We are really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.
It's okay as an intermediate step but all electric is much better long term.
Not for NMC batteries, which continue to go up in price (so much for the downward EV battery price trend EV promoters promised would materialize with the economies of scale).
And LFP batteries don't have the necessary performance characteristics for high load applications.
The great EV brownout of 2023 has arrived.
Sure, but given the long term might be longer than the average consumer holds onto a new car, there's a lot of value in a good intermediate solution.
The average person drives less than 30 miles a day. Building a 360 mile EV battery just to handle long-tail events seems very wasteful.
Given that Lithium battery production is largely the bottleneck to full electrification, you could use the batteries from 1 Tesla and make 6 plug-in hybrids from them. And then get pretty close to 6x-ing the amount of carbon saved.
Hybrids are probably the end-game for any forms of transportation that require operation for a long period of time. A dump truck, for example, could have its 12L, 400hp diesel engine replaced with a 1L, 60hp engine that charges the batteries that drive the electric motors. Since the auxiliary engine only needs to be able to provide just enough juice for cruising, it can be made much smaller.
This is how the LEVC taxis work in London; a 30kWh battery, charged by a 1.5L 3cyl petrol engine. Although in this case the kerb weight is about 200-300kg more than the previous (diesel) black cabs.
I just don't understand it. A car that can drive ~40 miles on pure electric that has an ICE for longer trips would satisfy the needs of everyone. For like 90+% of people, it would mean never using gas for their commute while also eliminating range anxiety.
I'm especially surprised about the lack of plug-in hybrids for semi trucks. I'd think having a little extra electronic torque would help considerably when accelerating. It doesn't need to go 0-60 in 20 seconds while carrying 80K lbs like the Tesla Semi claims, but certainly having extra power could be useful in some scenarios. Heck, just having regen braking would be a game changer when going down hills. No noise from a Jake Brake, and no worries about burning up brake pads.
Plus gas is a very volatile mix that degrades; you must run the ICE regularly to ensure the tank gets cycled.
But they also only stuck it with a 2 gallon tank.
All in all, a mild shortening of the life of your engine and perhaps triggering some maintenance sooner than otherwise.
Realistically, not much. The people saying “bad for you” aren’t wrong but they also fail to mention the effect size. It’s not particularly relevant unless you want to own the same car for a few hundred thousand miles and absolutely minimize maintenance. (Small aircraft for example, you want to care a lot about these things because they’re very expensive, when the engine fails you’ll be thousands of feet above the ground, and a well maintained plane can last decades. Your daily driver probably doesn’t have any of these issues)
There are various preventative things you can do to minimize the effects anyway. It’s one of those internet things where yeah they’re not wrong exactly but they need to relax. Having too much beer and cheeseburgers last night long term probably wasn’t the best decision, but you know what I’ll probably be fine.
Leaking gas in a car for a long time is like eating too much fast food. Ok yeah not the greatest but are you the type of person who cares enough to never eat McDonald’s? Make your decisions according to your disposition and don’t take people telling you you’re wrong too seriously.
I also only have the oil changed every 10K miles which horrifies my friends.
I only change my oil every 10k miles (or really 6-8k most often) but in an engine and with an oil specifically rated for such. Your jiffylube 5w30 (if that’s what you’re doing, if you’ve actually got an oil rated for 10k you’re fine) isn’t going to do great. It’s maybe 50-50 whether bad oil change schedule will be the thing that kills your car.
10K is probably fine with full synthetic oil if you're driving conservatively.
Now, if the engine runs long enough to fully warm up, this isn't the end of the world. Any water will turn to steam and be pushed out through the exhaust. However, if the engine only runs for a short period of time, water can sit inside of it and cause corrosion. Realistically this is only a problem if you repeatedly allow ethanol-containing fuel to sit for a long time, and also repeatedly run an ICE for very short periods of time.
It is a bigger problem for boat motors, because they operate in a wet environment already. It is also a bigger problem for carbureted engines, where fuel sits in the carburetor bowl while the engine is not running. This allows hygroscopic fuels to corrode the inside of the carburetor while the engine sits.
Ignoring ethanol, it is also true that gasoline breaks down over time. However, it typically takes many months before gasoline breaks down enough to worry. There are also additives that help stabilize gasoline for longer storage.
TL;DR in a reasonably modern-ish car, it's probably fine. In small engines like lawn mowers, it is best to either use ethanol-free gasoline or to completely drain the fuel before storing the mower for the winter. In antique cars with carburetors, it is best to use ethanol-free gasoline.
Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough. The first thing to go are the cam shafts.
https://www.aviationpros.com/home/article/10387461/corrosion...
> Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough.
I was always told to take the car for an actual drive (including a highway stretch) to achieve these ends, otherwise the moisture you're expelling accumulates in the exhaust system.
