EU data shows PHEVs emit 350% more CO2 than tested values
europe.autonews.com
europe.autonews.com
I'm German. My grandpa was an electrical engineer. He is very enthusiastic about his PHEV and talks about it alot. He bought one because not only is he interested, but also PHEV sales got heavily subsidized (i think like 6000€ or smth) and so many people bought one in his area as well. Apparently, a surprising amount of old middle class German people bought PHEVs and literally never charge it. My grandpa told me he onced asked his neighbor for a cable and that thing was brand new.
I'm not sure if its ignorance or deliberate though. If you never use the battery the resale value might be higher? It's also literally just an anecdote but it was surprising
- installing the charging point - 2k credit
- charing at charging station - 2k credit
- your electricity bill - 2k credit
- servicing the car - the more you drive on electric power the greater the discount is, say up to 50% with 2k cap.
So they got a good deal on a car. It's a car and it drives, and you fill it with gas. It already works, the effort to learn and use the car for more potential is (probably) not worth it to the owner.
You could see the same pattern with people who use office applications on a daily basis but don't bother learning functionality (or even shortcuts).
Yet I am not trying to push the "users are dumb" stereotype, because everyone has their own blind spots in knowledge.
My car is a compressed natural gas car that I drive with 100 % biogas, which is domestic made from waste and other side products of industry, and has an estimated CO2 equivalent emission of ~0 g/km. The tax law and emissions calculations assume that I drive it on natural gas all of the time, never a single kilometer using biogas. Additionally I need to pay an extra fixed tax (not based on kilometers driven) just because it's a CNG car. This tax is 6 times higher than for PHEVs.
Thus, a big SUV like Mitsubishi Outlander, which eats a lot of petrol as soon as you get outside the short EV range and runs its engine anyway when it's cold in the winter, gets to pay less tax (which is specifically based on CO2 emissions) than my biogas car.
PHEVs in my eyes are nothing but greenwashing for most people.
The taxes are not based on that, though. They're strictly interested in tailpipe emissions (not even lifecycle emissions), and don't recognise biogas at all.
I'm planning on switching to a BEV eventually, but right now it's not financially possible. Most of the time I commute on my bicycle anyway.
with mixed driving in winter with charging 78mpg
with mixed driving in summer with charging 117mpg
That's crazy to me, gasoline is so much more expensive than electricity, why wouldn't people charge the batteries more often?
Of course any sane person would want to charge their car electrically. So I can only imagine that the inability to do so is the problem.
My guess would be because many people can't. In most European cities having a dedicated place to charge your car is not affordable to most people. Which is one reason manufacturers targeted their BEVs at the higher end, the population who has a garage and can install a charger there.
There are only parking space with charging available for 2 cars in a 4km radius in my neighborhood. Charging that is anyway nit cost effective.
YMMV but afaik in europe there are still plenty of places where using an EV wouldn't be practical at all, even in urban area.
The only EV that I am considering is the Silence S01 moped and the reason is that its battery can be unmounted and be carried around as a trolley luggage so I could charge it inside my building.
I wonder if the two things are related. There are hundreds of EV chargers within 4km of where I live and on average they are 20-50% cheaper than charging at home (with the exception of fast chargers, which are pretty expensive).
But where I am, >95% of chargers have real time availability via app or web. You can schedule notifications for when a charger is free, and some charging networks even let you reserve chargers ahead of time.
If you value your time less than the savings (if there are any savings) on electricity vs gasoline.
That's because we don't need to. ICE is predicated on filling up every 1-4 weeks. EV is predicated on charging overnight.
> There's plenty of public charging infrastructure in Europe. Fast charging on the highways, slow charging in living areas.
But..where do you charge overnight? That's what the previous poster is saying. If you can't afford it, or you live in an apartment, what then?
Not just like. I can fill up my car in 5 minutes and it lasts 1-4 weeks. That's why I don't need to fill it up every night.
That's not the case with PHEVs, or even, I believe, BEVs.
What I see is how rich folks buying these (since these have TCO cost 2-4x as much as buying a solid used car every 10 years and servicing that with a good non-brand service, ie good BMWs are great at this) end up being proverbial slaves to their cars. Effin' car, like we are not enslaved with enough gizmos. Additional mental calculations compared to owning ICE cars re range if your commute is in tens of kms and not merely kms, forced to do stops on longer routes as car needs, not as the people riding it need.
I see it as adding tons complexity into our lives, and we are working hard on opposite direction.
The comparison to gas is irrelevant and nonsensical since it takes minutes to fill up and gas stations are plenty. If I had an electric car I would want to charge it overnight near my home. That is not possible for me and I don't see that it is possible for many others.
>There's plenty of opportunities to charge your vehicle over night
A kilometer away and I would occupy that spot for the entire night. It is pretty obvious why I would not do that.
I don't really care about your theory crafting what I could and could not do. It is obvious that this is the reason Hybrid owners don't use their electric mode as often, since they can avoid going to great lengths to charge their car.
