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Comment by pkolaczk | Hacker News Reader

Another part of the point is that you can pack a much smaller and more efficient ICE and then substitute the missing power and torque from electric motors when needed. Most cars are not used at max power all the time. You need max power only at short times when accelerating. With pure ICE there is the tradeoff - a bigger engine will get you more max power / max torque but is going to be less fuel efficient because of internal friction.

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On paper, yes, but did that ever happen? Sorry for being sarcastic, but where I live the frugal hybrid is exceptionally rare and the "same big engine, but driving a much heavier car" hybrid is omnipresent. The kind of people who might buy the frugal one buy second or third hand while almost all buyers of factory new pick the "same big engine" option, and those are the ones who decide what's available on the second hand market.

Omoda 9 (SUV) is sold in Europe only as plug-in hybrid with small-ish 1.5L 143HP engine + 394HP electric (145km of pure electric range, 35kWh LFP battery).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeed_Yaoguang

> did that ever happen?

In 2010 with the Chevrolet Volt.

I think the question is "is that overall effect the reality, or do most people buy a very heavy hybrid?"

Which only had a 1.4l engine. It was not as efficient as the gas only Prius but could be more efficient overall as the Volt of 2010 had a 40 mile EV range.

I wonder whether people actually understand that they need a smaller engine for the same performance?

Despite my overall low estimation of people's ability to fluidly reason about engineering tradeoffs, I think they generally do understand this one well enough, at least for the decisions that they will face. They're only deciding which car to buy, not what engine specifications are required to make a car successful in the market.

They go test-drive cars, probably glance at performance specifications and/or read/watch a test drive review of the cars. They can look at the 0-60mph/0-100 kph times and get a feel for "this car will be able to get out of its own way" vs "this car will be a rolling roadblock".

So "actually understand"? Maybe not, but "understand enough to guide their purchasing decision?" and therefore enough for the actual automobile product teams to design to accommodate? I think they do.

Yes, every single prius for example? The biggest engine that was produced with seems to be a ~100 bhp engine which isn't much for a 1.5 metric tonne car

In most countries, yes. Despite the push for SUV-styled cards (which are heavier than a regular city car, but not by that much), engines have been small.

Toyota Yaris - HSD - 1.5L 4cyl Renault Clio - E-Tech - 1.6L Hyundai Kona (SUV) - 1.6L Honda Jazz - 1.5L Peugeot 208 - 1.2L Peugeot 3008 (SUV) - 1.6L Peugeot 5008 (Family SUV) - 2L And the list goes on. Even BMW with it's xDrive puts out 1.5L engines.

Huge engines are only common in two places: sports cars (and even then, only a specific category like AMGs and friends, because even a Porsche 992 only has a 3L engine) and the US.

The info is useful, but those do not seem to be all that small. There were smaller engines available for the ICE version of the Clio, for example.

There was, and it was shit. The Cléon-Fonte, despite all my love for its BBBBRRRRRRRRRRVVVVVVVVVVV was becoming wildly insufficient for the already ever heavier cars simply due to electronics and safety measures, and it was already a 1.2L. The smallest ever put on a Clio was a .999L, and anyone driving a Twingo knows how it behaves the moment there's... a slight incline, or two people in the care.

1.5L is an incredibly small engine, especially when previous versions required much larger. The Renault Scénic IV is a 1.5 ton brick that is happily running on a 1.2L engine. The Scénic II's most sold motorization was a 2L engine.

I feel like I remember a pickup being available that was a 6L v8. So one cylinder in that engine had almost the same volume as all the cylinders in a 1.5L engine combined. That's pretty crazy to me.

edit: oh it was mine heh, my first car was a 1979 ford with a 460 ( 7.5L v8 ). It was a hand me down from my grandfather, he said if i could get it running i could have it.

A 6 liter 4-cylinder would have the same volume in a single cylinder as a 1.5L engine. A V8 of that size would have half the volume in a single cylinder, not almost the same volume.

A 1.5 liter is incredibly small. You’ll struggle to accelerate up slight inclines with that. If you’re in the mountains it will be even worse.

>On paper, yes, but did that ever happen?

Like absolutely, unless you consider 1.4L petrol engine large for something with over 170KW (over 220hp). Such kind of offerings are quite common at the East side of the pond.

I'd consider engines with HP in the two digits range not big. Few ICE cars (hybrid or not) are ever accelerated at the rate you could achieve with a 75 HP engine revved into the high but still safe range. People buy big engines so that they can get all their acceleration needs served at half throttle. And that's for stick shifting, those on automatic pick engine size so that they can accelerate on quarter throttle or else the car shifts back and it sounds all x "small engine working hard" (which would be so much less inefficient!).

Our family owned a Mercedes 240D (71 peak horsepower at sea level) for many years. That car's performance was lackluster on a good day and trying to merge onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike (with very short acceleration lanes) was IMO quite unsafe. From that experience, I'm pretty sure that people are dipping into more acceleration than that car could ever muster.

