Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain | Hacker News Reader

Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain

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168 pointsmroche454 comments

I used to like hybrids, and obviously series hybrids are the coolest kind of hybrids, but now that I’m driving a budget EV, I honestly don’t see the point anymore. Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs.

Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.

Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.

Also city dwellers with street parking and it’s hard charge, so a pure EV is a bad fit.

Hybrids with their good mileage although complex are a good fit for those.

Typically the driving distances are pretty short in a city, so you don't have to charge that often.

The smaller size of an EV would be more useful in most European cities, at least.

That's the irony of EVs. They're most useful in cities--short driving distances and less emissions in dense areas, but easiest for the consumer to use in the burbs where driving distances are longer and emissions are less of an issue.

I'd say they're most useful in suburbs. You can charge them overnight in your driveway or garage so there's almost no reason not to have one unless you're really focused on the road trip scenario but that's an issue for city cars too.

Yes, useful at the personal level. I agree. But at the community level, emission reduction is most useful for cities.

Even still, people driving from the suburbs to the city are a large part of emissions. People living in the city are already likely to use transit for some trips and so are going to make less emissions. Also for emissions we really shouldn't separate the suburb from the city - they are too close to each other and so one affects the other.

People who live in cities often don't drive that much, so they don't need to charge that often - I drive like 400 km per month, meaning I'd have to charge once a month on most modern EVs.

Also even in the sprawl, people usually don't drive hundreds of kilometers s day.

I'd correct this to be "a smaller sized EV" versus "the smaller size of an EV" as many of the EVs on the market are surprisingly big. Without pointing to the obvious behemoth truck/SUV EVs, my Tesla MY is considerably larger than a lot of CUVs on the market and has a much worse turning radius. What it does do well is stop and start fast meaning I can be more decisive and navigate through messy NYC/BOS traffic with more confidence than in my CRV, and regen braking + having lower "idling" costs does improve its city-profile.

Is the hybrid car then just a social cover for “I want gas savings, but where I live doesn’t have EVSEs?”

It almost reminds me of mechanical alarm clocks from the 70s, where they are designed to look like an electronic model but are just driven by AC motors (1).

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWqweWjsbU

I recently got a hybrid because I wanted better gas mileage--no more, no less. Without subsidies, I can't get the math to work for an EV.

It just depends on gas prices vs. electricity cost in your area.

For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.

I don’t understand the logic of this. Can you math it out?

Not going to do the math but in California gas is expensive and tax rebates still exist. Where I work there is a charger at most parking spaces.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gas-taxes-state/

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/08/07/governor-newsom-announces-...

I can't vouchers for the specifics, but it could make sense because gas and electricity prices as well as incentives vary a lot between US states.

There's a really easy calculator available at https://chooseev.com/savings-calculator/ You can play with different values for vehicles and local prices.[0][1]

It looks to me like an EV makes as much sense in Texas as anywhere. The places where EVs don't make sense currently have average gas prices but high electricity prices, like the Northeast.

[0] https://gasprices.aaa.com/todays-state-averages/

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

EVs make sense in Texas as well. While gas is cheaper in Texas, Electric is also cheaper and so these balance out.

The above is for most people. There are exceptions in both states where gas makes more sense.

> For example in the US it makes perfect sense to own an EV in California, but no sense in Texas for example.

It makes a lot of sense to own and operate an EV in Texas. At my current electricity rate, the energy cost per mile for my EV is something like 4¢/mi. I just bought gas this morning, gas was $3.75/gal for me in a very cheap gas part of town in Texas (many places are closer to $4). To get that same energy cost per mile, I'd need to get ~94MPG.

Let's compare it to a car that gets like 35mpg, and say I drove a normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year. $560 for energy costs in the EV, let's be fair and add on the extra $200 in taxes Texas is currently adding to EVs, $760. How much did I spend on gas on that 35MPG car? 14,000mi / 35MPG = 400 gallons, * $3.75 = $1,500/yr.

> normal average US mileage of 14,000mi in a year.

That sounds very high. The most common lease cap is 10k miles per year.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

Also, 10K seems like a common base lease arrangement, but up to 15K is common. On top of that its not like most cars are leased.

You got the time arrow the wrong way around. Those mechanical digital clocks predate the LED ones by a number of years.

They worked on the same principle as the old mechanical signs at airports and train stations.

So it was mechanical first with the motors, then the LED display and then LCD and then the current TFT etc.

Funnily enough, I’m a city dweller with street parking.

How many cities offer both abundant street parking and abundant charging stations?

Sorry, but how are these two related? What point are you trying to make? I live in the capital of a smaller European country and there's enough of both for it to be viable for me to own an EV. I believe it's the same in other larger cities and towns in the country (and smaller ones with malls or close to highways), then there's the weird gap of smaller towns that don't have enough chargers, but where many people live in apartment blocks with street parking, and then there's the countryside with small villages where people usually park in front of their house (and can charge at home easily).

> Sorry, but how are these two related?

I dunno. Ask the OP.

I live in West Seattle and own an EV. There still is not enough easily accessible charging infrastructure, requiring users to constantly monitor and go out of their way to use the only level2 pole station available in the neighborhood.

The nearest level3 is off the peninsula and both are under repair.

The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out. EV is not for everyone (yet)

> The point is that charging infrastructure is still being built out.

I know that EV infra generally sucks in the US, but don't people understand that more than 96% people on the planet live elsewhere? Often in places where EVs work just fine?

Most people are not fluent in English and not technically inclined. While I haven't seen real numbers I would expect a bit over half of the people here do live in the US.

We traveled 2000km+ through bigger cities like Brussels this summer alone with a BEV.

Parking during charging is often the only option. E.g. Gent even had parking only for rented BEVs and car sharing BEVs.

So, I don't know what you are talking about at all. There a restricted zones were you aren't even allowed to enter with an ICE.

Are they though? I mean you also don't have a gas station at the curb but you get by. Maybe you just need to charge at a public charging point. Just because you have an EV doesn't mean you absolute NEED to charge at home for it to make sense.

I can fill my 35L tank, pay, and be on my way in about 2 minutes. That gives me about 750km of autonomy. That's why I don't mind not having a gas station at the curb.

I can also show up at the gas station at any moment with a reasonable upper wait limit.

It's a bit disingenuous to ignore the downsides of not being able to charge at home. Public charging points may not exist, be too few, or be taken. If you drive enough, then you somewhat need to structure your life around charging your car.

Thankfully we're getting close to ~10 mins to go from 10% to 80% charge with newer models. Battery tech is actually advancing very steadily, so it won't be long for this to trickle down to cheaper models either.

Rules are also going in the right direction where I live. The onus is now on the homeowner association to justify denying you the permission to install a charging spot by your private parking space.

I luckily live in a building with reasonable people, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

I doubt it's anywhere near that fast in winter when its freezing out.

AIUI, fast charging still degrades the battery faster than slower/overnight charging so should only be done when absolutely necessary. Is that still true?

In modern EVs, not really, but we don’t have enough data for the latest 500kW+ monsters.

It's really not like that. It may seem like that from things you heard a few years ago, but even then, in the last four years, I haven't experienced any of this. Your car tells you when you'll need to charge on a road trip, and those chargers are at places that have food, or a bathroom, so you stretch your legs for a few minutes or eat something. Outside of road trips, it's not even a consideration.

Public charging is almost as expensive as gas though

About half as expensive where I live and the way I drive.

Around me gas is $4.00/gallon right now, and the public fast charging station closest to me is $0.39/KWh. It’s actually cheaper to burn gas unless you get less than ~30mpg (at least compare to my EV which gets about 3.2M/KWh). But I charge at home at about $0.14/KWh so it’s much cheaper than gas.