A big issues off all forms of chargeable cars is the lack of charging stations. When there are charging stations, the amount of time required to charge dissuades people from charging. Perhaps they look at the 20 minutes to charge a baby PHEV and say, “no.”
Additionally, the charging process in Europe involves carrying your own cables, which adds an extra layer of inconvenience—unlike in some places like China where charging stations provide the cables. - To open the trunk twice daily to get and put the heavy cables could deter regular charging, particularly for those using their PHEV for commuting.
If, like in CA, gas is $5.46/gallon (ref. https://gasprices.aaa.com/) and electricity is $0.19/kWh (ref. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/) then the equation looks very different from if gas is $4.74/gallon and electricity is $0.33/kWh like HI.
It's better for private owned ones... but it's still only 45-49%!!
People are lazy. Worst of all worlds combination.
At least with a EV I only plugin once a week at my home.
The truth is that all of this was entirely foreseeable and PHEVs should never have been incentivized, but especially in Germany, the government is very, very much under the influence of big carmakers, and they were years behind in BEVs, so they had their way.
However, no one actually used E85, because Volvo engines had recently had issues with some engine gaskets being ruined by ethanol...
They aren't inherently more polluting.
They could be though, the additional battery on PHEVs is heavy.
I am not entirely sure what the government could have done instead. Subsidizing public charging might have worked better - free fuel is a strong incentive - but then maybe people simply drive more. Or perhaps more likely they buy a hybrid thinking they'll charge it but find it to inconvenient.
If you can charge at home or work it's a great deal, but if you can't I can see how it would be hard to charge it enough to make it worthwhile.
Unless I have a dedicated garage for my car it just sounds like a huge faff. The cost savings for plugging it in vs. fuelling it are probably something like 50 pence, and the only time I'm ever going to do that would be dangling a cable from a window if I manage to park outside the house.
So basically for the sake of saving pennies I would have to hope that space is free, park in it, then move the car later when it's done, probably use some weird app because there's no normal way to pay, etc.
If I forget, then I get a £40+ parking ticket which would wipe out weeks/months of savings.
I don't own a PHEV but if I did I think I'd probably do it a few times for the novelty factor and then give up. It's not practical at all.
This is just a consequence of the crazy way WLTP was calculating emissions for PHEVs. It gets adjusted next year
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/features/...
No amount of incentives and enhancements of public transportation will ever fix this issue for sparsely populated areas. You can try to reduce exhausts and travel distances with car, but you can't fight car ownership.
My parents live in such an area and they can commute to work and back fully electric. They charge overnight and always fall back to combustion for larger routes, such as the next airport.
If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.
Where does this silly idea that "let's use more public transport in cities" requires rural areas to not use cars come from?
I'm not saying we shouldn't do mass transit. I like it, I want to see more of it. But thinking it's just a matter of buying more busses isn't reality for a lot of the US. We pretty much need to redesign our cities and towns for transit to be successful. Rug-pulling people by building out transit-unfriendly cities and then banning cars isn't going to go over well.
But take for example my neighborbood. There's bus lines on the north edge going east-west, bus lines on the west edge going north-south. I'm lucky, I live at the west edge of my neighborhood near one of the entrances so the north line stop is just outside my door. The south bound stop is across six lanes of 40+mph traffic with the nearest crosswalk over a quarter mile. It's a half-mile walk from my house to the east-west stop on the north edge of my neighborhood. And I'm in the middle-west edge of my neighborhood, if you're in the south-east of the neighborhood you've got about a mile walk to get to a bus stop. And my neighborhood isn't even a very big one for DFW.
It doesn't make sense to snake the busses all throughout the neighborhoods, you'll spend all the bus travel time going up and down residential streets. Nobody wants to ride on a bus slowly crawling through the maze of residences.
And even then, once I get on the bus half the travel time is just going past one development of houses after another. And I'm in a generally denser and more mixed part of the city than a lot of these places. Lots of my friends live in neighborhoods where it's at least a 5-10min drive to leave their neighborhood. Then they pass by a few neighborhoods before they get to the first small smatterings of retail, but chances are it doesn't have the stop they're interested in.
Transit really just can't function with this design. We need to redesign this to make it work. Cut up these massive residential only blocks, mix in some retail, densify things, etc. I'm not saying this to suggest we can't do it, I'm just being realistic to the challenges at hand. Burying your head in the sand acting like it's just a matter of another train line or more bus service or adding bike lanes isn't going to solve the systemic design issues we have in a lot of US cities and towns.
From the politicians pushing it. There's only one size fits all solutions. There's never an acceptance that people can have different circumstances.
> If you ignore the needs of those people, you only strengthen political forces who also support big oil. There needs to be a middle ground.
How are you even transporting your weekly groceries without a car? What if you have family? And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat? It just doesn't work in practice.
Virtually nobody moves to rural areas. People have been living there for generations. You can't expect them to mass-migrate somewhere else you must address their needs. If people have the impression that nobody supports them, you get extremists.
