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I like ICE cars. Someone literally had to pry the keys to my Integra out of my cold, (half-)dead hands. I like EVs: My Bolt's great. I will never own a hybrid, after working with my parents'. They are simply the worst of both worlds: With an ICE, if it breaks, I can probably fix it myself, likely cheaply. With an EV, there are vanishingly few moving parts to break. With a hybrid? All the failure prone parts of an ICE, packed into a smaller engine compartment because they had to stick an entire scaled-down EV in there on top of the ICE parts, making working on them a practice in futility.

With an ICE, I get gas once a week or so. With an EV, I plug my car in overnight a couple times a week, maybe using a fast charger once a month or so when I realize I've neglected to do before a longer trip. With a hybrid, I'm plugging in every night, plus getting gas once a month or so.

With a (manual transmission) ICE, I get to decide my power curve, and know if I slam the peddle to the metal, I can get a LOT of power out of that car. With an ICE, my acceleration is limited mostly by software. With a hybrid, if your EV mode battery gets depleted, the car gets sluggish. Plus, you're dragging around a bunch of dead weight in the form of a battery, so you don't even get respectable acceleration on ICE standards.

On top of all that, hybrids cost more (because they have basically all the parts of an ICE and an EV).

I wonder if you separate plug-in hybrids and non-plug-in hybrids, whether you might gain a more positive opinion of some.

With non-plug-in hybrids, you don't plug them in at night, and you're lugging a lot less battery around. In some sense, you do have all the complications of both, but as an example, the whole planetary gearset, dual motor setup in Toyota's Synergy drive replaces a traditional gearbox and seems to be more reliable and more efficient. I also expected Priuses to have worse reliability than non-hybrid Toyotas, and seem to have been completely wrong.

Also, while what I wrote above probably makes it sounds like I'm against plug-in hybrids, I think of them as a way to reduce the weight of a full electric car, by replacing a lot of the battery weight with a traditional ICE drivetrain, i.e. a range extender/light-weight source of power for acceleration.

I also don't like the weight and complication of modern cars. It's really hard to beat ICE for weight, but seems to be pretty easy to beat it for acceleration and fuel economy at the cost of making it more complicated (and worse handling).

I read a review of the BMW 330e iPerformance once, which messed with my head. They made the point that BMW had basically found a way to make a car heavier, without hurting acceleration or fuel economy (and also not really improving either).

FYI: I am just interested in this area, and have spent way too much time thinking about it. Many people will be more knowledgeable in this space. I just wanted to throw out some ideas to be shot down :)

Edit: Forgot to comment on your Integra - probably nothing modern will rival that for a long time! I was crushed giving up my '94 Celica a couple of years ago when I moved overseas. Basically gave it away!

>The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles.

The seller sets the asking price; the buyer sets the bid price; and mutual agreement between the buyer and the seller sets the selling price. When sellers set an asking price, they tend to refer to information about previous selling prices, creating a dynamic where buyers influence asking prices.

>Do those often persist through private party sales?

Yes: "Your New Vehicle Limited Warranty will follow your vehicle and be transferred to the new owner when a vehicle ownership transfer is performed through Tesla." (https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty) You opened your comment with "Why guess?", so I wonder why you posed this as a question (in such a way as to hint that the answer is "no") when the correct answer was a Google search away.

> but hybrids are still obviously better

Like a lot of anti-EV commentary^, there's nuance being missed and that is: use case. There is no "X is obviously better" (this is also true for a lot more topics than this)

I have a Nissan Leaf that's perfect for the purposes we bought it, better than a hybrid, far better than a petrol or diesel car. There are also scenarios where a hybrid is better, and there are also scenarios where a great big diesel burning engine is the best option. These gaps are closing though.

^I've had frustrating conversations with relatives when discussing the possibility of buying an EV where they just round-trip through a list of negatives, and I have to explain repeatedly that they don't apply to our use case. Examples:

- Can't tow: I haven't towed anything with any of our ICE cars in years (and we still have the ICE cars anyway)

- Can't take it interstate: We're not planning to take it interstate, and we're not planning on buying one big enough to carry what we'd need for an interstate trip anyway.