Long story short, I’d never have bought an EV if I couldn’t charge at home or work.

Far more in the U.K, well maybe with the recent petrol increases.

In April it cost about 14p mile off the motorway for petrol, 17 on the motorway (higher prices). Today it’s another 3p due to Iran, so 17/20p a mile.

Home electric costs 2.5p a mile at night, 8p during the day. public charging is around 15p on a slow overnight charger and 24p on a fast charger.

Public fast charging is. There's often public level two charging that's much cheaper.

I kinda think home charging is important. You never know when the public charger will have no spots.

Given the proliferation of public charger competition, I haven't run into this in the last two years. In 2023, I think I waited 10 minutes once in a rural area.

My neighbor had a EV.

It was always an issue, but he ended up moving to a more surban place. If you drove to work daily and they had charging it wouldn’t be an issue. Rapid charging isn’t that quick.

Though at my old office they started limiting time at the chargers. The city has recently started having public chargers.

One of the selling point of electric is you always start out with a full ish charge.

I’m on my bike on most days I commute. I like it better. Except in the winter where the lack of plowing of these separated bike lanes forced me onto public transit, which I don’t love. My car (2010 element) is gas but I only fill every 3 or so weeks.

I thought this but after 3 years I can say it is unfounded. the only reason I ever think about my state of charge on the city is when I need it to be low so I can use street parking that requires me to charge.

We really need more slow charging stations for folks to just park at. I’d have assumed that the economics would have been favorable to charge by the day/night rather than by the minute.

Every street lamp has 15a of power already running to it. It would be trivial to add an outlet to each one.

They should develop an easy to install add-on for streetlamps that adds two charging ports and a payment terminal.

> and a payment terminal

This should really be handled in the car and through the charging cable.

Probably not. Often that 15a is shared with several others nearby. In many cases there is a light sensor on one light that controls them all. Sometimes the transformers that supplies them isn't big enough for more load.

Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.

That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.

There’s a genuine technical issue: the AC EVSE protocols (J1772, NACS, etc) have several safety features that are far in excess of anything you’ll find in a regular 15A NEMA receptacle. I don’t think it would be wise to gave high traffic NEMA receptacles on fully weather-exposed streetlights.

The hardware for the safety systems would not be expensive in volume, but the cable and connector are expensive and bulky. And none of the EVSE standards are specified in a variant where the receptacle is fixed and the car carries the cable.

This is solvable, obviously. I don’t know whether drivers would want to deal with having their own cables, though.

Having your own cable for AC (here it's Type 2) is the norm in Europe, so I'd say it's survivable.

The point is that EVSE plugs are safer and European dryer plugs under the rain out in the open is technically kind of dangerous.

No, the cable you carry for AC charging has a Type 2 connector on both sides, it's purely an EV charging cable. It's not the same 3-phase plug you'd plug a table saw into.

Mines IP55 and the wall and 65 at the car, perfectly fine for heavy rain.

AIUI, Tesla really screwed the pooch here. For the original Model S, Tesla really really wanted the US model to tuck the charge socket under the little hinged reflector, and they couldn’t figure out how to fit the Type 2 “Mennekes” connector their. So they invented their own socket (which evolved into NACS), and the Tesla one is rather inferior to Type 2, at least when used for AC charging.

And now every EV needs to have a different charge port configuration for North America vs Europe, and North America is stuck with NACS. (NACS is fine for DC but still sucks for AC. It cannot support 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature except in the limited case of 1 or 2 chargers in a single family residence), and cables and adapters cannot passively report their current rating. So you would need to build a kind of gnarly active MITM system to make a safe extension cable, whereas a Type 2 to Type 2 cable is built part of the Type 2 design.

Later, Tesla proved the whole thing pointless by successfully fitting Type 2 in the same location…

European Model S has Type 2 in that location, only ones that don't fit is the Type 2 CCS with giant DCFC pins below the regular Type 2. NACS is just Tesla doing Apple.

NACS is far less clunky than CCS. And don’t get me started on ChaDeMo - my best guess is that whoever designed it thought that big heavy awkward gasoline nozzles where cool and wanted their EV chargers to be at least as massive.

ChaDeMonis basically dead now other than for existing cars. A typical U.K. service station will have 20 ccs chargers for every chademo, and nobody is deploying the latter for new places.

Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.

I think massive CHAdeMO plugs might have been for ultra rapid charging that never rolled out. There are brochures of 350kW+ watercooled CHAdeMO charging test equipment floating online, noted as plug limited to 200kW, dated at least as far back as 2015. That was when Tesla was still rolling out V2 150kW. So the plug overall dimensions and pin sizes are probably way overspecced for what it is in practice.

> 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature

Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.

May save you 5-10% on the bill.

3 phase has a property that the total power is (with fully balanced loads and no harmonics) constant. But n phases, equally spaced in phase angle, each an RMS voltage V from ground, with RMS current I per phase in phase with the voltage to ground, gives power n•V•I. (I’m assuming that n>=2 so that there is no neutral current.) There’s no savings for n=3 vs n=2.

There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.

Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.

I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.

When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.

But that’s all history now.

Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.

> Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs

Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.

It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.

It could even be cheap in a low-current version — it would basically be an extension cord, with two 12AWG hots and a ground plus a couple of little wires and the whatever inexpensive electrical parts are needed to declare its capabilities. If you can buy an e-marked USB-C cable for a few dollars, the latter won’t cost much.

It wasn't a matter of aiming low. NACS is arguably the perfect connector for the North American marketplace, or as perfect as anyone could reasonably expect for a standard of this class. The only other option on the table was a migration to CCS1, which would have been an objectively worse choice in literally all respects. CCS1 is more cumbersome, more fragile, and never enjoyed any numerical/incumbent advantage, peaking at 31% of deployed vehicles and plugs.

Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.

(For reference, I'm in a CCS2 marketplace.)

My car draws 7kW from the charger at home. You can get a standard plug in 2kW charger but they are a lot less efficient.

US power supplies tend to be 1kW though for constant load (1.5kW rather than 2kW) so even worse.

I got it, we need a new USB-C connector (C for Car), that'd be something to see.

There is not enough street lamps to charge a meaningful fraction of cars. I mean, look at the streets, there is so, so many cars, parked everywhere they can fit.

But I agree in principle - the power wiring is there already, it's a matter of spamming cheap low-power outlets wherever cars tend to congregate for a rest.

Which (obviously) already exists (google it). I haven't ever seen one in actual use however.

And how many amps does the street light draw? And how many are on the same circuit? How much extra capacity is there on that circuit to charge a car? I'd bet it's close to zero.

Driving hybrid still burns gas, generating CO2 which is destroying the world. Why would anyone pick it when EVs are available is beyond me.

It's not that simple. A pure EV needs ~10x as much battery as a PHEV. So for the same amount of batteries produced, you could make 10x as many vehicles PHEVs as EVs. Not all vehicles can be EVs due to practical issues.

Which results in more total electric miles driven replacing gas? I don't know, but "gas is destroying the world" is a brain short circuit.

What's making you short circuit? Gas is destroying the world.

EVs are more expensive. Hope that helps.

Yes, EV's solve one of the many negative impacts of cars. It's not some magic bullet.

They still depend on minerals that require destructive mining from equipment that runs on fossil fuels, still use rubber tires, still has tons of plastics that are made with petroleum, still dependent on a power grid mainly sustained by fossil fuels...

We should be thinking bigger than this, even. Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit whenever possible. If it's not possible, try to move somewhere where it is.

We must be willing to be slightly inconvenienced for the greater good instead of arguing about which type of car to drive. People don't want to have that conversation, though.

Of course they don't. That's a great argument for changing structural incentives, but not for convincing people who are talking about what car to buy.

