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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda OK with them just dominating hybrids; especially plugins.

I own a 2024 Prius Prime (PHEV) and the setup works great. No range anxiety, no special charging infra (I just plug in on a normal 120v overnight). I got the car in Feb 24 and maybe pumped gas a total of 8 times? If I didn't make two longer trips, it would have been 6.

But also, the power output is pretty great and an upgrade over the hybrid only model.

It feels like the sweet spot for most Americans and doesn't require any real lifestyle change.

Big shame is that dealers aren't necessarily charging them on the lot. So if you test drive one, you might only feel the hybrid and not the EV mode.

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A regular EV also requires no special infrastructure. Just your regular house electrical system (e.g. 120v wall outlet in the US). Only on long trips do you need fast chargers or does range anxiety kick in. If you do a lot of long drives I can see that being a problem. But if not I'd be willing to bet you'd lose less time charging than taking your vehicle to the mechanic for maintenance and repairs. Because the EV, when built well, requires a frighteningly low amount of maintenance.

Problem is that because it's a full EV, it might leave me at a deficit charging only on 120v.

On the other hand, two days a week I make a drive that's just beyond EV range and the hybrid just kicks in afterwards.

Based on the limited info you've shared, you don't seem to drive enough to be at a deficit. Maybe it will take the night to charge the 10-20% you've used during the day, but you have a big buffer.

You can't pick a car with a small battery though as that will cause problems on long trips. Something around 80 kWh should be enough for most people.

>> If you do a lot of long drives

>> the EV, when built well

Home charging at 120v for an EV is only practical for the most minimal & predictable use. And I'll add "as long as you don't want to sell it used..."

You’ll typically add 50 miles of range overnight, which is more than the average person drives in a day. That’s not minimal. Unpredictability is buffered by the large battery. You can drive 200 miles one day then slowly fill it back up. Fast chargers can be a backup for the occasional times it’s not enough.

Why would there be an issue with selling it used when doing this?

Nobody is interested in used EVs, therefore resale values are very low.

As written here, it’s presented as a specific disadvantage of charging from a 120V outlet, so that’s not it.

I’ve been hearing that for years now, and for years I’ve had an eye on the used EV market, and I don’t really see that happening here in Europe.

I think it was true, at least in the US, back then the Leaf was the most common EV. Their battery longevity was trash, they had poor range to start with, and tax credits pushed down the effective new price a lot.

Resale values are lower in US because they factor in the 7.5k USD tax credit and the state tax credit mostly, there is plenty of demand for used teslas for example.

Similar in other countries but sometimes not as direct.

Various regulations set targets which gives manufacturers incentives to hit sales targets. This leads to discounts or great lease deals just before certain dates if targets aren't met through standard prices.

The resale values are only low compared to the inflated COVID prices. A 3 year old Tesla 3 goes for about $25k. Which is painful if you paid $70k for the 3. However, the buyer is comparing to a new 3 which you can get for $35k after tax credit.

The opposite will occur when Trump cancels the credit.

Resale values are low compared to new prices. Tell me, why does your logic not apply to new prices?

For the same reasons people are interested in new iPhones, but not last year iPhones. And tax incentives.

Not really. Living in Switzerland, colleague has Model S, and over whole night plugged in his house he can charge only around 9km/h. That basically covers his commute but he can't build up charge for the weekend if he started week empty. Not even going into the fact that most folks here live in apartments and not standalone houses, and charging situation there is usually terrible and overhead of owning electric car is significant.

That sucks tremendously (on top of other tesla-related suck like extremely expensive OEM replacement parts that nobody else can service), and considering we talk about Switzerland here (and expensive well developed part of it), other countries are not that better off if at all.

As a backup, non-critical second car, why not if you feel like an early adopter and paying >40k for a function a used 5k car can perform even better. Main family car? No thank you, maybe for half the cost but probably even that's too much in this decade.

Is it that expensive to get an electric car charger installed?

