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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

For the batteries in each EV, you could make 7 plug-in hybrids. That's 1 full electric and 6 gas cars, vs 7 plug-in hybrids.

I think Toyota's approach would save more emissions so long as we are battery constrained.

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A lot of people who own plug-in hybrids don't really ever plug them in which makes them worse than gasoline cars or non-plugin hybrids because of added weight.

What? That doesn’t sound right. I would have to think the majority of people plug them in. That is the whole point of paying more for a plug-in.

In plenty of countries those plug-in hybrids were sold with lots of up front subsidies and reduced running costs due to lower taxation for the first five years.

I believe this stems from a paper that came out about how some large percentage of PHEVs never plugged in. The large caveat was that a large amount of that data was from company vehicles for employees. Which those employees have very little incentive to actually plug in since typically the company pays for fuel costs.

There was a bunch of reporting on this study like this: https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/features/phev-owners-not...

Here's the actual study (PDF): https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/real-world-ph...

We may have talked about it on HN.

Do we actually have proof for this or is just FUD, to be frank?

I heard the same thing but then after talking to some owners, sure, the ones that couldn't easily charge them did that, but everyone that could charge them, did, and liked it.

The electric motor is zippy, the car is silent, the range is enough for the average commute.

They generally like it and what you're saying sounds more like a early days myth.

I could be wrong, the world is a big place.

No idea if that's just the FUD or not. Sounds like something that might happen.

https://uk.motor1.com/news/276595/uk-hybrids-never-plugged-i...

My wife had a plug-in Ford C-Max Energi for a few years. We always plugged it in but it only did ~20 miles on pure EV so long term our mileage was around 40MPG. My Prius easily beats that and I'm not paying an extra $20 a month on my electric bill.

You're right though, when we bought it according the the computer the previous owner had never charged it. The charge cable wasn't even out of it's plastic. When we sold it to Car Max the new owner never setup their Ford Sync so we kept getting reports by email and they never charged it once.

There's a sweet spot that Ford missed with the C-Max.

I have a 2nd gen Volt. 50-60 miles on all electric when it's warm, 30-40 when it's cold. That, by the way, will bite a lot of people in the ass as they try EVs.

Anyways, 62,000 miles on the Volt, lifetime MPG is in the 170s.

I think the key is the Volt was designed to be a great plug in hybrid from the start. The C-Max had an ICE only, standard hybrid, and plug-in hybrid version. Our plug-in literally had two separate high voltage batteries. Half the cargo bay was just a carpeted box full of batteries.

It was also terribly engineered. Plugging the car into the wall didn't top off the 12V battery and whatever mechanism it used to do so was inadequate so you'd go out in the morning to a stone dead car quite often. The number of recalls was insane, though we got a lot of free oil changes out of that as the dealer usually threw them in free during recall services.

First and last Ford I'll ever buy.

They shouldn't have discontinued the Fusion. It could have used a revamp though, like what Toyota did for the Venza.

This was true several years ago but if you look now there are hundreds of GWh of cell plants coming online over the next 3 years. Toyota is very late here and won’t be able to produce dedicated BEVs at scale until 2026+. Competitors will already be on their 2nd or 3rd generation BEV platforms by then.

2nd or 3rd generation anything will still score lower than even a launch year Toyota when it comes to quality.

Actually they are having huge quality problems with their first BEV.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40827514/toyota-bz4x-whee...

Huge quality problems? Toyota recalled 250 cars. Tesla recalls hundreds of thousands every year like clockwork.

Depends on how the energy is generated and transmitted really.

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