Looking around the neighborhood, I assume the people with the rusted-out mufflers are the ones that just let it idle.
Since I have yet to see any of these various claims having any impact on the maintainability or function of my car, I think I'll stick to my plan of not wasting the gas in my engine for months at a time.
> This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight
I mean, US consumers already put up with this when it came to automatic transmissions. But the cost/maintenance problems were a fair trade-off for convenience.
And in the case of plug-in hybrids, they are VERY convenient. You almost never need to get gas, but you can still go on a road trip without any pre-planning.
Europeans, too. Automatics crossed over 50% in the last couple years.
The volt pretty much already is a case study for the other points. It’s not really that much work.
The later point can be resolved with software that uses the gas on occasion.
hybrid systems are complex but really not much more complex than traditional ICE when you consider that they no longer need starters or alternators, have transmissions with no shifting components, and can use electric A/C compressors to avoid accessory belts entirely.
They also have much longer maintenance intervals because the engine is only running ~2/3rds of the time.
Electric cars are of course simpler but have cost and range issues that are prohibitive for some use cases, not to mention will usually weigh much more than even an equivalent plugin hybrid.
Suffice to say there is a reason that the best taxi vehicle has been the Prius for more than a decade. efficient and rock solid reliable despite increased complexity.
Most importantly though, you can make 10 plugin hybrids with the battery from one BEV. As long as raw materials for batteries are a bottleneck then we should be seriously considering PHEVs as a stopgap if as we can make sure they are getting charged.
My PHEV has a two year maintenance cycle, and the ICE portion is changing the oil, mostly. Yes, at some point you'll need to do a timing chain/belt, and there's incidentals; you'll never need to replace emissions equipment on a BEV, and most of the unscheduled maintenance on my ICE equipped cars has been related to emissions: EGR valves, o2 sensors, EVAP canisters, etc.
The engine control system takes care of running the ICE regularly, it's not something you have to worry about. I'd expect it to push you to fill up the tank about twice a year if you're mostly driving electric. I drive my PHEV mostly gas, and not that often anyway, so I just fill up every 500 miles or so.
If we don't ramp down fossils by regulation, all this EV business is worse than useless anyway (we'll just end up with the emissions from battery production in addition to burning up all the oil we can pump - maybe sold abroad if domestically there's a lot of renewables available, but still burned).
If I had a plug in hybrid, it wouldn’t get plugged in.
Hybrid cars are, effectively, enablers. The not-even temptation to just top it up, in under a minute, at an entirely acceptable cost (given that you could afford a hybrid, you can afford gas) is the best way to prevent people from actually going electric.
Plus, from an industry perspective, hybrids are the perfect excuse for manufacturers to just keep spending on ICE improvements rather than EV improvements: as long as the total package seems to get more mileage every year, no one's paying attention to the fact that the EV parts don't get improved nearly as much as the ICE parts do. And because hybrids cut into EV sales, manufacturers have the perfect excuse to keep working on ICE tech because "the majority of people are still buying cars with an ICE or ICE component".
Hybrids would be great if people were rational. Instead, people are the exact opposite, and hybrids are the perfect "let's not move to full EV" excuse for consumers and manufacturers alike.
For a while I commuted 80 miles a day which would have meant daily charges were more or less necessary. Having to take the car out for a walk every night would have been irritating.
You also don't want most people to be driving EVs, because then it quickly becomes a situation like bikes are with last mile transport: if everyone used them, they wouldn't work so well, but so long as only a few people are using them it works great for you. If everyone brought a bike on the train we'd have to redesign trains to be far longer and lengthen underground stations to match; right now its fine because its only maybe 2-3 people per train car with a bike in my experience, but if that changes the fixes are expensive.
Likewise with EV chargers, if we see mass adoption, we'd have to foot the bill to turn every basically zero cost spit of pavement people park on into dedicated charging infrastructure. I'm assuming a municipal charger will have to be substantially more rugged and able to handle more abuse than your average home charger installation. Estimates on the internet vary for what a l2 charger costs, lets say its $10000 for one fit for a public parking spot. That would put the cost to convert the 6 million parking spots in Los Angeles at $60 billion. Sure that's probably not sound math, but it doesn't seem cheap, especially factoring in ongoing maintenance and replacement.
Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because many will be able to charge at home or use fast-chargers in emergencies. You don't have to be near-full at all times. You could deploy them at only 1/N spots, say something closer to 1/4 of all the spots, if even that (apartments might need 1/1, but streets and business parking lots/garages would need far less. You don't need them in any short-term street parking areas, as L2 is mostly-useless unless the car is sitting in place for hours).