- Wouldn't a hybrid be better / safer first option to dip into electric: Not for our very regular and frequent short trips, pure electric is simpler and cheaper, and I've done the research to be confident in the decision.

- Miscellaneous other: We're not actually getting rid of the existing cars (yet) so we're not losing anything you might be worried about us losing.

The Leaf is on track to have saved us nearly $2k in petrol for the year (even taking into account the cost of electricity to charge her). If she lasts another four years she'll have paid for herself.

I agree with you. Cars seem to be discussed as an all or nothing decision process.

Many families where I am have two cars. Both cars spend an inordinate amount of time driving around the city. One car will be the preferred long distance family hauler.

Simply making the other car full electric seems like a no brainer to me.

In my family we kept the Impreza, but the electric (Tesla 3) became the long-distance hauler. It turns out to be cheaper to run long distances, quieter and more comfortable, and surprisingly has more room for baggage. We couldn't find a single reason to keep using the Impreza for long distance.

Charging options are not so well built out in my country. It'll get better, but it's not there yet.

So ICE for the long hauls, electric for the city running where you can reliably charge it at home.

Makes sense. My country, Israel, is barely 500 km from top to bottom. Even for what we consider long distances here, the charge from home gets us anywhere, and another charge gets us back.

  > I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better

I was 100% with you up until this point. Hybrids have all the mechanical components of ICEs, thus need maintenance and repair just like an ICE vehicle. Additionally they have all the components of an electric. The reduced maintenance of EVS is their greatest strength, in my opinion as an EV owner who was not expecting this benefit.

I've replaced more transmissions and rebuilt more engines than most people you'll meet. The EV drivetrain, even if it has a weak point in the battery, it's such a pleasure to own because of the reduced maintenance. All the money saved on oil, oil filters, plugs, mufflers, replacement stolen catalytic converters, coils, plug wires, fire and air filters, valve gaskets, water pumps, timing chains, lifters, brake pads, and the damned automatic transmission, add up to about the same order as a battery replacement - if that battery replacement is even needed. In the ICE vehicle, all those things are definitely needed.

I completely agree. My father was a truck mechanic and I spent plenty of time under cars turning wrenches. I'm very happy that part of my life is behind me as an BEV owner. My wife still drives an old Accord and I dread the times when it needs an oil/transmission fluid change, muffler replacement, water pump, etc. All of that simply disappears when you switch to a BEV and it really is refreshing not having to think about it at all.

> Why guess?

Manufacturers DO publish reports. Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries, which turn out to greatly exceed their warranties. (This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Manufacturers just can't afford to have high warranty return rates).

The rest of your post is an attempt at hand-waving away what is a real phenomenon. EVs are still new to a lot of people, there's a lot of FUD floating around, and that can affect used vehicle prices. Markets behave irrationally sometimes, and that leads to opportunity. (In this case, getting a value buy on a used EV).

> hybrids are still obviously better

Hybrids are objectively worse. They have less all-electric (efficient, non-polluting) range, they charge more slowly, they have a more complex drivetrain with more parts subject to repair, etc. They're a better fit for a specific market segment, but that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent. You can get cheap EVs nowadays that have more range than my last ICE.

> that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent

Disagree. People vastly overestimate the complexity of hybrids.

The mechanical and electrical components in a Toyota-style planetary gear based hybrid are much simpler than a standard automatic transmission, and demonstrably more reliable than both a conventional automatic and belt-style CVT.

This is a long way of saying, the specific market segment hybrids are a good fit for is the set of all passenger car customers that an EV is _not_ a good fit for. Anyone buying a Corolla, Civic Rav4 or CR-V should be buying the hybrid, and sales seem to be trending that way.

[Hey I own one of those]. Nah, the majority of people buying those specific vehicles should be buying an EV instead. In fact, this article is targeted specifically to them.

Rather, the biggest need for hybrids are people who frequently tow long distance at highway speeds. The combined aero drag is ridiculous: about 25% of typical EV efficiency. You'd need to drag a humongous 300kwh battery around to get range comparable to a typical sedan while towing.

Instead, some of the new EREVs are more like a BEV + hybrid, in that they have a BEV-sized battery (e.g. 100+kwh) for all your non-towing driving, along with a generator to handle the long distance towing.

> Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries,

They were caught lying many times.