Hybrids have much more efficient ICE motors, which generate less CO2 than the motors of traditional cars. The amount of CO2 is further reduced by energy recovery.

TFA links another page where it is explained how the ICE motors used in Nissan hybrids have surpassed 50% efficiency, which is an efficiency that in the past was reached only in huge 2-stroke Diesel engines for ships.

50% is already not much lower than the efficiency of the gas turbines used in electricity generation plants, but the power plants with combined cycle (gas turbines + steam turbines) may reach over 65% efficiency and the power plants with Combined Heat and Power may reach over 80% total efficiency.

Battery EVs may take advantage of continuous improvements in the energy generation infrastructure, but for now they are still not usable everywhere, so hybrids are still preferable to cars with pure ICEs.

The Carnot cycle makes it impossible for that to be true unless they're ignoring something.

The coolest type of hybrid is obviously Toyota's original Prius design with the power split system. The point of it just to have a really efficient petrol car. If having a petrol car isn't something you want, then don't go hybrid.

Round here Toyotas almost immediately took over the taxi market. They're ideal for that use case: high milage, but stop/start in cities. Not seen many pure EV taxis yet apart from the occasional Tesla.

BEV deployment seems to be following fixed infrastructure. In Europe you can see it spreading out from Norway. Various mundane factors like "do I know there's charge points near where I go" and "does anyone I know drive an EV" affect adoption. That's why I quite like the UK green number plate stripe, it's a near costless bit of official EV promotion.

In Australia (Melbourne), EVs have taken over the taxi/Uber/DiDi services, the city is a 50km radius semicircle, and the airport is a fair distance from the CBD.

The charging network is still being built out, but for these type of services, it's a no brainer.

Just saw my first FedEx EV truck (inner city Melbourne) and all the posties use EV trikes.

I actually disagree. Why do you need a car for city trips? Most often you can take transport, a bike or walk. And in emergency situations take a taxi.

I have a car and use it only to go OUTSIDE the city, road trips and to the mountains / sea. That's why I think a hybrid is still the best option.

I imagine one needs a car when living in the US.

In large US cities, a car is not necessary if one has sufficient health and determination to use alternatives.

Kind of true in the downtown areas of many large cities, but becomes pretty untrue once you get further out there.

Whenever I travel for work I usually try to first experience what its like walking, taking transit, and then finally take rideshare/taxis. I often find a lot of the cities I've been to, you end up practically relying on rideshares unless you're down to walk through spaces which are very unsafe for pedestrians and have some rather long walks. I often end up renting cars on second trips to those cities.

Sufficient determination reads as a lot of free time and few responsibilities. It's not realistic, even in a city like Seattle, for anyone outside of maybe their 20s.

NYC, sure.

You disagree, but my post doesn't say anything about city trips..? I use public transport in the city. I use the car to visit family in the countryside (about 100 km away) and to go on trips and vacations. The EV works beautifully for all that.

Try public transport or a bike in a city in south america and come back to talk about your experience

Are you from a main Spanish city? Because the chargers are being set up but not so fast, and parking is not exactly an easy thing to find for most people.

I generally agree: I've owned two hybrids, and their high complexity leads to maintenance problems. (Toyotas seem to be the outlier.)

IMO, if you have a place to charge it, go EV. (I have a two-car garage for mine.) Otherwise, stick with ICE until the charging situation improves.

Given that you only really need 240 volts (or maybe 3 phase longer term), I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.

It's already happening in some places, maybe one day it'll be mandated.

Limiting factor appears to be distribution network capacity. Probably also production capacity.

Where I live many requested powergrid connections are put on hold permanently due to lack of capacity.

Your utility probably allows people to pay significantly more to a fund to upgrade capacity to get prioritized. They may just not want to pay.

I briefly worked with some people trying to "solve" this in the US. There's two major obstacles:

1: The power company is slow as molasses making new connections.

2: The networking protocols used for billing are "creative" and unreliable. This is why many EV charging stations don't work or don't take credit cards. (Basically, the protocol has too many options and spends far too much effort on pointless certificate exchanges.)

Building on that...

> I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.

Because if everybody plugs in at roughly the same time (think of everyone arriving home from work in the evening,) load will go much higher than the electrical service can handle. No modern apartment building or parking garage simply has enough wiring and transformers to handle all that: It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down to keep the load low enough so it doesn't trip a breaker somewhere.

> It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down

This alone would be a deal breaker for me - get home from work and plug-in to get ready for a long drive later that evening or the next morning only to find that the charging was slow and I wasn't fully charged? No thanks.

That's a rather ignorant comment.

No residential charger, whether that's home or apartment building, is powerful enough to charge your vehicle that fast. You would need to go to a supercharger or equivalent. (Edit: A charge that fast would require more than 200 amp service.)

Besides why would you drain your battery during the day, go home, and then drain your battery again? That's a lot more mileage than you realize. (Edit: You got to stop to pee sometime, that's when you charge.)

Anecdotally, I've never heard this. I have an American hybrid from 10+ years ago with 90K miles and it's been super reliable. (Knock on wood...)

This isn't born out in the data, non-plugin hybrids are more reliable than ICE according to Consumer Reports.

> 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.

A lot of EV/PHEV problems likely come down to them being much newer designs with issues that still need to be to work out, but hybrid vs. ICE is pretty clear. The e-CVTs, HV accessories, and simpler, less-stressed engines (no turbos which are quite common in efficiency focused ICE) enabled by hybrid drive-trains are big boons for reliability.

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

I agree I don’t like having both engines, more to fail. BUT I could see a world where you basically have basically an EV with a smaller battery pack (150 mile range) and basically a swappable $300 generator. I saw swappable so that if anything goes wrong they just swap it for $300, and credit you back async any recovery value. Just electricity generation from it, for rare needs of longer range. I think in theory, it could be a good way to get a cheaper EV supporting rare bursts of range and low maintenance cost.

But I’m not even sure regulators would allow such a design. Even then I’m not sure it’s worth it.

But I am totally done with ICE car maintenance. I want nothing to do with it anymore.

A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.

I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.

To put it in perspective why a 5kWh generator isn't a range extender: my lightening has a range of 331 miles and 135kWh battery. If we assume a spherical cow (60mph, and I get every single one of those 331 miles), the truck buns through the battery in 5.5 hours, which equates to 24.5kWh to keep up.

In actuality, at highway speeds I'll burn through 80% of the battery in 3 hours which equals a run rate of 36kWh. If we ran a 5kWh generator the whole time and assume perfect charging efficiency, it'd extend the time to charge by 28 minutes.

I think you mean kw. The kWh rating is basically just how big the gas tank is.

Technically correct for the rating of the generator output capacity, I was just meeting OP where they were at and they used kwh as a unit for the generator. At the end of the day, that nuance isn't all that important

Using the right units is definitely important. I don't know why we've just decided they don't matter in this regard.

that's kind of like saying you have a 500 horsepower gas tank, or a 10 gallon engine, though.

My Chevrolet Bolt actually shows me the real-time kW draw from the high voltage battery and, while it's highly dependent on driving conditions, it seems to require around 12-15 kW to maintain 60 MPH on a flat dry road using cruise control and with the climate control turned off. It's not the most efficient model on the market, but it's also far from the least; as you noted your F-150 would need significantly more energy under the same conditions.

The lightning is ridiculous, it weight 70% more than your bolt and is huge.

My partner and I honestly bought it to be a whole house backup battery. My regions get ice storms and we have hundreds of gallons of aquariums we'd need to keep powered through a long duration power outage. 135 kwh of battery storage cost more than the 135kwh battery truck, so we got a whole house battery backup system with wheels and cruise control. It can backstop 80 amps for 3 days.

