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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as extremely sensible. It's worth considering how hybrids and EVs relate to various driving patterns:

  * All short range trips
  * Mostly short range trips, occasional long range trip
  * Long daily commute

EVs manage that first option fine, but struggle with the latter two, especially cheaper EVs with smaller batteries. Hybrids work just as well as traditional engines for all of these patterns, while consuming less fuel.

Plug-in hybrids are particularly great at that middle option. Most of the time they behave like an EV, but on the occasional long haul they just switch to gas so there's no range anxiety. In that scenario, plug-in hybrids offer the best of both worlds.

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EV is perfectly fine for a daily commute unless you're driving 100s of miles a day.

It really comes down to whether you can conveniently charge the car or need to take very long trips and can't manage the overhead or availability of charging mid trip.

You’ll add lots more charge cycles to the small hybrid battery. A 30 mile commute is only 15% of a 200mile battery but would be 100% of some PHEVs. If an LFP battery gets 2,000 cycles lifetime then that’s 400,000 miles vs 60,000.

You’ll also have more things to service when you still have an ICE so it’s not all upsides.

More fast chargers is the way to go. I’d love to see the car manufacturers working together to roll out super chargers everywhere.

Toyota has been building plug-in hybrids for about a quarter century. Their evolution is slow but steady. They are made to be maintained easily—far more than any other modern car. After all this time there is no evidence that the hybrid batteries are wear out particularly fast AFAIK. In fact, older Prius models hold up incredibly well.

Expanding upon this, in a PHEV the battery is relatively small and inexpensive compared to an EV. In the event it does fail it's a financial inconvenience and not effectively totaling the vehicle.

I just want to add some real-world experience to this as the owner of an early hybrid, a 6th gen Honda Civic Hybrid.

It's a terrible hybrid, full stop — but it's still a decent car because it's a Civic. It's as old as an early Prius, and those have held up pretty well, but Honda did a terrible job with their hybrid batteries. Mine was replaced under warranty at 60K miles, and the replacement is already noticeably worn only ~50k miles in.

If the replacement battery fails, the car is totaled. It's just not worth paying ~4k for a refurbished and flawed battery.

But the reason I bring this up, is that we're still in the early stages of EVs, and it still feels like luck of the draw on who's releasing a truly reliable EV product. Early Tesla batteries seem to be holding up long term, but at the same time those early cars have a ton of non-battery related issues. Maybe new ones are great, but there's no way to know until it happens. I thought I was buying something great because Honda typically builds long lasting cars (My last accord had ~300k miles before I sold it).

My next car will probably be an EV over a hybrid based on my experience.

I don't know what era a 6th gen Honda Civic comes from, but I just bought a 2011 Honda CR-Z hybrid sports car this year, and I love it. I bought it to supplement my 2012 Toyota Prius-C, which is a pretty awesome hybrid. The Toyota gets way better gas mileage and can cruise in all-electric mode in the city, but the Honda has way more zooms. And the Honda Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) system allows the transmission to be a 6-speed manual (more fun).

On the CR-Z forums and CR-Z subreddit, every prospective buyer worries about the hybrid batteries, but virtually no owner has ever had to replace them. The older NiMH batteries are more reliable than the newer LiON, and the former are that much cheaper to refurbish.

A plugin hybrid seems to be the best way to go for someone who lives in northern Canada and is not a city person. But I don't want to pay the new-car premium price, nor do I want an Internet-connected vehicle sending all that personal data back to the mothership, which they all seem to do.

6th gen Civics are the ones from 2006-2010, which are fantastic, and notably better than the following generation that was drastically cut down thanks to Honda freaking out about the great recession.

The CR-Zs are awesome! I believe the 2011s use LiON batteries, which ironically are supposedly more reliable than the NiMH batteries they were using prior (and in my Civic). Apparently Toyota had patents on their prismatic batteries, and Honda was stuck using D-cell style NiMH ones which were poorly cooled.

The poor cooling caused them to slowly drift their state of charge, but because they were wired in series, there was no way for the battery management system to rebalance them, resulting in horrible capacity loss. Worse yet, Honda didn't include an alternator in my Civic, and the 12v battery was intended to be charged by the hybrid battery + IMA.

