Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

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Getting 50 extra miles in your garage or a 15 minute pitstop is a lot easier than charging an EV to full. Each 50 mile charge is about 2 gallon saved, and people like to save $10 every few days if possible.

PHEVs are lighter than full EVs, and incentivize the manufacturer to build a smaller car. (EVs are longer because the batteries take up lots of horizontal space). If Mazda's experiments pay off, then a wankel [1] engine PHEV will be space efficient and sustainable. Now not everyone needs to tow, but EVs are horrible at towing. A PHEV is an ideal long-term alternative to petrol for heavy-hauling use cases.

I firmly believe fully emissions-free vehicles will be the future. But the powergrid & charging infrastructure for 100% EV are at least 10-20 years away. Until then, PHEVs should be encouraged as a stopgap, especially for countries without easy ways to generate renewable energy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3gzQVGEqF4

I calculated how much our savings would be if we buy a PHEV instead of a new ICE (or a very efficient mild hybrid like the civic or a corolla) and we wouldnt get even after 5 years, because buying a PHEV costs that much more.

Of course this is based on our car usage patterns so its really subjective.

I agree with you on the powergrid and charging infrastructure. A counterpoint i rarely see is if everyone would switch to EVs or PHEVs in 5 years, the electrical infra would collapse. And the electricity price world skyrocket and it would not be this cheap as it is now. So we should keep that in mind when we calculate the savings.

> A counterpoint i rarely see is if everyone would switch to EVs or PHEVs in 5 years, the electrical infra would collapse.

Electricity grids are massively overbuilt and underutilized because they need to deal with a big spike of power usage in the early evenings. So if grids became strained by EVs, it would be relatively easy to fix this: just encourage or mandate time of day tariffs.

The price signal would encourage people to charge outside of peak times. The improved utilization of the grid may even reduce distribution costs per kWh.

There are many countries where this is not true. Look up loadshedding in South Africa, for example.

Over the last 30 years, South Africa's generation capacity has crumbled from 37GW to 28GW. So yes, sure, electrifying anything there is not going to work. But I'd say that's a completely different category of problems.

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