If it were me I'd just get a whole house generator in that situation, seems like it would be a lot less than the truck with batteries or the batteries. The bonuses are I wouldn't need to replace an expensive truck with another expensive truck in the future if I didn't want to. 3 days is impressive, but I had an ice storm leave my family without power for 3 weeks once.

It's pretty strange that 135kwh of stationary batteries are more expensive than 135kwh with a truck attached, seems like some one must be running a screw job on the storage batteries.

Regulations!

We've had pretty poor experiences with generators in the past. A whole house generator is very expensive, especially with a transfer switch. Without a transfer switch you have to run the generator outside and route power inside through a window left ajar, which is not great when the ice storm has happened. The truck is parked in an insulated garage and is easy to route power from.

3 days is impressive if you're pulling maximum you can from the truck, if you pull anything less than that your time is greater. Our aquariums do not require all 80 amps. Max length power outage for us has been a week and the truck will easily last that long.

And totally agree about the cost of battery power banks. This was a few years ago, so things might be different now.

You can't drive the truck during that week? So you need to keep a spare car for the time your battery bank isn't mobile?

Rather, for all the other time when the power is working, you can use your generator for transportation!

I don't know about you, but I'm not driving very much during or after an ice storm.

Besides, the aquariums are fine without power for an hour or three, so technically I could if needed.

For what it's worth you get fairly similar results if you assume an efficiency for a ICE engine (25-40% depending on a lot of things) and work backwards from the energy density of the fuel and the milage you achieve over a trip.

But charging at the service station will take 20 minutes after a 3 hour drive which seems reasonable

We did a 12 hour driving trip just recently. Did 15-20 minute breaks for charging about every 2 hours. Perfect timing to get out, use the bathroom, get a new beverage and get going. Barely felt like we were stopping to charge anywhere except when walking to the bathroom since chargers tend to be on the edges of a parking lot instead of near the entrance.

As a bonus, Ford pushed out an update last year that allowed the truck to charge at 185kws for the first 15 minutes or so of a charge before things heat up, so we took full advantage of it. By the time the charge rate was slowing down we were unplugging to go.

> swappable $300 generator

It's never that simple, but it could be. Modular standard parts that could be installed on a standard chassis design would be great. So have a small generator or an additional battery, maybe even a fuel cell. Probably never happen but it would be the nirvana of car design. Standardization would drive scale and it could work really well. That approach did wonders for the PC industry.

Basically a modular trunk add-on, with an air and exhaust pipe?

> for rare needs of longer range.

Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.

Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.

(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)

Yeah... My 7kwh generator is the size of a large wheelbarrow and weighs a good 250 lbs.

Not to mention, loud as all get out at that size.

It also needs a decent amount of maintenance to keep it running (or it needs to run frequently).

Personally... Ev with a swappable battery seems like a much better solution.

The only reason this even sorta makes sense right now is that we're in a really weird transition period where gas is available everywhere and it's still hard to find batteries/chargers.

This isn't a tech problem, it's an infrastructure problem. It should be treated that way.

I’m not sure why you’d offer a drop in option if you can just build it into the car. Extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) / Range Extender Electric Vehicle (REEV) do exist on the market already.

A more practical solution is to just rent out a small generator on a trailer.

Unless I’ve completely misunderstood what you’re getting at.

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...

It's not exactly what you're describing, but I think it will become more common as battery technology growth slows down.

Why not towable gas generator trailers that you can rent for long trips.

Hook it on, plug the connector up and attach your license plate to the back (or use eink).

Years ago I saw some one who had sawed off the back end of a late 1980s Chevy cavalier (or similar) and turned it into a portable generator trailer for his EV. This was so long ago it was probably an EV conversion of some kind.

There used to be a really classic old website called Mr. Sharkey (you can see some of it on archive.org). He was into a number of different weird and wonderful hobbies. One of them was a VW Rabbit powered by something like a 24hp DC motor and lead acid batteries.

One of the most interesting projects he did was to build a trailer from the front clip of a similar VW Rabbit, engine and transmission etc. He then used this trailer in a pusher configuration to take the electric VW Rabbit on extended trips. The engine was controlled by a hand throttle in the car. Apparently the handling was surprisingly acceptable in this configuration.

Edit - Found the link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121105135914/http://www.mrshar...

Alternatively, put a battery in that trailer. See for example https://far-a-day.com/en: “Like an external phone battery, but for your car!”

The bmw i3 range extender engine only generates 19kw of electricity. It doesn't allow you to "fill up and drive anywhere" like a car. It is more like a bigger battery.

I think the solution is actually what we have now - high-power dc fast chargers spread around the country.

You really think people should get an EV when they don't have anywhere but public chargers to charge?

I really think relying on public chargers isn't a problem for hundreds of millions of people all over the world and I'd like people to consider getting an EV as their next car.

My live-in girlfriend has a Tesla that she has had for six years. We live in northeast Ohio, not a small population.

Each of us once a week have to drive far enough that we would public charge and the inconvenience is enough that we are getting a hybrid.

A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.

How badly has that pack degraded if you have to charge after 2 hours? We have a 2021 Tesla Y and can drive for 4 hours before needing to charge--assuming we start fully charged. The math doesn't seem to be mathing here.

You don’t if where you’re coming from has a charger. But for instance, she drives two hours away to another city and stays overnight and drives back in the morning and there isn’t a charger near her hotel there.

I drive two hours to a different city to see a hockey game, and there isn’t one by the arena, and I want to drive back two hours.

You’re charging somewhere and it’s rarely convenient in the Midwest.

Etc

I've seen an increasing number of hotels with level two charging now. Has she looked to see if there are other hotel options with chargers?

What do you spend the additional hour on? Charging for the ENTIRE 2hr trip, starting with an empty car, would take less than 30 minutes in my very average EV. A quick boost good enough for 100km (60mi) at 130 km/h (80mph) takes about 9 minutes. 1 hour of cumulative charging (well spaced) gets me about 750km (466mi) of range. Starting with a charged car gets me well into "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers, still on one hour of charging.

> "fuck it I'm not driving that far in one day" numbers

Yeah this is what gets lost in most conversations. The fraction of the population doing marathon road trips is actually pretty small. The average is more like 400-500 miles a day. That's a single stop at lunch time, rinse and repeat each day.

> 400-500 miles a day.

I don't think my car even has a large enough petrol tank for that. You Americans drive way too much.

The average American does not drive that much, in fact it’s an order of magnitude below that. They were making a joke or meaning weeks or something.

One hour of cumulative charging, well spaced, means at least 1.5 hours of actual lost time (exit highway, drive to charger - remember that most US highways do not have service areas as such, so you are interacting with regular local traffic for fuel stops, start/end charging, get back to and on highway) and probably more like two. Same drive with ICE-speed fueling has more like 30 minutes down time (if it’s just me).

If you have children or pets along, you will stop more, but then the question is whether the charging areas have the amenities that fuel stations do - available snacks, restrooms, pet relief areas, and at least the Tesla superchargers I have seen generally do not have the same level of availability for those.

Also, 750 km is well within single-day driving. I did 950 km each way in June, with pets and wife, and it took a touch over 11 hours each way (Google Maps estimates 9.5 hours of actual driving time without stops), and I don’t know any other American who would turn that into a two-day drive unless they couldn’t leave early in the morning. Though I’m sure they exist. There really wasn’t a good place to stop after just doing most of the drive. Either halfway, or all the way, or sleep in some awful hotel and eat up the better part of two extra days of your time off. (I get more time off than most, but I have to take a full week at a time - a break is a full week, or two full weeks, or three, but not extendable by an extra couple of days.)

Yeah but if the charger is 15 minutes out of your way, or it’s not got one open, or whatever. There’s real time other than charging in public frequently.