My bicycle rear rack is rated for 25KG and I have 2 70L bags, my Wald front basket can handle some additionnal load and I converted my old kids trailer to carry groceries too. I can carry enough.
But you don't have to buy a week worth of groceries in a single day.
Also we are in 2024. Supermarkets do deliveries.
> What if you have family?
There are seats for toddlers and cargo bikes and trailers for those that need to carry more than one. After that kids love cycling. We are constantly saying humans have a way too sedentary life and people need to exercise in order to be healthy. You have here a solution much cheaper both in term of time and money than going to the gym.
> And do you also use your bike during heavy rain/winter/strong heat?
You just deal with it the same way you do when you have to walk from your car in that huge parking lot to the place you are actually going to.
The only limiter is climbs. But if I was limited by my climbing capacity while loaded I would use an e-bike.
None of it is about the environment.
Do you have any sources discussing this? Most waste numbers I've seen from France (where I live) and the EU are in volume or weight, neither of which will be affected by the caps remaining attached to bottles (which is an EU-wide thing IIRC).
[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/904/oj [1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
1. The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone:
The phase-out of nuclear energy in Germany was first regulated in the year 2000 under the red-green federal government (Schröder I Cabinet) through a contract known as the Nuclear Consensus between the Federal Republic and various operating companies. In 2002, the German Nuclear Energy Act was revised based on this contract. The Nuclear Consensus stipulated that, assuming a standard operational lifetime of about 32 years, a nuclear power plant was allowed to produce a specified "remaining electricity amount" before being decommissioned. Based on the electricity production of the individual plants in the past, the assigned remaining electricity amounts would mean that the last of the 19 German nuclear power plants would be decommissioned around 2021. Because the Nuclear Consensus allowed for the transfer of remaining electricity amounts between plants, the Stade (on November 14, 2003) and Obrigheim (on May 11, 2005) nuclear power plants were decommissioned.
On October 28, 2010, the Bundestag, with a black-yellow majority under the Merkel II Cabinet, decided on a further amendment to the Nuclear Energy Act, extending the operating times of the seven facilities that started operation before 1980 by eight years each, and those of the remaining ten nuclear power plants by 14 years each. This was publicly referred to as a "reversal of the phase-out." In return, the energy companies committed to an annual payment of 300 million euros for the years 2011 and 2012, and 200 million euros annually until 2016. The funds were intended to finance the Energy and Climate Fund. Furthermore, the federal government (as announced on September 6) introduced a nuclear fuel tax of 2.3 billion euros annually for six years, from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2016.
This extension was revised in 2011 – following the onset of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This was publicly referred to as a "reversal of the reversal of the phase-out." After the announcement of a moratorium on operating times on March 14, 2011, the operators ceased their payments to the Energy and Climate Fund.
During the energy crisis following the energy conflict in 2022, the federal government allowed the continued operation of the last three nuclear power plants, Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2, until mid-April 2023; this required a legislative change, as the Nuclear Energy Act of 2011 had definitively planned for a gradual phase-out by the end of 2022. In April 2023, the nuclear power plants Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2 were taken offline.
> If you look on the actual data, it's the other way around. Is this just Russian opinion making?
>The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone: [...]
Am I misreading your post? It looks like you're not really disagreeing with the claim that '"Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants', just quibbling over some details like whether other parties were involved.
The real energy politics failure happened mostly under Merkel , but the greens are sooooo bad. Yes, ofc - it boiled over in 2021/2022 but we warned Merkel did not bother to set the necessary goals in the decades prior. Kinda difficult to built new solar and wind energy quickly when your predecessor intentionally crippled that.
And I don't see how your comment refutes what I said. If anything it makes the case that not just the greens are anti nuclear but Germans in general have lost the plot and gone anti nuclear. Probably not the point you wanted to make, but there it is.
„1. The Greens didn't push to close the nuclear power plants alone:“
But: You think
„The same Germany where the "Green party" pushed to close nuclear power plants and buy more gas from the Russians. Truly clown world.“
is good style and promotes factual, also political, discussion? I believe that it is not and thus promotes the division and the intensification of the discourse instead of factual discussion. And Russia and the AfD are happy about that. Russia would very much like to sell a lot of gas to all of us. Russia would very much like to continue to act as one of the main suppliers and main players in nuclear energy, which is why Russia also has something against renewable energies. But the division of Europe is more valuable.
So, at the end, you did them a favor.
how does a 0.75 percentage point savings amount to "several thousand Euros per year"?
>Overall mostly very affluent people bought these cars,
Tesla buyers tend to be affluent as well. Should we cancel EV tax credits for them as well?
>and the net effect for the environment was probably negative
I don't get it. According to the EPA at least hybrids have much better fuel efficiency than their conventional counterparts. Therefore I don't understand how the hybrids would be a net negative.
For EVs this tax was reduced to 0.25% to further incentivise the adoption.
I have a hybrid truck. In city driving, it is twice as efficient as its non-hybrid counterpart. It’s also about 50% more efficient than our mid-sized SUV. It also has the benefit of being able to turn off the engine for an extended period of idling.