Guess who had a fun time when the car shut off in the middle of the highway (!!) on the way to work? Thankfully CA mandates a 10y/150k mi warranty on PZEV powertrains!

Everything but the hybrid part of my Civic is great, and I no longer need to drive to work, so I don't use it all that much. Hoping it lasts long enough that by the time I need to replace it I have tons of options to pick from.

Which is also he case for any EV starting ~now. Yes batteries have been ~50% of the build cost of an EV, but they are also dropping by 20%/year. The last 5 years or so this was basically absorbed in extending the range, but you really don’t need much more than 100kWh batteries in a car. I don’t think this bet will be working out

The Rav4 Prime (idk about other PHEVs) accounts for this by having a 10% buffer at full charge and a 13% buffer at low charge which are where a lot of the degradation comes from. You're right they likely won't last as long but it will be far longer than 60k miles. The tiny (~1.5kWh) batteries in Priuses routinely make it past 150k while getting thrashed from 20% to 80% their whole life.

How many miles do you get if you make an even worse assumption about the hybrid battery?

the small battery in a Sienna is a nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH).

It's also a transition technology, because Japanese battery manufacturers like Idemetsu Kosan, AGC, and TDK need around 5-7 years to begin mass-producing solid state batteries (and have already started constructing factories for them in JP, US, and SK).

Yep, fully EV for 99.99% of trips but functions exactly as an ICE car for edge cases is a no-brainer purchase. I don't really care about servicing the batteries more often because there's fewer of them and the ICE engine is likely to get 1/10th the miles of the car overall so it probably won't be the source of problems.

Over the summer, my son had a baseball tournament in Detroit, and we were driving from Chicago. I have never driven an EV before, and I wanted to see what it was like before a lease is up on one of our cars, so I decided to rent one and try the long distance trip.

It was horrific. I had no idea you needed separate apps for nearly every station. Every station had broken stalls, or a single stall with a line, and what's the difference between AC and DC for charging, or charging stations ONLY for a single brand (Rivian, how tf is this legal?). The stations were in the middle of nowhere; I thought my son and I could at least stop and get some food while it charged, but we didn't find any of those. Just one at a truck stop outside of Kalamazoo, and another at the end of the runway at the airport outside of Ann Arbor (we got tired of the trickle charge at Kalamazoo and left after 30 minutes, and needed to recharge in Ann Arbor).

Downtown Detroit had a handful of charging stations, and I ended up spending 45 minutes at the GM building to charge to 85%. When returning the car in Chicago, it is nearly impossible to get to 100% charge at the place near my house because the stations seem to start trickling after 80%, so it took over 60 minutes to go from 20% to 95% with a "fast" charger, then a 20 minute drive to O'Hare got it below 90% again. And I now have 3 apps on my phone each with a "wallet" with money I will not be using any time in the near future.

I know that long-distance isn't necessarily a selling point for EV, but that was only part of it. Every step of the way it was like companies took the worst parts of the internet and app culture and enshitified refeuling/charging. The car itself was pretty nice (Hyandai Ioniq 5), and I enjoyed driving it. But I felt like it was a CONSTANT stress worrying about where we will charge when needed, because of all of the issues; I felt like I had to thinking about finding a charging station when I got under 20% because who knows how long I will have to search for a good station.

I can't commit to an EV until they are more prevalent and I can just pull up and use a credit card without an app. Say what you will about Shell or BP, but at least I don't need to worry about them leaking my data in some hack because they have a shitty app or something. We'll definitely be buying a hybrid, probably plug-in, and I'll look at EVs again in 10 years or something.

> I had no idea you needed separate apps for nearly every station.

The fact that you need an app at all is a serious issue for me.

THIS! THIS! THIS! THIS! THIS! THIS! THIS!

If I need an app to charge an EV, then I'm not buying an EV - period end.

I hear people say Tesla is great because they have the largest charging network. What a load of BS! THAT'S A GIANT STEP BACKWARDS! Right now, I can take my dino car and fill up anywhere. I don't need a station branded for my make of car. I also don't need an app to buy gas.