I have no doubt that some people behave as you describe, but I think some of that is driven from a rational position of not wanting to buy a car that is incapable of anything more than their normal daily driving. If you need to accelerate quickly to merge safely into traffic, bringing only 75 [or 71] peak horsepower to the table isn't a comfortable position to be in.

Hybrid one - 0-100km/h sub 7sec. The most important part is not 0-xxx but being able to take trucks in relatively short distances b/c most roads features just two lanes. Pressing pedal to the metal and engaging both engine does that.

The sub 100 power doesn't mean much if the engine has a turbine, e.g. TSI of volkswagen

Fiat 500 hybrid 999cc engine, 69bhp (51kW).

I hired one on holiday and it worked fine. Maybe I'm getting old but I see less point in getting something that does 0-60 in 4 sec when most traffic goes from 0-40 in about two minutes and doesn't get much faster. It still has a top speed over 100mph.

BMW i8

The vast majority of hybrids use simulated atkinson cycle... while their cylinders might be the same size as N/A vehicles, they leave the intake valve open past the end of the stroke, so they effectively are displacing less, even though the cylinder dimensions might be the same size. The advantage is that atkinson cycle is more efficient. But it has too poor performance characteristics for an ICE-only car.

Yes, check out BYD's hybrids. The petrol engine is 46% efficient, which is pretty damn amazing. This is more efficient than most power plants (combined cycle plants are better- but most power plants are not combined-cycle).

So what is the well to wheel efficiency of this vs. pure electric? There are fuel transportation losses in one, and transmission line losses in the other. In many cities electricity is quite a bit more expensive than gas so hybrids are a better deal financially.

Which cities are those? I can think of maybe a few in the Middle East with subsidized gasoline, but I’m coming up blank after that.

I've never seen a car where the hybrid and pure gas versions have the same size engine; the hybrid engine is almost always lighter and makes less power.

Dunno if you consider plugin hybrids hybrids, but I believe the Audi Q5 PHEV and ICE-only engines are the same.

There’s a few luxury cars that use the same or larger engines for the hybrid. Lexus did it with the LS, hybrid 600h had a larger engine (5L) than the gas 460 (4.6L).

Those are super rare though.

This reminds me of the short lived dilbert cartoon when Dilbert is complaining about how pokey his Prius, and when he hands the car over to Dogbert, he somehow is able to rip out of the parking lot at high speed.

Seriously though, hybrids seem like a bad compromise to just getting an EV. Hybrids have an electric drive train with an ICE drive train, and somehow that double complexity will be worth it? In the long run, EVs are winning on cost alone (especially in China where making cheap EVs is a thing).

And, you can make much lighter and lower range electric cars without all those heavy batteries, and boost the range with diesel when needed. Very attractive in principle. Most cars are not using their full range all the time, for a lot of people a 50 mile range car would be more than enough 98% of the time, but that remaining 2% means that people end up buying 200 mile range cars instead.

But then, do you end up removing enough battery weight to offset the weight of a whole ICE?

Smaller cars have always been available, but people have shown a preference for bigger cars where they can sit higher up, even though it costs them more.

I'm not talking about size, I'm talking about range and weight. You can have a huge car or a smaller car, going from a 90kWh battery pack to a 30kWh battery pack is gonna have the same weight saving in both

Maybe they should be at least charged for the catastrophic externalities that that "preference" results in.

does "preference" equate to endless, manipulative advertising from car manufacturers? Or, perhaps, the "preference" of higher profit margins from larger cars, pushing manufacturers to entirely abandon reasonably sized cars?

"Everyone who doesn't want what I want them to want has been brainwashed by corporate interests" is not a robust assertion under even the most casual scrutiny.

I hate to break it to you but something like a Rogue or HRV does circles around an Altima or Civic when it comes to daily flexibility and utility for a fairly paltry additional cost. It doesn't take a degree in rocket surgery to figure out why they fly off the shelves. For the average person they're a good combination of attributes.

The North American market now only includes a handful of sedans. Meanwhile, Hyundai and Toyota somehow manage to sell “tiny” cars in Korea, Japan and lots of developing countries.

A practical car is a station wagon, not an SUV, many of which have less storage space.

Please, cut the needless snark. People do buy vehicles for edge cases but the lack of smaller, practical vehicles is driven is large part by manufacturer profit.

Many of those tiny foreign cars are unfortunately not economically useful to sell in the regulated markets of the rich west, and even when they are they often aren't without the developing nation sales volume to amortize a lot of the fixed costs over.

I agree that there's a lot of stupidity going on when it comes to station wagons vs crossovers vs compact SUVs and the OEMs really do SUV-ify a lot of things that ought not to be.