Something has to be very wrong if you're charging at all on a three hour trip, or taking an hour to charge. Do you have one of those mythical Canada-only stripper models that Tesla created as a dodge around regulations? One of those with a degraded battery is about the only way you can find yourself with a range barely over 100 miles.

I just recently did a 422 mile trip. Needed one 11 minute recharging stop.

My EV could probably make a 3 hour highway trip without charging, but it would put me dangerously close to empty when I arrived.

Depends a lot on terrain. Las Vegas to SD is brutal for elevation. Only 332 miles but I had to stop to charge twice in order to arrive with at least 20% charge in my 330mi range EV. Maybe I could have done it on 1 stop but I didn't want to risk getting my family stranded.

That is a fair point. Although ABRP tells me I should be able to do it with a single 11 minute stop, only bringing SOC up to 55%. But to be completely honest, I have not driven the route, so ABRP estimate is the best I have to work with (it is usually a good match for me).

Ohio probably does not have a hill higher than ~1500 ft within a three hour drive :).

Not at all. At highway speeds you can easily take a Tesla from 80 to 20 in 3 hrs. That’s 210 miles.

Yeah if I’m willing to regularly charged to 100 and drive it down to 10 I can get another hour.

OP is leaving something out of this story, because a 2hr trip is around ~130 miles. An EV with "300 mile" range can fairly reliably do 260 miles, and worse case, a quick 5 minute fast charge can get you the rest of the way home.

They might have an early model with a really small battery pack like the Model S 60. That car charges from 10% to 90% in about 40 minutes: very slow by modern standards.

> A 2 hr trip becoming a three hour trip only has to happen to you once a week for a few weeks before you realize the limitations.

Even if you’re driving at 80, that’s a 160 mile trip. What Tesla does your gf have? What’s the range?

Part of the difficulty in understanding the problem for others is that they simply don't drive very far, very often. Our pickup has a range of over 750 miles with a full tank. It's not unusual for the tank to have to be filled two days back to back: my wife drives a lot. When you're driving that much, the last thing you want to do is stop if you don't have to.

It looks like this is common, but it is not. It's insanely rare. But because people with these .1% edge cases comment every time they can, they look more prevalent.

> Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.

Whoa, you're leaving out some pretty big demographics.

There are also a lot of people (the majority of people?) for whom EV charging is inconvenient or impossible -- apartment dwellers and people without driveways.

(Yes, yes, some apartments offer EV charging and some people without driveways can just run a charger out to the street)

sure but also you need to be an apt dweller wo home charging options AND have enough of a daily drive that you need to charge that much.

it would be interesting to correlate apartment dwellers with their weekly commute miles.

we could come up with the number that range needs to get to so that the majority of people could only need to charge once a week. I bet current mid-range evs cover a surprising amount of people. Just guessing but i bet the number is like 280miles a week in metro areas.

Then it's probably not really a big deal to find a public charger somewhere you'd be spending the hour or so anyway. you dont see any newish shopping center these days wo a bank or two of chargers but also lots of parks, libraries and other places youd go that dont cost money have chargers now too.

It feels like its worse, maybe not as "convenient" as going to a gas station but also gas stations are pretty terrible places. smelly with who-knows-what fumes, usually pretty grimy, requires handling of toxic chemicals. Its faster but all things considered i dont think its remotely a "better" way to do it.

> Then it's probably not really a big deal to find a public charger somewhere you'd be spending the hour or so anyway. you dont see any newish shopping center these days wo a bank or two of chargers but also lots of parks, libraries and other places youd go that dont cost money have chargers now too.

I don't really see a lot of public chargers here in the NE USA, but it's also highly likely I'm simply not looking for them either.

Taking an hour out of my day a few times per week to charge an EV someplace public also sounds like a huge PITA. However, I agree that it's worth it for environmental reasons. I would probably also learn to like it. It's like going to the laundromat. Nobody likes it... but it's also an excuse to chill out and read a book for an hour or two! (or whatever)

I am exactly that and I’m not leaving myself out.

> bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute

If we put aside 5 hour commute, this describes central Tokyo, not bumfuck nowhere. Bumfuck nowhere has land for offgrid solar and therefore free home charging.

If the city you're in offers free roadside parking with L1 or L2 charging on light poles, good for you, but Tokyo and Japan at large isn't like that at all(unattended roadside parking is banned nationwide and robotic garages are everywhere).

   > robotic garages are everywhere

Robotic WHAT? That's crazy, if it's what I'm imagining. Is Tokyo that much crowded?

You park your car in a stall, get out of your car, and then the stall closes and it moves a platform under your car and stores it someplace. You punch in your claim number, pay your parking fee, and then it gets your car and puts it back in the stall.

They're in places other than Tokyo as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog

One was featured in the old Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift movie. That was probably the first time I had seen one, about 20 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8

Way back there was a news story about one of those, in which the owner didn't pay the licence fee for the software, so the software company bricked their parking garage with loads of people's cars inside.

City of Hoboken, NJ. Plenty of more recent stories about Hoboken using robots, so I guess it didn't put them off.

Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742

(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)

That's crazy awesome... I wish I'd had use for one where I live just to test it out LOL

https://roboticparking.com/how-it-works/

...as one example.

It’s not some Japan-only technology. You see them in New York City too.

20 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHAkCLk6wP8

If you're in the city a car shouldn't even be a major consideration (ideally).

That's true for majority of cases, but a small percentage of Tokyo that needs to visit places taxis and trains don't go is still a large number.

Thinking 10 years down the road, will autonomous rentals be geo-fenced and not suitable for multi-day trips to rural places?

A car should always be a major consideration for someone's needs. Especially if you have a family with young children or are disabled. Discounting cars as useless because mass transit exists is a terrible idea.

Unless you live in a city that has mass transit that actually works.

Thanks, car company talking point.

Walkable towns and cities should always be a major consideration for human needs. Especially because most people go through stages in their lives of themselves being young children, sickness, injury, having young children, ageing and losing ability with age in a way that isn't traditionally considered 'disabled' but functionally is. Relying on being able to afford and drive a car as a neccessary part of life is a terrible idea.

Yeah, so few households that still own a car but don't use for commute choose cheaper ICEs that require no attention during weekdays. Then company cars driven weekdays when necessary remain ICE for familiarity as well as various EV chicken and egg problems.

There is no electricity in Tokyo?

The canonical American setup of a house with a garage where you can charge your car is exceedingly rare in Tokyo. Most people live in apartments and don't have cars, and even suburbam houses rarely have garages. If they have cars, they're parked in the apartment garage or a monthly contract parking lot, neither of which has charging.

It's a solvable chicken and egg problem, and China cracked it, but for time being Japan is way behind the curve in EV adoption.

Robotic parking but not charging as part of it seems odd.

The trays that hold cars are either passed between different rails or rotated around like a paternoster lift(the Prague city hall weird elevator thing). It's just incompatible with the concept of a cable, and a third rail or giant bus bar docking plug upgrades for those systems would be too costly and risky.

Maybe that might have happened already if Japan was as insane as it was in 1995, but it just costs too much right now.

You’d think they could have a connector which lined up fairly easily when storing them and building a new one. Have a standard 30kW supply which automatically plugs in, then powers an on ramp charger. Not every ramp/spec would need the electic, only cars that need charging.

Indeed this seems to be an available product:

https://www.ip2.co.jp/parking/kikaishiki/products/ev-chargin...

https://www.tokyo-gas.co.jp/news/topics/20220930-04.html

With this being a retrofit

https://www.mhi.com/jp/news/1101285025.html

So it just seems to be a commercial question of demand rather than a technical question of feasibility.

