New Toyota Camry to Be Sold Only as Hybrid
wsj.com
wsj.com
A larger battery won’t do you any good if charged by regeneration unless you’re somehow always driving down a big hill.
There’s a reason hybrids like the non-PHEV Prius models have tiny batteries.
At some point, the extra weight cannot be offset by more/better Regen and better fuel efficiency on gas where applicable, but going from a few kWh hybrid to a 10-20 kWh hybrid will usually be a net positive even with additional weight, all other things being equal.
You're better off with a significantly smaller regular hybrid battery (1-2kWh) or none at all instead of lugging around the weight of a discharged PHEV battery that'll never reasonably be close to charged from regular driving (unless your regular driving includes ~200 miles only steep downhill braking to fully charge the PHEV battery).
As for cost, well, that's what the subsidies are for.
Regen braking is usually able to capture 15-30% of the motor's output power.
You'd have to be at full regen for about 22 minutes to fully charge that battery. That's not a realistic driving pattern for a significantly large majority of people.
https://www.sae.org/news/2023/04/2023-toyota-prius-prime-dri...
Even with an extra 200+lbs, having a bigger battery is better for Regen and offsets the additional weight to some extent.
If someone is a super conservative/disciplined driver, they can get the same mpg from a hybrid with a smaller pack, but most people don't want to hypermile their cars.
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2023-toyota-prius-prime-f...
You still need other additional equipment to use the bigger battery. Electric motors aren't light either. Having bigger motors without power to use them is also a waste.
The current Prius Prime compared to the Prius is interesting because Toyota traded performance for fuel efficiency with the plug-in.
In the last 2 generations of Prius, Toyota kept performance similar and the fuel efficiency of the plug-ins was better than the hybrids.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=32484&...
At this point, having a larger battery/etc should allow better fuel effective even with more weight assuming the same vehicle, performance, etc...
But they're $50,000 and that's too goddamn much so I'll continue polluting with my twenty year old volkswagen
If it's not going to work that way, it's just a hybrid with a few configuration tweaks.
It is not remotely like an exaggerated version of auto stop/start. You have control over EV-now, EV-later, and automatic settings. Some PHEVs are stingier on the EV-limited top speed, but in my Ford I can go with the flow of traffic on 280 without triggering the ICE.
And I suspect car manufacturers have found that car buyers don’t understand the tradeoffs and advantages of PHEVs. If I’m right about that, it really is a shame, because PHEVs really should be an excellent way to fit the vast majority of people’s driving needs and also squeeze out the most electrification per unit of global battery production.
I wouldn’t spring for a level 2 install for a 10-15 kWh battery.
I’m not sure PHEVs are the panacea many people seem to think they are. In theory most tris are short and could be covered by the battery. In practice do average owners do that?
More to the point though, even if you have a 40 mile commute, reducing gas consumption in half is still a massive win.
From a purely technical standpoint, the Prius has a 3.2kWh battery, and the Prius Prime has a 6.8kWh battery. The Prius Prime has a rated range of 44 electric miles, so presumably if you charged the Prius up to the max, it would get 20 miles or so. As an electric vehicle, this is extremely marginal. For people who keep their car in a garage with a power outlet most every night, many people would be able to dramatically reduce their gasoline usage if they started the day with 20 miles of charge.
The only problem is that it's not really an EV. The range isn't good enough where it's an EV except for road trips, and I think that on the Prius the gas engine kicks in above a certain speed or if you mash the accelerator, because the electric motor doesn't produce very much power. The result is that if you were to charge it every night, you might reduce your gas consumption by say, 75% or something.
Then this leads to a psychological problem, where people want to hold certain values, or not. They don't want to hold a value half way. For example, imagine that you thought that eating meat was murder. Would you then want to cut your meat consumption by 75% and feel good that you had reduced the number of murders you were routinely committing?
Is that right? The numbers I’ve seen are that the PHEV has a 13.6 kWh battery and the HEV has a much smaller battery, like less than 1 kWh.
But. Very little people would care to charge PHEV on any regular schedule. So you end up getting more expensive car, with bigger battery, that’s driven just as a hybrid.
You can see that with current sales - they often are bought purely because of subsides, and used as normal hybrid.
https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/real-world-ph...
As an anecdote, I know a handfull of people that exchanged their pricy SUVs for the equivalent PHEV version and where laughing at the fact they where getting roughly 10k of gov kickbacks for doing it, even though they didn't even have anywhere to plug in.
If you can charge at home or at work, then BEV's and PHEV's are great choices.
If you can't charge at home or at work (which is a lot of people) then a PHEV is added expense for no added benefit.
Meanwhile, I’m sticking to used cars.
Camry does have V6 this year but it’s gone next year
Unclear this is the case, why do you say so?
Which from a pollution/microplastics standpoint isn't good, we need an improved sustainable tire asap.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/autoshow-la-camry/toyotas-ca...