I just got two installed for $800, and the charger itself is $420 each. Even if a circuit panel had to be upgraded and some wire needed to be run, surely it is only a couple thousand extra at most.

Seems like you might have a case of SV myopia. The idea that $1640 plus “a few thousand extra” to be able to drive a very expensive vehicle would be not “that expensive” is pretty out of touch.

Electric vehicles are not “very” expensive, even in Europe, and it’s a capital expense. That charger is going to be useful for decades to come.

And if electric vehicles pencil out in the US to equal cost of gas cars including oil changes and all that, then surely they do in Europe with their higher gas costs.

Can you put numbers to not very expensive? Looking at vw for their ev equivalents, for me personally, it qualifies as very expensive (without subsidies)

I tried to find new gas vs electric car sale prices in a couple European countries, but I couldn’t easily find a reputable source.

With how active European governments are on legislation to curb carbon emissions, I assumed the proposition of a new electric vehicle to a new gas vehicle would be at least as good as the US (over the lifetime of the car, higher initial cost for EV, but lower maintenance costs).

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/europe...

Of course, this only applies to people with a home with a space to park and charge their car, and whose everyday destinations are mostly within an hour.

Edit: looks like small diesel cars are still available in Europe, so taking those as the base option, I can see how an EV would be expensive. This option doesn’t exist in the US, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1bfhpnl/does_it_ma...

Not OP but my power company gave me $1500, I only had to pay like $300 in total. There's currently (or, was, as may be the case in a few days) a ton of credits/assistance.

That was for two chargers, not one. And normal outlets give plenty of range overnight, it’s just a luxury to be able to charge faster when you want.

A new 200A electrical panel costs $5000-6000 to be installed with a permit in SV. If you want to run 50A wire for an L2 charger that might be $1000-2000 more. Getting close to $10000, so I'd say it is fairly expensive.

That’s just SV, though, you would’ve paid <1/3 that elsewhere.

Or just run an extension cord from your dryer outlet with a splitter. $100 and done.

If the numbers I find online for tesla power usage is correct, that would indicate that she charges with around 1.8 kW. But most homes should have little problem supplying the double (16 ampere with 230v = 3.680kW). But maybe she is stuck with 10 ampere?

But even with 9km/h I am surprised that's not enough, does she really drive more than 108km a day?

(this is not to take away from her experience, I am just surprised)

Europe has higher voltage, 230, so should go faster than charging from 120V.

Interesting, we got that charging speed off of a normal US 1.5kw outlet (120v, 12 amps). Don’t most European standard outlets put out more than that?

For many people in cities, it’s hard to secure parking with reliable access to an electrical outlet.

Not just in cities. In the U.S. at least, a lot of people live in suburban townhouse complexes that have shared parking lots. It's going to take a lot of investment to make charging easy for everyone.

Something that makes it easier to own EVs here in London (UK) are these chargers on lampposts, there are probably thousands of them at this point: https://i.imgur.com/1YdeVwf.png

They're slow (3-7kW), can't be installed everywhere, there are not enough if everyone wants to charge at the same time, and some areas still don't have them, but plug it in when you arrive and you should be fine to go in the morning. It's a good idea and more places should adopt it.

That wouldn’t be a problem for the op with the phev because they are already charging at home and only driving less than 30 miles each day except 8 times in the past year. I still don’t get why phevs are a thing.

The downside of plugins is that it has both systems (more things that can go wrong, added cost, weight) and they're not amazing at being an ICE car (small fuel tank) or electric car (small battery).

In your case it seems that a pure EV would be fine? Maybe not one with a small battery, but 300-400 miles of range isn't that uncommon these days.

In any case, the important thing is that it works well for you.

It's also not great that people sometimes buy them because of breaks on price and then keep them where they can't plug them in, which is the worst of both worlds. But a properly used plug-in hybrid can be a good thing for some yeah

Re: being a gas-powered car: they seem fine in terms of tank size, 11 litres for a prius prime vs 13 litres for a gas corolla from the 2010s. You get better fuel efficiency, too, so your effective range is likely at least as good as a regular gasoline car.