Yeah, they do exist but IIUC, real world deployments are rare. I totally forgot about this when writing the original comment, but a lot of these systems can't take many SUVs and all Tesla vehicles(including Model 3) mainly due to width and also to height. Maybe that is a compounding factor for rarity of those upgrades.

Unlike bumfuck nowhere, Tokyo offers decent public transportation. Right?

Tokyo has a similar car ownership as Amsterdam - 0.4 per household.

About 75% of houses in Amsterdam own zero cars, and thus most of the rest have two.

In Tokyo however you have literally one of the best Public Transit systems in the world. So why buy car?

I don't know, but people do buy cars so long their financial and parking situations allow. Many seem to be used for non-daily/non-daytime purposes(Home Depot/IKEA/Costco, kids/pets/luggage too loud/bulky/stinky for trains, had a bad day and must hit touge at 2AM, whatever). ICEs probably fit those use cases better than commuter EVs as they are, which are built around constant trickle charges and regular driving.

I love the simplicity here. Another edge case - apartment management company doest allow installing EV - despite legality. Just bureaucracy is mind-boggling in EU. I'd rather have a hybrid that gives me 18-22 km / liter. We had one neighbour in the area who won after 3 years of fighting bureaucracy - Coming up with a proposal for the board meeting that happens once a year and taking all the feedback points, and working through the insurance companies to amend their standard practices.

I don’t consider that an edge case, that’s just another person who can’t charge at home. A huge percentage of people will never be able to charge an EV at home. People associate EVs with home charging because that’s why the early adopters would get them, but it’s not supposed to be a prerequisite for owning one.

As always, it's countries in the global south that can't get EVs because they are sold locally for twice the price of an ICE car, even when both are made by the Chinese. So hybrids, price wise are a middle ground because they use smaller batteries which are less expensive

I disagree. Basically anywhere an ICE engine is used for whatever reason, it should be a hybrid instead. There are good enough reasons not to use EVs but there are zero practical reasons to not use a hybrid.

I don't use my car daily (thanks subway), only for rare monthly trips, 400km one way. How does hybrid helps here? it just adds weight for no reason

I watched a technology connections video that explained Hybrids in a way I hadn't heard before. Basically the gist was that because ICE cars need to be able to handle a wide range of operating conditions (accelerating uphill, creeping in traffic, coasting at 60), there are design constraints on the engine that a hybrid engine doesn't have. A hybrid battery can smooth out rapid bursts of power and recharge during less intense moments. The result is a hybrid engine can run in its most efficient speed most of the time (and apparently have a different design altogether that is more efficient somehow)

Ultimately even after conversion losses a hybrid can be more efficient than just directly driving the wheels. I think most people understand that part but the reason behind it was never obvious to me.

Hybrids are more expensive

Your comment could be featured in the recent Reddit “what are the clues someone has never been poor”.

Just buy the $48k Model Y instead of the $25k Corolla Hybrid, what's the big deal?

I grew up in a low-income family in an ex-Eastern bloc country. My $32k EV is the only new car anyone in my extended family has ever bought.

UK has some of the most expensive electricity in the world, and I can't charge at home without paying the council north of £1000 to cut a cable gully in front of my house (which I'm not even guaranteed a parking space outside of). Public chargers are at least 2x higher cost than home charging and can be up to 20x.

Despite this, I bought a cheap used 2020 Nissan Leaf and hopefully will never look back. This year it makes a huge difference but last year it would be barely a few percent cheaper than petrol. I'm a nerd and I'm happy to do some extra planning for road trips, but I don't think the average person will look at an EV like this. Range anxiety essentially limits you to ~60% of total range capacity (you're not going to sit at a service waiting absurd amounts of time to charge the last 20%, and you're not going to risk getting so low that if the next charger is faulty it will strand you).

I do agree that hybrids are nuts, and only make sense for a small demographic. I also suspect that they are a green scam as I read that most PHEV owners don't bother to actually plug them in, so the impressive ~100 MPG figures are actually worse than ICE. I'm not a car guy but even I can recognise that the hybrid engine provides absolutely zero satisfaction, especially with a CVT.

So yes, people are buying hybrids because of inflated MPG marketing, virtue signalling, whatever government benefits you get from a "green" vehicle (not much, our government isn't serious about EVs and hates anyone having a car) but most importantly the fact that every service station in the country can fuel it, in a few seconds.

Compared the old 2020 Leaf the current model has around 387 mile range, which I think is enough that I wouldn't worry about range.

They also charge a lot faster now it's using a CCS connector.

There's plenty of other models providing that range too such as Renault Scenic.

I don't think hybrids are worth the extra complexity at all now. All those little moving engine parts are going to wear out sooner or later.

ps Is it bad that I still laugh at calling a place "bumfuck"?

> so the impressive ~100 MPG figures are actually worse than ICE.

If you have a specific example of a hybrid that gets worse mileage than a comparable non-hybrid ICE I'd love to hear it, because that directly contradicts my lived experience.

At various times, I've owned a 2003 Prius and a 2012 Honda Fit. The Prius was larger, had better acceleration and routinely got nearly twice the MPG of the Fit.

That was ~20 years ago; I believe newer models of Prius use different battery chemistries. On the occasions when I've driven a newer model, it got better mileage than what I experienced back then.

>specific example of a hybrid that gets worse mileage than a comparable non-hybrid ICE I'd love to hear it

How about one of the e-power nissans from the article?

https://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/2025/3381665/nissan_x...

https://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/2018/2605130/nissan_x...

So if you compare a diesel to a petrol-hybrid, and you use the diesel's NEDC rating and compare it to the hybrid's WLTP rating, then number bigger!

Lets make a real comparison: The NEDC combined rating for the 2025 e-POWER is 5.4l/100km (FWD). The 2018 diesel version you linked uses 5.6l/100km, and the petrol 2018 version uses 6.2l/100km.

For a truly fair comparison you could have looked at the non-e-power versions from 2025, which come in at 7.4l/100km.

e-POWER listed data is massaged NEDC rating. Real life users report closer to 7L combined cycle for 2025 e-POWER model, and it goes all the way to 10L pure long highway driving (no recuperation). In contrast diesel model does the sticker mileage.

The UK has the most ridiculously powerful municipal governments I've ever seen. There's a reason you guys are falling so far behind, it sucks.

Before the War on Iran gas was equivalently priced to electricity in parts of California, like where I live, so a hybrid made more sense then. Especially as they are usually far cheaper than all electric vehicles

Hybrids were a great solution 30 years ago. So many companies dragged their feet for so long they’re only putting them in everything now that the writing is on the wall it’s much too late.

Pathetic.

>Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.

In NYC it's a nightmare to own an EV and rely on public charging.

It's one of those cities where owning a car should be a nightmare by design in the first place.

In NYC you shouldn't own a car.

> I used to like hybrids

I think that is a transition issue with most tech.

Like when film cameras were first transitioning to digital there was a lot of reasons you wouldn't just glom onto digital. Early digital cameras had low resolution (or files were huge), bad dynamic range, either terrible lenses or didn't work well with slr lenses, etc.

I remember when tesla came out with the first EVs the batteries had ridiculous/expensive capacity compared to other EVs (compare 90kwh to a leaf with like a leaf was 24kwh). Hybrids made sense because EV range was either poor or expensive or both. And charger infrastructure was barely getting started.

Now it is different.

If you live in large parts of the USA, by which I mean pretty much anything that is not the eastern seaboard or California, and you need to go anywhere remotely rural, charging infrastructure is absolutely not reliable.

I have an EV, which is amazing in my metro area, but I regularly take trips where I would not feel comfortable finding a place to charge, despite what EV locator maps might tell you. If you show up and that charger is not working, which is not uncommon, you might be stranded.

