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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

"these vehicles are currently not realizing their potential, largely because they are not being charged and driven fully electrically as frequently as assumed"

That's crazy to me, gasoline is so much more expensive than electricity, why wouldn't people charge the batteries more often?

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At least in Germany a lot of them are company cars. As in a car used by one specific employee for official and private uses alike, but paid by the company as part of the compensation. The employee might not have had a say in choosing a PHEV and might not be paying for the gasoline either.

This - the study sheet shows that only 11-15% of company owned hybrids are ever charged and driving on electricity.

It's better for private owned ones... but it's still only 45-49%!!

there are also companies that give you a card to pay for refuelling your car, but to charge it you would have to pay yourself - guess what people do...

>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.

To me that's a really weird analogy. Nobody would think about putting a gasoline tank and pump in their garage ... There's plenty of public charging infrastructure in Europe. Fast charging on the highways, slow charging in living areas. Even many supermarkets offer fast chargers now, so that during your grocery shopping trip you can get most of your charging needs covered. There's plenty of opportunities to charge your vehicle over night, or really quickly when needed. It's absolutely possible to own an EV without a garage

Here (Slovenia) that is a lot of hassle for no personal benefit. Public charging is expensive enough that you'll never recuperate the higher price of the vehicle (if you can't charge at home).

Plenty? It really depends on the location.

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.

>There are only parking space with charging available for 2 cars in a 4km radius in my neighborhood. Charging that is anyway not cost effective.

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).

Even if the price were right, would I want to have to check every couple of hours if the parking space is available for me to charge my vehicle? These parking spaces are mostly used by visitors because EVs aren't convenient enough for locals.

I'm not going to argue that public EV charging is always convenient. It certainly sounds like it isnt where you are.

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.

> It's absolutely possible to own an EV without a garage

If you value your time less than the savings (if there are any savings) on electricity vs gasoline.

> To me that's a really weird analogy. Nobody would think about putting a gasoline tank and pump in their garage

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?

You leave your car parked outside at a slow 22kW charger. But with a full BEV, you don't need to charge every night, just like you don't need to fill up your gasoline car every evening in your own garage.

The article is specifically about PHEVs.

> But with a full BEV, you don't need to charge every night, just like you don't need to fill up your gasoline car every evening in your own garage.

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.

Nope, not even in Switzerland its good enough and covered enough. Maybe for some folks, but not good enough for others.

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.

I live in a major European city. If I wanted to charge an electric car it would be at least a kilometers away and is often unavailable.

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.

Why do people buy them then?

A factor could be the limited range on a single charge, which might not meet the daily travel needs unless there's convenient access to a charging station at home or work.

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.

I made some back-of-the-napkin calculations, and based on the electric range and outside charging prices it didn't seem like electric cars are really that much cheaper. The only time they clearly come out on top is when you can charge them at home at off peak hours, at least around here. PHEVs are in an even worse situation because even though they have a small battery, they need to be charged for quite some time, so outside charging is kind of off the table.

Your back-of-napkin calculations must assume values for the price of gas and the price of electricity.

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.

Those electricity prices are way off for California. PGE, which serves most of the state, charges over $0.30/kwh even off peak with a EV focused rate plan. Peak rates on any plan are much, much higher.

My basic point is that "is a PHEV/EV good value?" is a very local question since the economics of electric power and gasoline are local as well.

DC Fast charging prices are usually quite high (45-50 c/kwh and may well be near the cost of gas, but not all PHEV's support that. Level 2 charging is usually much cheaper (20-30 c/kwh) though slower. So if you can charge at one of those (such as at work) it also works out to be cheaper than gas.

Depends. Could be that people are going further than the charge. If the EV side lacks recombinant braking, you might not charge. If there is a dearth of street side charging, you might not charge. If there is a dearth of office charging, you might not charge.

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.”

Because they are company cars and the company pays for gas but not your electricity if you charge it at home.

The cars are so expensive, that fuel costs are insignificant to the people who buy them.

"Let me plugin my car every night now, and take it to the gas station every week."

People are lazy. Worst of all worlds combination.

At least with a EV I only plugin once a week at my home.

Because most of these (PHEV) vehicles have a completely laughable EV range. For many commutes you’d have to plug in every ${DEITY}damn time you get home and likewise in the office, every day. Good luck if you have street parking at home or if your work only offers a handful of chargers (or zero).

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.

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