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Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

Hybrids will spur adoption faster and cheaper than anything

Hybrids doesn't make sense to me. If you need a car that runs on gas then make it a proper ICE car. Why put two engines into one? Seems super wasteful.

Consumer report says hybrids are more reliable than ICE and EVs https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...

"Overall, hybrids have 26 percent fewer problems than cars powered by internal combustion engines (ICE)."

Seems fishy to me. How can a more complex device (ICE + EV) be more reliable than a pure ICE or EV? Also seems like a crap website, their chart show 79% more problems as red and then 26% fever as green.

Because modern ICE cars have freaking overgrown snowmobile transmissions, and a hybrid drivetrain can replace that entirely.

A hybrid can be simpler than an ICE car (by eliminating the transmission and allowing the engine to be power-banded) and cheaper than an EV (because a 10x size battery is more than the cost of the engine and generator).

Still doesn't explain how the EV is less reliable. OK, it's more expensive due to the battery, but surely no ICE at all should make it more reliable.

Most mechanical stresses in the drivetrain are transient and happen in the transmission. In the engine, they happen in the "out of band" power regimes -- very low and very high RPM.

The hybrid moves those transient "stresses," and the imparted maintenance thereof, into the electrical system. The engine never sees them.

This unlocks additional efficiencies. For example, the Prius uses the more fuel efficient Atkinson cycle engine. This is not possible in a standard car, because it cannot provide enough power in those transient regimes. You also get things like regenerative braking which help prolong brake life.

And, there's probably a bit of selection bias as well. I could see that the type of someone who buys a Prius is the type to not thrash it. That probably makes it appear more reliable in the statistics.

PHEV's are significantly less reliable, though. HEV's and PHEV's should have a similar level of reliability. The difference is that HEV's are mostly Toyotas and PHEV's mostly aren't.

My impression is that non-Toyota hybrids are significantly less reliable than gasoline cars, but the article doesn't give enough data to tell for sure.

You might be right. It says one of the only reliable PHEVs is the Toyota RAV4 prime.

Still, I would expect the hybrid Camry to be more reliable than the gas Camry. Simpler transmission, engine turns off when idle, doesn't need to rev as high because of the electric assist.

Sure. Hybrids should be more reliable than gasoline vehicles. But often people point at this article to say that hybrids are more reliable than electric cars, and is why I push back. That's just cherry picking. That statement is hiding behind the stronger facts that Toyotas are more reliable than Teslas and the first year of a new model is less reliable than others.

Electric for 95% of driving, gas to eliminate range anxiety for the few longer trips per year. Use the gas for charging the batteries - no connection between gas engine and electric drivetrain.

But then just rent an ICE car when you go for a long drive... better for the environment.

That makes no financial sense. I bought a car because rentals over time exceeded the ownership of owning. Since many trips are outside the EV range.

Not sure. In the comment I replied to, they mentioned that EV is good 95% of the time. In that case, renting a car, like once a month, for a long range tip would make sense imo. Better yet, public transport, then rent an EV there.

Or just get a PHEV. And then you only need 1/3 of the batteries in your car, and you don't have to deal with rentals. Does it really make sense to have 300 miles worth of batteries that you haul around in your car when 90% of your trips are less than 100 miles?

No, but it makes less sense to haul around an ICE or more battery than needed for 100 miles.

Have you dealt with a rental agency in a population hub any time in the past 15 years? It's awful service and such a pain to do all the research anew on pricing every time you want to do a drive.

Much easier to manage your own predictable resources than try to shove your use-case into another organization's framework.

> Use the gas for charging the batteries - no connection between gas engine and electric drivetrain.

Almost all of them have a connection from the gas engine to the wheels. I don't know if it is still the case today, but no that long ago many hybrid models even reused the same automatic transmission from the ICE version of the car. Hybrids are not designed as an electric car with a generator, the drivetrain is truly "hybrid" and send direct mechanical power form the ICE to the wheels

A Model 3's battery is 82kWh, a Camry Hybrid's battery is 1.6kWH.

In terms of battery, you could produce (82 / 1.6 = 51.25) hybrids per fully electric car.

The total fuel savings of replacing 10+ ICE cars with hybrids is an order of magnitude larger than replacing 1 ICE car with a fully electric car.

For each of those 51 hybrids you need to manufacture an extra ICE engine. Which is not cheap. It's more complex to make a drive train that can seamlessly handle switching from EV to ICE. So it's more difficult to manufacture. Has there been a study that takes the whole lifecycle of a hybrid into account vs an EV or ICE?

Would be super interested if there had been a research that also takes into account that we don't need SUVs that seems to be the go to car in the US.

ICE engines may be more complex, but batteries are still more expensive than a small ICE engine. Have you seen the cost of a replacement battery for a Tesla? $12-20k all day long. You don't need a massive, high performance ICE engine to charge up batteries on the go, or to get your car down the highway. Meanwhile I can get a high performance crate engine for less than half that cost ($5-6k all day). Less than half that for a basic, economical 4 banger.

A PHEV battery is 1/10th the size of an EV battery typically giving about 50 km of range. 90% of most people's daily use is less than 50 km. We could build 10 PHEVs with the battery from one EV. This means instead of an EV cutting fossil fuel use by 100%, 10 PHEVs could cut fossil fuel use by 90% x 10 = 900%.

PHEVs also charge faster due to the battery being 1/10th the size but they don't require buying a 240v charger and can be charged using 120v in 1/5th the time of an EV.

If you don't have anywhere to charge, you'll have to get an HEV.

The best you can get with current pure ICEs is about 35/43/39 mpg city/highway/combined.

A non-plug-in Toyota Prius gets 57/56/57. A Hyundai Elantra hybrid gets 53/56/54.

It's about getting more people using EV more often, and efficiently using the limited resources required for EVs.

Please go read about Toyota's strategy. If you have enough Lithium for 1000 EV batteries, or 10,000 hybrid batteries, it seems pretty easy to see how it is better for everyone, especially given average trip distance.

Not sure why hybrids don't make sense to you, have you done the research to consider all aspects of the change, or are you focused on a specific factor like reliability or wastefulness of the parts used? Don't you think it's wasteful to put a massive battery in a car to give it a long range that will be rarely used in most trips?

the good is the enemy of the perfect.

Hybrids will spur adoption of EVs?

A hybrid is not an EV, if your goal is to sell EVs then hybrids aren't accomplishing that.

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