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Comment by hnburnsy | Hacker News Reader

Consumers don't realize they are getting the worst of both worlds with added weight, complexity, repairs, inefficiency, and costs along with potential reliability (ex-Toyota) Not to mention studies that show PHEV owners frequently don't plug in.

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Well those owners are idiots. That says nothing about the car. You can't exclude Toyota when you make the claim that hybrids are unreliable and inefficient either. They have proven that they can be reliable and efficient.

Hybrids aren't running around doing 30 miles a day with a 300 mile battery like most EVs. Talk about inefficient!

How many miles of long trips? A quick search gives me half of them are long distance (50+ miles).

Since the short trips can all be done very efficiently on battery (recovering all the braking, too), I guess the weight isn't much of an issue for commuting if you can have the rest -half of the total driven miles- on EV with a full battery vehicle.

I wish I could find numbers on eCO2/miles for the short vs long trips.

The problem is the limited charging infrastructure. Hybrid owners don't need to plug in for the vehicle to function so they yield available chargers to actual EVs. To get past this you would need ubiquitous charging infra.

PHEV owners only need to charge at home (and if they can’t, don’t need a PHEV) and use electric power for local commuting.

The future of BEVs (and the most practical today) is also charging at home, and available chargers can grow slowly with BEVs used for road trips. Tesla is pretty close to there already. So, chargers don’t need to ubiquitous, just a bit more available on less common road trip routes.

My main goal with buying an EV is to give the middle finger to the oil industry as they have meddled with the world too much.

They screwed public transit and entire nations just for profits. I love my Subbie and I'll keep that until it breaks apart and replace it with an EV. Maybe today there's many downsides to an EV, but I hope it evens up and maybe becomes even better to get one.

Nah, PHEVs are the perfect compromise for lots of people who wouldn't otherwise be able to go all electric. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Indeed. I cannot charge my car at home so I drive a PHEV. I use public chargers when one is available on my street. If not, no problem. I’d say about 80% of my daily driving is done on the battery, which is a lot better than 0!

My Outlander rarely needed repairs and I always plugged it in. The car even complained about me needing to use the gazoline in the tank because it risked getting old in the tank and needed to be replaced. That was a great car. My new EV, a Subaru Solterra is great too though.

> Subaru Solterra

Looking at Doug Demuro reviews it has one the worst weekend score and one the best daily score. Amazing.

That’s simple not true. Studies have shown that historically hybrid vehicles have fewer issues than any other type, possibly because reducing the ICE use increases reliability overall more than adding the minimal EV complexity.

>Hybrids, which combine a gas engine, electric motor, and battery, have 15 percent fewer problems on average than gas-only cars. EVs and PHEVs have about 80 percent more problems on average than gas-only cars.

>“Many of the problems with EVs and plug-in hybrids are because they are newer designs compared to gas technology, so some kinks still continue to be worked out,” says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. “By comparison, hybrids have been around for nearly three decades, and the technology is tried and true.”

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...

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