there’s many more cars you can convert if you put 1/5 of the battery in each one. Fuel is much more energy dense than batteries so the removed weight is making the car more efficient as well. Ultimately I think it’s important to value flexibility and maximizing tradeoffs, which I feel plug in hybrids achieve.

And, not being in the industry, I don’t quite understand why.

Look at diesel electric locomotives. They run the diesel only for power and they use the electric motors for drive. Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission like a full EV does?

Gas engines have an optimal RPM. Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Instead, they are complex vehicles with EXTRA transmission like components.

The only car I know of that works this way is the BMW i3, which came with an optional 'range extender' that's essentially a little gas generator with a 2(!) gallon tank. One complaint I've heard is that it doesn't necessarily put out enough wattage to fully drive the car under certain (hilly, cold) conditions (But, I have to imagine that could be solved with a bigger generator).

The problem as I understand it is that California's regulations require that the range extender doesn't provide more range than the car's internal battery. How this ended up the case I have no idea.

You can convince the i3 to believe it's a European car which increases the range extender's utility dramatically. You can unlock more fuel as well as have the generator turn on whenever you want (as opposed to at only very low SOC), largely mitigating hills.

The purpose of the small gas tank was to qualify for California subsidies and ZEV credits. California doesn't want to subsidize anyone who might buy a PHEV or BEV with REX and then run it 100% on gasoline.

Somr hybrids do, they're called "series hybrids" as opposed to "parallel hybrids" or may be referred to as Extended Range Electric Vehicles (or some other ordering of those words.)

It doesn't work because of energy loss converting mechanical to electric and back is higher than mechanical transmission straight to the wheels. Honda does do something like what you describe at low speeds but the efficiency is not very good. Toyota and some other manufacturers use clever arrangements of planetary gears + motor/generator to keep the engine closer to optimal parameters independent of wheels. I'm not sure a modern hybrid system is more complex than a modern automatic transmission.

> Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission

Nissan e-Power system does exactly that, but requires full EV powertrain. Added cost. Also punishes transmission suppliers.

> Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Toyota THS system kind of does this. Output shaft is driven at a speed that is function of resistance and generator RPM and engine RPM thereby allowing RPM to stay in optimal-ish area.

The more I think about future drivetrains, the remarkable and more remarkable Prius starts to look for me - everyone hates hideous Toyota aesthetics and so do I, but Toyota hybrid system is rather ingenious and really something.

Internal combustion engines are very complex. Yet they can be produced really cheap.

It's a bit like microchips.

Vast sums (think tens to hundreds of billions) have been invested into the "machine that makes the machine". Cranking out engines at this point is relatively simple.

Path dependency is a very powerful force.

I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.

Cost isn’t the same thing as complexity. EVs are probably more expensive because batteries are expensive.

You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question…

Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?

How do the EV incentives compare to fossil fuel subsidies?

Where are the incentives taking the price of a Bolt that low? My LEAF just turned 7 and I'd probably buy a Bolt immediately if I could get one in the $11K range. (The LEAF has been great all around, but only being able to count on 75 miles is annoying from time to time.)

I'd like to know this too -- have had my eye on the Bolt for some time.

The 2022 Bolt base price is $31k and it is no longer eligible for federal tax credits. In my state, EVs are partially exempt from state sales tax, but that just means the total price is something like $32k including tax (instead of $33.5k).

If Build Back Better passed, the Bolt would be eligible for a $12.5k federal credit, so I'd be looking at $19.5k. But that bill is stalled and the Bolt isn't even available to buy new right now -- GM halted manufacturing until at least February due to a battery defect.

It looks like a few states offer tax rebates of $3-5k, so that might get you close to $11k if you could get the dealer to knock a few thousand off MSRP, but I have no idea if that's realistic (and again, this assumes BBB or something similar passes).

> But that bill is stalled and the Bolt isn't even available to buy new right now -- GM halted manufacturing until at least February due to a battery defect.

Not only that, a subsidy that large would dramatically increase short-term demand without meaningfully increasing short-term supply. So either they would raise the price or they'll be sold out before you can buy one, e.g. because they all went to the friends and associates of the dealers.

California. I have to admit it’s second hand (and outdated.. last year…) information, but worth looking into imho even though I’d rather see anyone get a Tesla.

I’m actually in the market for an EV or PHEV that seats 6 or more, and my search started with the Model X. But I’ll probably wind up getting a Volvo XC90. It’s around $30K cheaper, which is nice, and more importantly, if I ordered a Model X tomorrow, the expected delivery date is January 2023.

Did you take the resell value into account?

Plug-in hybrids can be as simple as normal hybrids with bigger motors and batteries.

On power-split device hybrids, the hybrid system outright replaces the automatic transmission which is the true "insanely complex" component.

Plug-in hybrids are, in the US, at average car cost now, but this may be because of EV credits.

PHEVs are more complex, but arguably not more complex than having both a BEV and an ICE vehicle. If a BEV covers 95% of my driving needs, that sounds great, but it still means I need two cars if one is a BEV.

5% of your drives sounds like a problem solved by a car rental, not by owning two vehicles.

Unless those 5% of rides start an airplane flight away, I can't imagine very many people are going to pay all the costs to own a car and all the costs and hassle/time-wastage of renting a car once or twice a month. They'll buy a PHEV, hybrid, or conventional car and wait for the BEVs to improve. (I'm a LEAF owner, but can trade cars with my spouse when I need to. I think twice in 7 years we've both needed to drive a distance in a single day where the shorter drive would stress the LEAF.)

Right, but that’s exactly my point, you wouldn’t own two vehicles, and you wouldn’t own one vehicle that still requires you to regularly rent a second vehicle. You’ll just own a single vehicle that covers 100% of your driving needs.

This makes very little sense. The complexity is an implementation detail. PHEVs are cheaper than EVs by a wide margin, complexity be damned, and are more practical to boot. Building PHEVs does not in any way reduce the amount that will be spent on battery R&D; PHEVs will consume all the batteries we can throw at them because we will still want the biggest battery pack available.

Such complexity is still cheap to mass manufacture.

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