I drove a Toyota Corolla Hybrid a few months ago. Loved the car.
My ICE Corolla was bullet proof. I’d love some of that with a battery.
I found Toyota’s past resistance to EVs embarrassing. This is a very welcome step.
The entire point of a plug-in hybrid is that you can use it as a straight EV in a non-trivial subset of cases.
> Maybe a whole new category electric cars with optional ability to use petrol.
That’s usually called a range-extended EV, but that’s reserved for “series” architectures, which is not something Toyota wants to do.
The Volt and i3 are probably the most well-known examples. The volt has a pretty short all-electric range (topped out at 50 miles on the second gen), the i3 was designed as an EV first so the range extended models had a more respectable 125mi all-electric, plus ~75 from the range extender (the straight EV model topped out at 150mi range).
It was very much a transitional model though, both successors are only available as pure EVs.
100+ miles means it's, for a lot of people, basically an electric car.
Perhaps the defining line is that with 100 mile range you'd be likely to top-up the battery part on a long journey rather than just ignoring it. I do feel that makes it a different category, more like the range extended EVs.
That’s not a point because it has nothing to do with the moniker “plug-in”. And is also not really true (because what “the standard”?)
Ah so a strait up lie then.
> I'm pretty sure you are just arguing for the sake of arguing at this point. You haven't added anything useful.
Aside from giving you an example of a 10 years old hybrid with the kind of all-electric range you exclaim had never existed before, which you just decided to ignore entirely as you spouted a bunch of baseless assertions in not-support of your destruction of objective language?
Have you considered reading your comments?
- Ford Kuga PHEV: 28-41 miles
- Mazda CX-60: 39 miles
- Volkswagen Tiguan PHEV: 30 miles
- Kia Niro PHEV: 33 miles
- Toyota RAV4 PHEV - 46 miles
- BMW Model 3: 32-36 miles
You yourself called the BMW I3 an range extended EV. Why does that deserve a different name but not a Prius with a much extended range?
A range extended EV doesn't have a gearbox or a diff. Just a generator attached to the battery. So they drop all that complexity and weight.
I always thought they were a brilliant design in that sense, as far back as 2010ish when the Chevy Volt was announced. I'm surprised they haven't caught on more vs hybrids.
A plug-in hybrid would hardy fit the definition if it had a 1kwh battery more typical of a conventional hybrid but with the technical ability to plug it in. No more so than the ability to run an old fashioned manual petrol on the starter motor for a few meters made those hybrids. Usain Bolt and a marathon runner both use their legs to move but they are hardly equivalent.