As long as this situation persists, you can count me out of EVs. When I can go to a BP station (just a well-known vendor for discussion) and charge my car using a credit card - I'm in.

Wow, as a non EV owner I had no idea you needed a smartphone and app to charge your car out in public. And that some charging stations didn't work with some brands of car. How could the industry screw this up so badly? I'll also be sticking with my gas car until this crap gets sorted out.

Well, technically EVs have much larger "filling up" network than your dino car, since you can charge it from literally any socket anywhere in the world. It's not like Teslas can only be charged at superchargers. If you can charge at home every night it's likely you will never use a public charger in the lifetime of the car(unless you absolutely have to).

But yes, we need government regulation that says any EV charger should just have a card reader and start charging without requiring any kind of app/authentication.

> since you can charge it from literally any socket anywhere in the world.

Technically, I suppose. In reality, no. You aren't allowed to use almost all of those outlets.

> If you can charge at home every night

Sure, but there is a huge number of people who can't. For them, charging at commercial stations is the only option, so how available that is, and how they work, might be the most important consideration.

Running it through a calculator, I am getting 24 hours on a standard 120V 15AMP socket. from 20% to 80% on a Model 3 2024 Tesla. I am using calc at https://evadept.com/calc/ev-charging-time-calculator

So I can charge in my garage but only if I upgrade to 240V?

Well, are you going to use 60% of charge in your model 3 every single day? Because that would mean driving ~120-150 miles every day, and that's a lot more driving than people normally do. Fair enough if you do, I just mean people don't realize that actually, if you plug your car in every day it's like someone comes in at night and refuels your car - if you need to drive 120 miles one day but only 20 the next day, you are probably still fine just charging the car overnight using the slowest socket. And that's ignoring the possibility of having an actual charger station installed at home.

45mi drive to work so 90 round trip. There is no way to charge there. Most weeks will be 4 days 90 miles (WFH Friday). So, less than 60% but similar ballpark.

Circuit breaker is in the garage so not too hard to modify but sounds like I do need 240V if I want to get an EV. Thanks.

No you don’t. (You may very well be happier if you do the upgrade though). You have Fridays and weekends to top up too. Yes the charge you start with every day will decrease over the course of the week, but you’ll still have enough to do the commute on Thursday. But if you do not do the upgrade, check whether your outlet can be run at top load continuously. Most outlets aren’t rated for that

This video basically sums it up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92w5doU68D8

TLDR, the guy does an identical drive in both Polestar 2 and a Tesla, the Tesla just works at every supercharger, he plugs in and that's it, no app no nothing, the car charges at maximum available speed every time. With the Polestar every charger requires a different app, the chargers themselves are not built properly(advertising higher charging rates than the cables they have been installed with can support), broken stalls, and the car almost never charged anywhere close to its maximum charging speed.

I love EVs(I own one!) but the state of public infrastructure is absolutely dire, unless you own a tesla and can use superchargers.

> he plugs in and that's it, no app no nothing

There's still an app. It's just running in the car instead of your phone.

Yes, of course - I just mean from an external perspective you don't really need to do anything, other than plugging the car in - Teslas's network knows exactly who to bill for the electricity usage, there's no faffing about with a barely usable app on your phone to even just start the charge first. But yes, ultimately it still has the problem that all charging sessions require tracking and your personal data, you can't use a supercharger anonymously(not as far as I know anyway).

I've done 4 3000km trips in a Tesla, and they were pleasant experiences. Only once did we ever wait 15 minutes for a charge, every other time the charging session was shorter than our bathroom and/or meal and/or hotel stop. We ended up doing most of the trip on the top half of the battery simply because the battery lasted longer than young bladders. Your experience may differ if you're not traveling with a family, but if you are, an EV on a route covered by superchargers is hassle and extra wait free.

I have 2 concerns when looking at say a BMW X5 eDrive50 (or whatever name it has).

1) The fuel tank is 3.7 gallons smaller than their gasoline counterparts. Since these plugin-hybrids charge slowly, you're still suffering from having a hybrid while doing these long road-trips.

2) I often wonder how these engines are protected against wear when the engine is cold, but the battery runs out and they need to rev up from dead-cold.

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