I wish PHEV were more popular. I really don't need a car with 300 mile+ range. Just like 50 miles and if I need to rarely go more I'd rather just use gas.
Something like PodBike except much cheaper would also be appreciated.
Something like PodBike except much cheaper would also be appreciated.
As electric cars keep getting cheaper and the ubiquity of rapid charging keeps improving, I think for a lot of people the PHEV concept won't work out as well as it sounds. It will be just as easy to rapid charge a mid-range EV for long trips and you get the benefit of all your day-to-day driving being nicer as well.
If anything once we can make carbon neutral synthetic fuel out of renewables what would be the purpose of BEV environmentally?
People keep saying this but is this true? Modern ICE is pretty well understood. We’re not taking about a Honda beater from the 80s. Not to mention in the context of a PHEV you still wouldn't have exhaust for most trips anyway.
That's not to say EVs aren't complex or hard to build. There are a lot of parts inside the battery pack. But they aren't moving parts and they don't need the same kind of regular maintenance. Electric cars don't have oil to change and they almost never need brakes replaced because of regen. They don't have O2 sensors that fail, they don't have spark plugs to change, they don't have timing belts to replace, etc. If you look at a list of the top 10 most frequent car repairs, maybe 9 of them can't happen on an electric car. It is just a simpler system of moving parts. The complexity is in a different place.
The problem with PHEV is you have the different types of complexity of both systems combined just in an effort to boost range.
True, ICE car are more complicated but its pretty clear that build and maintain is cheaper than BEV. ICE cars are half the price of EVs. Maintenance of good Japanese cars is cheap, I spend like $30/yr on oil changes.
• PHEVs have (pretty much by definition) smaller batteries, so they discharge/cycle more of their capacity, wearing down batteries quicker. They're also less convenient, because they have to be plugged in more often and charge slower (if you don't plug them in daily, they're just overcomplicated ICE cars).
• A pure electric drive train is pretty energy-efficient (80%+ Well-to-Wheel efficiency). Combustion engines are only about 35% efficient (and it won't get better: there's no room to use the heat, and you can't avoid generating heat in a combustion engine). It's already bad even if you have perfectly efficient fuel synthesis. We're not near having too much electricity to waste.
• There's still an engine and a gearbox to maintain. These are mechanically much more complex and inherently more fragile than an EV power train.
• Most PHEVs on the market have weaker/laggier performance than BEVs due to having a smaller battery that can't deliver high peak power, and having only one electric motor due to sharing a power train with ICE.
Modern fast-charging BEVs already work great. They have effectively infinite range if you charge 20 minutes per 2-3 hours of driving. That's entirely within reason, and only about 10% slower than pee-in-a-bottle road trips.
I do wish more folks with PHEVs would ensure they're plugged in as much as possible, but I'm still of the position that they have a reasonable usecase while the world transitions.
Regen improves overall efficiency by 3%-10%. It has a relatively small effect even in BEVs. Majority of the energy is lost to rolling resistance and drag (otherwise you could just turn your engine off and coast to your destination…), so there isn't that much to capture. I'm not sure if it even cancels out the extra weight and inefficiency of PHEVs having two power trains. It makes less of a difference than variability between ICE models, so you could be better off driving a smaller pure ICE car.
Is that how you would also describe a non-plugin hybrid?
If you don't plug them in daily, they're very fuel efficient ICE cars, with nice acceleration from a stop, and the opportunity to get free charging at some locations, rockstar parking at others (sometimes for a small fee), and maybe carpool stickers.
> • A pure electric drive train is pretty energy-efficient (80%+ Well-to-Wheel efficiency). Combustion engines are only about 35% efficient (and it won't get better: there's no room to use the heat, and you can't avoid generating heat in a combustion engine). It's already bad even if you have perfectly efficient fuel synthesis. We're not near having too much electricity to waste.