The added complexity / part count is definitely a downside, though.

Edit: er, now I'm not sure about my second statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42748610

Regarding the complexity, I believe Toyota has been ahead of the (hybrid) competition for many years, but a PHEV still has two different systems. Everything that can go bad on a pure EV (battery, electric motors, charging system) is there and even if the ICE part is simpler, it's still something that can break.

With this said, other reports of batteries going bad on old Prius, I haven't read much about them being unreliable, so it should be fine while the car is fairly new.

I think you meant gallons and not litres. At least the Prius prime seems to have a 10.6 gallon tank.

I was planning on buying the highest trim '24 Prius prime but availability and dealership markup made it unreasonable even in a large city. The lower trims didn't seem worth it. Instead I bought a used '23 model 3 long range with every upgrade (accel & fsd) and still saved money. Car had a few thousand miles.

I'm super happy I didn't get the Prius. Spec wise the Tesla is superior. Driving our other ice car is less enjoyable for me now. I use 120v but I work from home so it works. I still like the Prius/RAV4 prime but at its price point and limited availability I just don't see the value over Tesla.

The trick with the Prius Prime (and all PHEVs) is to lease and buy out the lease. That's a $7500 discount.

How well do Prius Primes (or other PHEVs) handle long periods where one's daily mileage is well under the EV mode range and one is able to charge at home every night? I think it has been 5+ years since I've driven more than 25 miles in a day and even longer since I was away from home overnight.

I've read ICEs can have problems if you go too long without running them. Will the Prime's software automatically run the ICE on occasion to keep it in good shape?

The VW PHEV’s will run the combustion engine regularly, mainly to avoid the fuel going stale. I assume the Toyota does the same.

My friend's Jeep will give them a notice that it needs to switch to gas when it hasn't been used for a while, so it seems like a pretty common thing across manufacturers.

The engine still kicks on once in a while. Notably now in winter, it kicks on if I have multiple seat heaters and the steering wheel heater on. But my use case also has two days where it's over the battery range so I know it'll kick on.

You can manually control it if you want and I do it once in a while when I need more acceleration since max power is delivered with both drivetrains.

We had this situation when we lived in a big city, before we moved somewhere that we drive longer distances regularly. We’d often go over a year without filling up. The engine runs occasionally to keep the gas from going stale, and in the winter the engine will kick on for the defroster. We never had any issues with it, and still have the car now.

Also, have they sorted out the 12V battery management for this low use scenario?

Our family has an older Hybrid Camry from around 2010 and it will destroy 12V batteries with too much local driving and parking. A typical regular ICE does better in the same conditions.

From the behavior, I assume it's because they only charged the 12V via a weak alternator when the ICE runs, rather than also keeping it charged via DC-DC conversion from the larger electric traction power system.

They haven't solved it.

I just returned from a 21 day trip and my 12v was dead because I left the Prius off the charger. It's fine as long as it's on the charger (my guess is it trickle charges it), but if you leave it off the charger, the traction battery doesn't maintain the 12v.

That's too bad. It shouldn't necessarily even need to charge the battery when parked, so much as have smarter battery management logic to get the car into lower power consumption states when parked and to more aggressively maintain the 12V charge when operating.

We resorted to installing a big master cutoff switch on the negative battery terminal in the trunk of the Camry. So if there is no plan to use the car again in the next few days, we electrically isolate the battery.

Then, we have to go through a longer "boot up" process to reactivate the car for its next use. Use the mechanical key to open the trunk, restore power, then enter the cabin and go through multiple cycles with the START button to let all the computers power back up...

Also importantly, it’s now quite good-looking, too.

And as much power as an early 2000's V6 Maxima. Great daily driver; seats are just so-so though.

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