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Comment by eldaisfish | Hacker News Reader

Personally, my next vehicle will be a plug-in hybrid, likely a used Prius.

For all the benefits of EVs, they are a hassle today and will likely continue to be a hassle for the lifetime of a vehicle purchased today.

My current vehicle, a four door sedan, averages approximately 6 l / 100 km. Pretty good but that is largely because it is light.

IMHO, there's a huge part of the hybrid / dual drivetrain story that EV advocates miss - eliminating most (but not all) fuel emissions is a very good start and is certainly better than the status quo. Hybrids also come with the benefits of both fuels, an advantage that is often ignored.

A 2023 Prius prime has about 60 km of electric range. This is well above the average commute length in Canada.

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What benefits do you see hybrids having over EVs? Is it just range anxiety? If so, check out how quickly some of the 800V architecture cars can change. I think the Kia EV6 can charge from 10-90% in 18 minutes, and that's for almost 300 miles of range.

I don't know about you, but if I charged every time I stopped to pee (and buy a seltzer, predicting the next stop) I'd never have to have a dedicated charge stop.

And the hoopla about winter driving range is pretty much moot if you have one with a heat pump.

A PHEV isn't a straight upgrade from a HEV, the extra weight from the batteries typically means once your out of your small electric only range, you get worse MPG than the HEV

At least for me, it's not just charging time for longer distance driving, it's charger availability. Driving a gas car, I can be pretty confident that as long as I'm not driving through Death Valley, I will be able to easily find numerous places where I just need a credit card and I can fill up.

Electric chargers on the other hand are a festival of incompatibility, unreliability, unexpectedly slow charging, broken chargers, mandatory terrible apps, lack of availability off major roads, etc. Now every trip is like driving a gas car through the middle of rural Australia, where you have to carefully plan your stops and hope nothing goes wrong.

Now I admit all that is getting better, but the experience is still worse than taking a road trip in a gas car. And most importantly, it's something people feel less comfortable relying on. If the only difference was time to fill up, I don't think it would be an issue for a lot of people.

It's honestly not like that anymore. I thought I'd read that Tesla fired their supercharging team, but ten more have opened around my city in the last six months.

The price of electricity keeps dropping too, because the networks are competing with each other. And even cheap hotels more and more often have free L2 charging - I had multiple options in Casper, Wyoming, a few months ago!

I road trip far more than the average American, and I think it's no longer an issue.

This is the stupidest discriminatory hurdle that ought to be regulated ASAP.

With cash or card on hand you can get fossil fuels with only one question asked, "anything else?". Electricity? Boy, you better have that curriculum vitae on hand, because we're gonna get to know each other very well before that IoT relay makes contact.

An interesting one for me is that living in Texas, there is a punitive tax on registration for EVs, but not plug-in hybrids. It's not terribly significant, but it is worth mentioning. Otherwise, range anxiety is still a factor.

As much as I hate those taxes, they do make a bit of sense. The gas taxes pay for the roads, but if you're charging at home, everyone else is paying for your wear and tear on roads.

I calculated I'd need to drive an electric vehicle about 80,000 miles a year for them to break even with gas taxes. Not to mention that road damage goes up at something like the 4th power to vehicle weight, so it's heavy trucks that take most of the toll on roads.

Didn't realize they were that much. That's crazy. They should be based on either the odometer of the car, or the 12k-15k miles/year average driving amount.

Heavy trucks do cause the vast majority of road wear and tear, but EVs do tend to weigh more. Hell, my ford lightning with it's extended battery weighs over 6k pounds. 50% heavier than normal vehicles, but doesn't hold a candle to a loaded semi.

> I think the Kia EV6 can charge from 10-90% in 18 minutes,

How's the battery health after 15 years ?

I can't speak to the Kia specifically, by my EV (Ford lightning) comes with a 10 year warranty on the battery.

Unless you don't have access to charging at home, DC fast charging is exceptionally rare. When I leave home, I have 300 miles before I need to use a DC fast charger, so I think I've used a DC fast charger around a dozen times. That's probably average, and would have minimal impact on battery health.

If you're always fast charging though, that could cause problems, don't quote me but I think I saw something talking about ten years of simulated fast charging cut 14% off the battery life. I wouldn't be surprised if 15 years show similar since battery pack failure is a bathtub curve.

Probably ~90%

Battery anxiety is real, at least here in Montana. I don't have my supercharger adapter yet (been 6 months, probably be another 6 months at this rate), and the only chargers that were available to me on my last trip were the Level 1 chargers. I made it back home (day trip) with about 14% battery, but the speed at which the battery was falling made me exceptionally anxious.

My EV remains a local "for fun" vehicle for the foreseeable future.

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