What EV? I have a 2020 Model 3 and in six years I've never had an issue with charging, even when driving around rural Montana & Idaho in the winter. I've never had a supercharging station be out of commission. Sometimes an individual stall or small group of stalls will be offline, but the car tells you which ones are broken so you don't waste time trying to charge at one.

We have a 2022 Leaf. Great city car; not so great out of town.

Just to be clear, that's an infrastructure problem, not a car problem. There aren't too many places you can drive in the US where you don't see a gas station at least every 50 miles, typically much more frequently. Charging stations are a completely different story.

9 times out of 10, when I have problems with a public charger, it's with some stupid app. I avoid chargers that are app only, and target those where I can just tap my debit card to pay (an actual card, not more smartphone tomfoolery). See also: parking apps.

It takes all of my willpower not to go full Ted Kaczynski some days.

This is one big advantage of having a Tesla and using their Supercharger network. I tried using 3rd party chargers a few times. The spotty reliability, annoying apps, & frustrating payment flows made me avoid them. With Tesla's network you just plug the car in. There's really no excuse for other vehicles & chargers being worse. ISO 15118 defines a plug & charge standard, which Tesla implements. Electrify America supports it as well, but vehicles often lack support for it, or require the vehicle owner to activate the feature.[1]

1. https://www.electrifyamerica.com/plug-and-charge/

I've seen some chargers (non-Tesla) that support it, but only for CCS DC charging (which my Leaf doesn't have), not AC charging. Just tapping my debit card isn't much of an inconvenience, though plugging in and walking away does sound nice. However, I'm kind of suspicious of what data a car and charger is exchanging with Plug & Charge. In the privacy hell world we find ourselves in my guess is "all of it".

You're talking about a car problem, not an infrastructure problem. The 2022 Leaf has an EPA range of either 149 or 212 miles depending on the model, and only has a 50kW or 100kW CHAdeMO port, which is slow to charge and doesn't allow you to use Tesla's Supercharger network. The battery management system uses air cooling, so charging rates are quickly limited by the pack heating up.

Also Nissan has instructed Leaf owners to not use DC fast charging, as doing so can cause battery fires. A recall has been issued, but no fix is available yet.[1]

1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2025/RCLRPT-25V655-5278.pdf

As others have noted, you have a very low range EV. It's really not what anyone is suggesting now.

I just bought a Caddy Maxi diesel for moving my family on weekend and vacation trips. In Europe the future is bike + metro/train + big diesel car.

If you live in a European city, you should be using a car for commuting.

I don’t see why the future shouldn’t be bike + public transport + EV. That’s what I’m personally going for. In fact, unless EVs disappear from the market for some reason, I will never buy an ICE car again.

Have you tried moving 4 kids and two adults 700km in a day on an ev?

In the setup you are describing the EV would only be used for long trips. EVs are just not great for that.

I have tried moving two adults about 750 km in a day in an EV repeatedly, the last time was just a few weeks ago from Czechia to Italy and then back a week later. I imagine the EV will be even less noticeable with kids, because we’ll need to stop even more often because of them.

I agree in general, however there is one small issue here. First I have an EV and love it. I would not buy another gas car for myself or my wife. The issue is I need to purchase a car for my kid who is in the process of applying to medical school. Depending on where they go, an EV could be an issue. It is not that the school will not have chargers, it is that they will be living in an apartment which will likely have no place to charge. This is the reason I am looking at a hybrid.

Same here. I'm on my 2nd EV, and will be getting my 3rd soon. Driving an ICE car would feel like using an old flip phone instead of a smartphone.

But for my daughter, she will be off to college soon. You can't guarantee apartments will have chargers. And the school she'll mostly likely go to is close enough to drive to/from, but far enough that it would need at least 2, maybe 3, recharges for an EV. It just isn't practical.

An EV isn't right for every scenario, even if for many it is.

What’s wrong with 2 charging stops? Especially on a trip long enough to require charging stops?

It adds at least an hour to a long trip already. Plus, it isn't guaranteed that the stops will be in optimal locations for the route, so it could likely be 3 stops.

The biggest issue with fast charging on trips that I've encountered is actually getting to the chargers only to find all of them in use and a queue of cars already waiting to charge. So that 30 minute charge turns into 30-60 minutes of waiting for a 30 minute charge.

Fast charging for a trip is still not anywhere as easy as finding a gas station. Stopping for 30-90 minutes every 3 hours of driving make those long trips feel maddeningly longer.

Increasingly, apartment buildings have chargers. And they don't need charging at home if they can charge during class.

I guess you don’t travel by car except for work commutes?

I’m a few years into PHEV ownership now, and I’m so glad I didn’t get an EV. Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger. And chargers are VERY sparse everywhere I’ve been.

With my RAV4 Prime, I get 40-50 miles of EV range, enough that most days I use zero gas. But if I want to hit up the beach or mountains, or take a cross-country trip, or drive up to PA or VA to visit my girlfriend’s family, there’s zero hassle to find a charger. It just reverts to a normal hybrid once you run out of electric-only range (around 20% of the battery’s actual capacity).

It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.

This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”

Im curious how common a 200mile weekend trip actually is. Its been years since Ive driven even 100miles in a single trip

Many other people drive more than you do.

I'm from the flat parts of the US midwest. Interesting stuff can be hundreds of miles away. There is absolutely a culture of cramming the family in to the car or RV the moment a long weekend starts and driving late in to the night to reach the destination, getting a day or two there, then hauling ass to get home in time to be back to work/school the next day.

That said, I also daily drive an EV and have no trouble road tripping it. I'm older, I can't just drive 500 miles only stopping for gas and restrooms like I used to, so a 15 minute stop every 1:45 or so is no big deal.

Back when I had a gas car it was a Fiesta ST, which is a great daily driver but a terrible road trip car, so I was already in the habit of renting a car if I was going to be on the road for longer than 8ish hours. This car is more comfortable so I probably won't rent if I'm not in a hurry, but if I feel the need to knock out 1000 miles as quickly as possible the option will always remain.

I don’t commute and I use the EV almost exclusively for trips, including a few countries over, but my EV also isn’t replacing the unique US model of “I spend half my waking hours driving a tank around 3rd world charging infrastructure”, so I can’t relate to some of the answers here.

Honestly, US charging infrastructure is great. People who don't have one just don't have the UI showing them where all the chargers are.

laughs in Central Idahoan

In all seriousness, you're correct in re: to probably 90%+ of the population. There are definitely still areas where an EV can be challenging as your only vehicle, but those are places with pretty specific circumstances. They're deeply rural, they demand a lot more miles driven per user per year than most areas, there's more practical applications that EVs just aren't good enough at yet and there's a weird cultural resistance to EVs in a lot of those places. Even that's changing, though. It's just slower. Honestly, it's developing a lot faster even in these holdouts than I thought it would.

Ha! Of course, too bad they didn't leave that breeder reactor running for you. :)

> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.

Curious what you're using for comparison for "performs better." There are lots of 300-400+ HP EVs when you consider the cost of a RAV4 Prime ($41.5K-$50K USD)

I agree it's a bit privileged to expect people to start converting over to EVs wholesale, especially with the current political climate that's disincentivizing new EV production and charger networks. Moreover, as others point out, if you can't charge at home, the math and logistics stop being quite so favorable towards EVs.

However, as someone who made the jump to an EV a few years ago, if you can manage it it's more reasonable than a lot of people think. I too live in the Triangle of NC, and my current EV cheerfully gets me to the beach every year and up to visit family in Virginia without breaking a sweat. This year, I used ABRP (A Better Route Planner app) to plot out the beach drive and it was as smooth an experience as I've had making that trip. Yes, we had to stop for a charge (because I hadn't charged fully before we left), but I had the chance to grab a snack and stretch my legs for fifteen or twenty before setting out again, so I honestly didn't mind. A lot depends on where people need to go, but thus far I haven't found a lot of places where the chargers are so sparse I really had to worry about it.

