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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

>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

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.

> did that ever happen?

In 2010 with the Chevrolet Volt.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

BMW i8

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