You also don't necessarily need to have the raw power to run them all simultaneously: you can have local groups powershare (e.g. deploy 8 chargers with a feed-in that supports 4, and the chargers can coordinate to drop their charge rate as more people plug in).
If those wild assumptions are true ($1k, 1/4 of parking spots), LA's bill drops to $1.5B, which seems much more reasonable. The capacity will build up organically over time as EV adoption grows, starting with corporate and apartment parking lots.
I think in this hypothetical all-EV future, there would be other compensating changes to the city as well. Like, all gas stations would go poof, and their tanks, and the fuel delivery trucks, and most of the refineries, and all of the associated impacts on peoples' health from both the fueling and the car exhausts, etc. There's a lot of potential upside to offset any reasonable electrification costs.
Frankly having my own charger at home would make owning a full EV even more convenient over the hybrid.
In some cases reliability actually improves, as the extremely reliable electric motor can replace things such as reverse gear and the starter motor, reducing complexity of the ICE system and transmission. The only parts being serviced that you pay for continue to be the gas bits exactly as before.
They have to carry with them an entire gas engine, plus large electric motors, plus a huge battery. That's a lot of mass. This makes them inefficient as gas vehicles, and less efficient as EVs.
Take a look at the Toyota Prius Prime, considered a great PHEV. It's got almost the same gas milage in combined city/highway driving as my 2012 Honda Civic (around 50 mpg). The Prius has got a slight edge. But that's combined, which presumes 45% highway and 55% city. You don't want to take that car on a road trip because once the battery is dead, you'll be needing to stop to refill the gas tank every 90 minutes. My Civic will drive 600km or more on highways, easily.
PHEVs are the best vehicle if you drive less than 60km per day, and mostly have stop-go city driving (so you can recharge on braking).
The 2021 Prius Prime is rated at 53mpg highway. Let's assume that is optimistic and it gets 50mpg. Its fuel tank holds 11.4 gallons, but you don't want to run it dry - let's say 10 gallons are usable. That is a 500-mile (~800km) range after the battery is dead. At 75mph, that requires stopping to refill the gas tank every 6 hours and 40 minutes.
The most efficient 2012 Honda Civic is the hybrid, which is EPA rated at 44mpg highway. That is very efficient. However, 44mpg -> 53mpg is a 20% increase in distance per gallon of fuel. The Prius Prime is significantly more efficient. Since we're intentionally ignoring electric range in these numbers, I think the efficiency gains are mostly from the 9 years of R&D that passed between these two cars being built.
Interestingly, the non-plugin 2021 Prius Eco is also rated at 53mpg highway. I do think it's odd that the extra weight from a larger battery didn't have a bigger impact on fuel economy. It looks like that makes a small difference in town, where the Prius Eco gets 58mpg vs the Prius Prime's 55mpg.
And it will get much better fuel economy than the Civic as soon as traffic gets bad or some city driving is required.
Picking highway MPG cherry picks the solution that makes the Hybrid or EV look the worst compared to the traditional ICE car.
Not that the Civic is/was a bad car. But all cars are a lot bigger and safer than they were, so it's almost always cherry picking to go back and take an example of an old fuel efficient car. A lot of those old cars could not pass modern emissions or safety testing, they got their good fuel economy by being a) Slow b) Light. A big part of light was not having extra mass for safety or emissions. On top of all that the mileage ratings for cars have also changed, so you can't even directly compare the ratings for an old civic with a new one.
I do wholeheartedly agree with you, though. Even when cherry picking data (highway mpg's, ignoring miles driven in EV mode, choosing the most efficient Civic) and ignoring other factors (larger, safer, lower emissions), the Prius Prime is much more efficient. I think plugin hybrids have their place.
The general complaint that I hear about other PHEVs is that car manufacturers publish the "combined highway/ city" rating, which is weighted heavily in favor of city driving- which is where a PHEV is incredible thanks to regenerative braking.
But if you're not using the brakes and just driving a long distance, your battery stops helping after 30-ish minutes and now you're just in a gas car with an undersized engine carrying a very heavy battery.
Better to go pure EV instead, which is what I'm on a damned long waiting list to do right now.
This is just wrong. The Prius Prime has an 11.4 gal tank and is rated 53mpg on the highway [1]. If you drive 70mph you'll need to refill after 7+ hours of driving and 500+mi.
[1] https://www.toyota-slo.com/blog/the-new-2022-toyota-prius-pr...
Nit: it's the low average speed of stop-go driving (less air resistance) that makes city driving more efficient for EVs. You'd get even better efficiency for the same average speed if it weren't stop-go driving.
Of course electric busses are vastly more convenient. They are almost silent compared to the heavy noise a diesel bus makes on acceleration. Their routes are predictable, so charging can be accounted for. Although a bus can also mount very large batteries to begin with.