The shape of these vehicles is fairly preordained by the nature of the fuel economy regulations and wind resistance and other regulations that apply equally to all of them. You're not gonna find "more space" in something like a Subaru Outback by squashing it on the vertical axis unless you stretch it in another dimension or find somewhere else to find space. Maybe you might be able to eek out a slightly better angle on the hatch or something but it ain't gonna be much. Fuel economy regulations make cars with thicc asses like the big sedans and station wagons of yesterday nonsensical.

The snark is not needless. It is tautologically impossible for the overwhelming majority of people do be "doing it wrong" on a matter that is in large part a subjective one of preference. If someone wants to assert that then I will talk down to them.

People buy these small SUVs left and right because they're seemingly the best option when it comes to well rounded boring A to B vehicles.

I think the crossover is pretty much the modern station wagon. I suppose they get marketed as SUV's but they're basically just a bit longer and taller car vs what I'd consider a "real" SUV; an enclosed truck chassis.

also once everybody else is obstructing your view with a bigger car it becomes necessary to have a bigger one, it's a race to the metaphorical bototm

I thought about PHEV but in the end went full EV simply because it seemed to me with two whole power trains that's 2x the components to go wrong/need maintenance.

This. This times 100x . Also, it’s not like each powertrain has an independent failure mode. If either break, your car is a brick until it’s fixed.

I have a friend who drives a Chevy Volt with a dead ICE engine; she just charges the battery and uses it as a (rather short range) pure EV vehicle. Not ideal, but it works for her until she gets something else.

If she was in California she wouldn't be able to pass smog at her next inspection, which is a funny problem considering she drives in pure EV mode now.

Oh I agree completely. I'm driving an old diesel now but I have no desire to get a hybrid, I'd get a pure EV if I were to buy a new car. But there are some tempting things in principle about plug-in hybrids

That same insight applies to regular hybrids, and yet Toyota’s hybrids are legendary for their durability. There’s a reason half the cabs where I live are Prius station wagons, and it’s not their efficiency, judging by how they’re driven.

Consumer reports found that HEV's were the most reliable, and PHEV"s the least reliable. That's nonsensical, there's little difference between the two.

Toyota is the biggest seller of HEV's, Stellantis of PHEV. That's the difference. EV's on paper should be the most reliable, but Tesla is the biggest seller of those. If you want reliability, choose by brand rather than engine type.

I was comparing a Hyundai Ioniq EV with a Hyundai Ioniq PHEV and was surprised to find more problems reported by the owners of the Ioniq EV.

Mostly issues with 12V battery, it seemed like.

In the end I bought a Stellantis EV so I probably deserve everything I get - but they are cheap!

12V batteries dying in EVs has been a consistent problem. I think it got better for Tesla when they moved from lead acid to lithium ion for the 12V (like the much bigger battery).

>Consumer reports found that HEV's were the most reliable, and PHEV"s the least reliable. That's nonsensical, there's little difference between the two.

Eh, it's not so much nonsensical, as it is that you're just misinterpreting the data.

This conversation here is specifically about powertrain reliability, but that isn't what consumer reports measures. They measure complaints about any feature on the vehicle, including ancillary accessories unrelated to the vehicle's ability to transport people.

But also as you point out, shitty engineering (Stellantis's specialty) is a bigger issue than any particular drivetrain type.

Toyota's success with the Prius proves that this fear is unfounded. You will regularly find second hand prius models for sale with 500,000 km on the odometer.

Just think - if two drivetrains were less reliable, wouldn't you see that with the Prius?

That's a common misconception, but hybrids are almost never as complicated as an ICE powertrain plus an EV powertrain. E.g. most hybrids are able to eliminate many parts that ICE vehicles require, like, starters, drive belts, multi-ratio transmissions, alternators, etc. Because of this, many hybrids surpass ICE-only vehicles in reliability.

In some ways it’s more complicated. The battery management and cooling is a point of failure. It’s also heavier and so wear and tear on suspension is greater.

On the other hand, a Toyota hybrid doesn’t have a gearbox at all, not even a CVT. Instead it has something similar to a differential, it’s mechanically simple and very reliable. It uses the electric motor in place of a turbo, so that’s another common failure point removed. It doesn’t have a starter motor, and the Atkinson cycle engine should suffer less stress than an equivalent petrol.

Practically the biggest problem is finding a 3rd party garage who will inspect the hybrid parts as part of a service.

You're right in principle, but it's important to remember that tradeoffs exist. You can very much trade off engineering effort and time to improve reliability.

Commercial aviation is a great example of taming extreme inherent unsafety of aircraft by applying a lot of resources to the engineering side. Another is space programs.

And car power trains have nothing on those ;) As Toyota has shown, it's totally possible to make reliable hybrid cars with enough engineering thrown at the problem.

So if all things were equal, you'd absolutely expect an EV to be more reliable than a hybrid, but all things are rarely equal.

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