You're right about efficiency, but Texas often has overnight periods with too much electricity, and the California solar peak is close too (to the point where time of use rates have changed and there's an off peak price during the middle of the day). That's likely not enough to make fuel synthesis viable, of course.
> • There's still an engine and a gearbox to maintain. These are mechanically much more complex and inherently more fragile than an EV power train.
> • Most PHEVs on the market have weaker/laggier performance than BEVs due to having a smaller battery that can't deliver high peak power, and having only one electric motor due to sharing a power train with ICE.
Most PHEVs (and most HEVs) on the market are using a ICE + two electric motor + gears power system. Early Honda hybrids had a different system, but afaik, everyone else adopted the system that Toyota pioneered, sometimes called an e-CVT. There's no gear selection mechanism and it's relatively simple. (Apart from manufacturing errors, but if Ford can make a hybrid transmission that fails early, they can make BEV gearing that fails early too; hopefully my replacement transmission outlasts the rest of the components)
My PHEV has a two year maintenance interval for the engine, and sure, that's more than an engineless car, but modern engine maintenance is fairly painless. Change the oil when the minder tells you, make sure the drive belt or chain gets changed on times. Spark plugs when they need them. Fiddle with the emissions control when the light turns on.
Performance seems more than adequate, I can spin the tires from a stop, and it goes faster when I push the pedal down more. The only time there's significant lag in response is if you put it in EV only mode and try to get up to free flowing freeway speeds to merge. But, that's a silly thing to do; the battery evaporates at freeway speeds, and the gas engine gets best mileage at freeway speeds, using the whole car will get you the best results.
Poor interior space is a real issue, especially in mine (Ford didn't take the time to find a good place for the batteries, they just shoehorned them into an already small cargo area)
When I need to do a long trip I'll just have the power pack thrown on the back at the neighborhood depot next to the propane tanks at the gas station. It can have a fossil fuel powered generator, or just be batteries, I don't care.
What I do care about is not having to cart around an ICE 100% of the time for the sake of trips I do <=10% of the time. Maintaining ICE garbage is not something I see in my future, and I'm an experienced graybeard grease monkey.
On the other hand, if you truly only need 50 miles, you don't want to be lugging around the extra battery weight. On the other-other hand, you don't seem concerned about lugging around the polluting gas engine when batteries would do the job just as well if not better. Charging time at the top of the range is one factor that many advocates of low-range vehicles are not aware of. What ends up happening with PHEVs is the gas engine gets used way more than you expect.
Also, PHEVs stink, so there is that. And before you mention long tailpipe, it is a fallacy, as has been explained.
I plug my prius PHEV into a 110v socket at night and it serves my 25mi daily driving just fine.
Charging speed is directly proportional to the size of the battery. But yes with high voltage DC chargers on a small battery you'll reach 80% at the same rate as a larger battery, but the 80% is much smaller, so the mile gain rate is also much smaller.
We've had a BEV for three years now. Last Christmas we had a loaner as it was for repair, and the loaner was a regular ICE. One of the first things that struck me was the smell of fuel and exhaust. The next thing was how noisy it was.
Hope I don't have to get another ICE, BEVs are just so much nicer to drive overall.
I also just installed solar at home. I expect the next family car would also be PHEV suv to replace the 16 years old minivan. Other than long trip, I don't expect to use gas much, maybe just once a week to oil up the engine for a few minutes.
Even for commuting, having an oversized battery extends lifespan because of the reduced charge cycle per cell (and battery will generally last much longer than any engine).
I do like the range boost of the engine though. Especially when exploring new areas and not having a consistent route and supercharge routine. Although going back to the pump always reminds me why pure electric is the future.
(I've had both a Tesla and a Volt).
1. Say your 300 mile battery loses 30% in 5-10 years. So now you're down to about 200. In the winter in some areas you might lose another 30 to 50%. So now you're conservatively down to 100 miles. This still can be enough, but it's low enough where it's a hinderance.
2. The equivalent smaller battery as you've stated would drain faster, but it would also be substantially cheaper to replace to begin with. As a result the cost of the battery relative to the car is cheaper and the economics if buying a new battery makes more sense.