But apart from the slight difference in maintenance quota, there also was a problem in winter. When it was cold outside many busses refused to work. They would need to stay within a depot in winter which increases costs again. Still electric busses seem to be an efficient way to curb in-city emissions and noise pollution to a large degree. And I think the problem with temperature can surely be solved somehow.
I do think perfect became the enemy of good here. But there are still valid economic reasons for the private companies that provide these vehicles. Ultimately they don't get paid for their vehicles to be more economical and less noisy.
I don't think it is worth to replace heavy machinery yet. There are just too few vehicles that the investment doesn't seem too reasonable yet as long as there are that many more efficient things to replace.
That said, I really appreciate early adopters of EVs who are helping push the infrastructure.
[0]https://nypost.com/2013/06/30/mta-hasnt-purchased-a-hybrid-b...
[1]https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/200-electric-buses-are-...
The MTA operates 5,800 buses [1]. At 525 kWh per bus [2], that’s 3 GwH of batteries fleetwide. Charging those daily is enough to keep a large power plant busy.
[1] https://new.mta.info/project/zero-emission-bus-fleet
[2] https://chargedevs.com/newswire/new-yorks-mta-orders-60-more...
Plugin hybrids cars are expensive, not at the least because they require both a traditional ICE drivetrain and a large battery and electric motor, and specialized power split transmissions to make those work together.
Therefore, most plugin hybrids are higher end (just like EVs) and marketed at wealthier people who want to drive electric most of the time but have range anxiety or don't want to deal with DC fast charging. Look for yourself:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g15377500/plug-in-hybr...
That said, they can make a lot of sense if you need 1 car that can do everything, both short daily drives and long trips. The sleeper hit here is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The new ones have 38miles electric range and seat 7.
However, the falling price of batteries and growth of DC fast charging infrastructure means that they will PHEVs will be a bridge technology.
Many city buses however are starting to convert to some form of plugin hybrid, although even their
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_electric_bus#List_of_tr...
However, even city buses are moving towards full electrification since the maintenance and fuel costs tend to dominate the total cost of ownership for them, and those are much lower with full electric.
The thought occurs to me to make the rear wheels powered by the ICE and the front wheels electric.
Then no wacky transmissions.
I don't know anything about a "power split" transmission, but isn't that the sort of thing a differential gear set does very well at?
That's why for instance we do not have much multi-motors EVs without a mechanical coupling...
AFAIK, no multi-motor EV has a mechanical coupling between the motors. Do you know of a counter-example?
A planetary gear set is often a component of a power split transmission, but there are other components. The key thing is that it is able to blend power from multiple sources [1]
> The thought occurs to me to make the rear wheels powered by the ICE and the front wheels electric.
> Then no wacky transmissions.
The problem is you then have a car that switches the basic drive characteristics (FWD to RWD) depending on what fuel you are using. Everything from the chassis to the suspension in a car is designed according to where the power is coming from.
Mitsubishi addressed this problem in their Outlander PHEV by using 2 electric motors, 1 on each axle, with the front axle being supplemented by the ICE engine (via a 1 way clutch) when more power is needed than the small battery can output, or when the battery is depleted [2]. This doesn't completely solve the problem but makes it less noticeable, and eliminates the need for a mechanical driveshaft between the front and rear.
Also, this approach only switches the vehicle from FWD to AWD, not from FWD to RWD. It's the same with dual motor EVs, they switch from 1 axle drive to 2 axle drive - they don't switch from one axle completely to the other. Imagine your car suddenly becoming RWD when the battery was depleted. That would be weird, and potentially even dangerous.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941....
By using two electric motors connected to a planetary gearset you can replace the starter and alternator, allow for electric drive and regenerative braking, and provide a continuously variable transmission for the gas engine all with a set of constantly meshed gears (i.e. no shifting components).
I want a full conversion just as much as anyone who lives on this planet does, but I can see some cases being allowed for as our technology catches up to the lingering problems.
A total conversion to electric isn't feasible in a lot of places like that.
During our lifetime there are certain ICE applications that we really have no good alternatives for. So finding a palatable cost for carbon removal we are collectively willing to pay buys us a lot of options.
For a snow plow that needs to run for hours at a time, I suspect that the additional cost of the batteries of a plug-in hybrid isn't worth it over a normal hybrid, or just a diesel-powered engine.
We don't need to electrify everything, and even if that will happen in the long run, we don't need to rush to do it now. What percentage of total NYC emissions come from these trucks? Probably a pretty small portion.
It's not politically correct for NYC to buy more diesel trucks, but it is probably what they should do.
Another tempted but so far not promising was the hybrid-series EVs (like ships, with electrical engine powered by a generator) so far Nissan have tempted again, but honestly sound to be a failure...