Not to mention that only Tesla's have the super charger network, so it makes even less sense for non-Tesla EV owners.
A battery range longer than the average trip distance * 2 is unnecessary. Ideally you'd have "just enough" + infrastructure to charge at said locations + gas to go further if necessary.
But this is way, way more degradation than actually happens.
> Not to mention that only Tesla's have the super charger network, so it makes even less sense for non-Tesla EV owners.
This isn't true anymore in much of Europe, and in not too long it won't be true anywhere.
> A battery range longer than the average trip distance * 2 is unnecessary.
About half of your trips are longer than average.
Not really, it’s in line with the battery warranty with more or less all EV manufacturers
> This isn't true anymore in much of Europe, and in not too long it won't be true anywhere.
We’ll see.
> About half of your trips are longer than average.
Sure but I’m talking about PHEV, obviously with BEV you have to be conservative.
https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
Approximately 15% per 6 years, in line with my estimate and the warranty offered by all manufacturers sans Hyundai.
1. It says very little about how the data is collected. Just "Geotab developed the tool based on an analysis of 6,300 fleet and consumer electric vehicles." that's not a lot of transparency.
2. It appears to be based largely on commercial vehicles (although see point 1, it's hard to tell). Consumers drive way less than commercial, which makes analysis by year less than useful.
3. It has a sample size of 6000 vehicles. That might sound like a lot, but since it is broken down into 21 different types of vehicle with about 3 models per type, that's only 100 vehicles per model+year. This would be less of a problem if they disclosed how many vehicles of each type they had, but they don't.
4. They also don't disclose how they have averaged vehicles.
5. The data they have that is easy to cross check (i.e. vs Tesla) shows that their numbers are way different from other sources https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-dat... and https://www.evchargerreviews.net/should-you-worry-about-ev-b... that are much more transparent about their data.
All in all, it's very unclear with that source where the data is coming from, how it is analyzed, and it's conclusions differ dramatically from much better analysis.
I’m also involved in the electric Smart community and those batteries have phenomenally low degradation, often being above 92% at 8 years, due to excellent thermal and charge management.
The only manufacturer that seems to put their money where their mouth is in Hyundai with a lifetime length and mileage battery warranty.
Another example: iPhones have a 1-year warranty but usually last much longer than that.
iPhones are irrelevant to the discussion, lol.
> needing any repair
But for the battery, you were talking about when it needed replacement.
No, it's not. That's why some manufacturers offer much longer warranties than others despite having similar reliability numbers. Warranty terms are driven by the business and encompass a lot more than mean time to first failure.
> iPhones are irrelevant to the discussion, lol.
If warranties were a good approximation of how long things last without repair, why would that only apply in the car world?
What's an example of this controlled for the price of the car?
> If warranties were a good approximation of how long things last without repair, why would that only apply in the car world?
Warranties are a good approximation in the context of cars. Virtually all other consumer devices have a 1 year warranty so it's not really a distinguishing feature.
In any case, warranty aside the reason I even brought it up is because many manufacturers warranties imply potential for up to 30% degradation after about 8 years which is why I used the numbers I used (https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batter...)
Any decision to offer a warranty beyond that is driven by whether it will entice new car buyers to buy the car or to pay more for it.
CCS cars get the benefit of all charging networks combined, including (gradually) Tesla's:
https://electrek.co/2022/05/18/tesla-expands-supercharger-pi...
My BMW i3 battery warranty was 80% remaining capacity after 8 years.
I checked the raw data, and they actually did he 80/20 rule, so when it reported 100% charged in the user interface, the battery was 80% full. Based on this I think it would have lasted a long time (it got totalled by some dofus, entirely unrelated).
What? Have you been driving GMC cars or something? Change the oil on schedule and engines last for decades.
The secret to having the machinery last on a car is (as you said) oil changes, and I'll add suspension lube, too.