I would have to stop once for 10-15 min to cover that 400-mile round trip in my EV (Hyundai Ioniq 5). I've driven 900-mile days, in the winter, through snow, without issue, in the same car. It takes marginally longer.

> It also performs far better than any EVs or ICEs I’ve seen anywhere close to its price point.

My own anecdote is that I vastly prefer driving an EV on road trips. The lack of noise and gear shifts, regen braking, etc., all make it a much less draining experience.

> This “everyone should just have an EV” thing really reads like a modern “let them eat cake.”

This is a very different story for countries that don't have high import tariffs on Chinese vehicles. EVs there are fast becoming the cheaper option.

self-driving is where it's at. BlueCruise, Comma.ai, Telsa FSD. Eventually insurance rates will come down for drivers that use such driver aids.

There is a zero hassle to find a charger for most EVs. The car tells you where to go, it is generally built into the navigation. You would not need to limit yourself to places to stay with a charger.

> Just a normal weekend trip to the beach or mountains (200-ish miles from the Triangle of NC either way) would mean I’d have to limit myself to hotels/Airbnbs with a charger.

I bought an EV just under a year ago and because I park literally right next to my electrical panel I figured I'd probably end up installing a 40 amp EVSE within a few weeks. Here we are, again nearly a year later, and I'm still using the standard 120v L1 cable the car came with because it's plenty. The only time I'm getting below 50% are on road trips where fast chargers are easy to come by.

As a matter of fact the last two vacation rental homes I've stayed in have been in North Carolina, one on Topsail Beach and one near Black Mountain. The one near Black Mountain actually had a 14-50 outlet outside intended for RVs or EV charging but both had plenty of 5-20s outside where I could have easily plugged in my portable cord to easily cover the driving we did in the area, and even if they didn't with 240ish miles of range and a variety of fast chargers in the nearest decent size city 10-15 miles away it's not really a concern.

> Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.

Or do not have a garage, driveway, nor any other parking spot besides on the street, so can't charge at home.

Charging at home is a nice bonus.

So the public pays for your car storage?

I pay an annual fee for a street parking permit.

That's still (usually) the public paying for it. Parking permits are generally hilariously cheap compared to the market value of the land they reserve.

> Parking permits are generally hilariously cheap compared to the market value of the land they reserve.

The "reserved" land is a street: what else is it going to be used for except transportation?

The house I'm in was built before cars were even invented (1890s) and there were streets then, but even as early as 1907 cars were being used (there are photographs of my neighbourhood with them).

The people that complain about 'free parking' conveniently forget that land owners pay property taxes, vehicle and fuel taxes, and other taxes which go to maintaining the public roads. So it's not free. And society built a lot of infrastructure which requires most people to own a car in order to survive in it. That sort of bitching is the classic case where you shift blame to individuals for systematic issues beyond their control. And how much blame people get depends on class of course.

> The people that complain about 'free parking' conveniently forget that land owners pay property taxes, vehicle and fuel taxes, and other taxes which go to maintaining the public roads. So it's not free.

A common resource that is unmetered just ends up being abused. There's lots of data on this, e.g.:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

And I'm not sure if the various taxes that are paid actually cover the costs of all the roads (never mind the externalities causing climate change). Certainly there is a lot of public utility to paved roads/highways such that some level of 'subsidy' is probably warranted, but I think that congestion pricing needs to be done a lot more too:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218725

Plenty of people in Seattle just run the charging cable from the house across the sidewalk with one of those little ramps over it. And we've got a whole bunch of chargers on electricity poles, they are starting to proliferate around neighborhoods.

> Plenty of people in Seattle just run the charging cable from the house across the sidewalk with one of those little ramps over it.

That only works if you park your car on the same side of the street as your house: that is not true in my case. That charging cable would be running across the road itself.

Our utility poles are also on people's property, so the charging cable would lay across the sidewalk.

Or live in an apartment and can't charge at home using cheap electricity.

How much does public charging cost where you live?

>the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs

Hybrids are less expensive than EVs. They are complicated, I suppose, but the evidence is quite clear they are more reliable than pure gas designs, so this is not an issue in practice.

>Seeing a sleek modern car pull away whisper quiet and then start the ICE 3 seconds later with a stutter and a puff of water vapor from underneath is the most schizophrenic sight, it somehow feels more dated than actual ICE cars.

I have never seen a car behave like this and am fairly sure you haven't, either. It is telling that even your strawman argument is emotional.

>Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere with expensive electricity, zero solar power and a daily 5 hour commute, an EV will likely work just fine for you.

Even under circumstances ideal for an EV, a plug-in hybrid will win. Way cheaper, way more flexible, and just as efficient for the large majority of driving.

most people don't understand hybrids i believe, and this video [1] (aptly titled) explains well how they work.

plug-in hybrid don't make sense to me based on the op's experience, but the regular hybrids (where you don't charge the battery) makes perfect sense today, more than ever arguably. same tech as f1 cars fwiw (not that this season they are being very favoured)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI

> "Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs."

The recent Technology Connections video[1] on Toyota's hybrid drivetrain claims that people misunderstand the purpose, and I had. I assumed battery for stop-start city driving and engine for everything else, but no. Only the motors can move the car which means no gearbox or transmission, which is simpler and cheaper than I had imagined two drivetrains would be. It has a small engine because the battery assists when power demand is high (acceleration) which is cheaper than a pure ICE car and the battery is smaller and cheaper than a pure EV. It (sometimes) starts the engine after pulling away because it needs enough charge to keep power available.

Two extra benefits: regenerative braking reclaims some energy, and the engine can run on the Atkinson-cycle which is too gutless for an ICE car. Both contributing to much better fuel efficiency than an ICE car, while keeping the convenience of easy refuelling instead of recharging.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI - "It's a really good idea and everyone hating on it probably doesn't understand it"

I personally do understand how Toyota’s hybrid drivetrain works, I’ve driven it a lot, seen the consumption figures and I think it’s a great technology. Still, seeing how well my EV works on any kind of trip (5km to 750km), a hybrid Corolla simply doesn’t offer anything that I’d want.

A large chunk of the world doesn't have near enough infrastructure to support EVs. In many places they don't yet make sense.

One thing that always puzzled me was how the gas engines in hybrids were so efficient. Technology Connections has a great video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI

tl;dw: constant RPM and a weird stroke geometry where the power stroke is longer than the other strokes to extract more energy from the expanding gasses.

I'm surprised there isn't more effort to create hybrids in reverse--an electric car with optional gas generator. The gas generator could run at constant speed, never changing RMP, while the battery handles constant changes in acceleration. The idea is not mine. I've heard about it in China

bmw I3s were this type of hybrid as far as I remember.

the ICE extender was an option.

Yup, my friends had one and loved it despite the... unique styling.

They live in the Puget Sound area, and both work at the same place. It worked out to where they could do their commute, and ordinary errands entirely on battery, and only needed the range extender if they were going into downtown Seattle or on a road trip or such.

And the range extender was underpowered. Drive up a hill on a freeway at 70 mph and the battery would deplete and the car would slow down to 25 mph which was the fastest the range extender could make it go up a gentle incline.

It's dangerous to do 25 mph on a freeway... There are some roads I'm too scared to drive my i3 on now.

If you pulled over to let it recharge, it wouldn't do so, since the range extender refuses to run at full throttle when the car isn't moving fast (perhaps no cooling fan??)

Chevrolet Volt (2011) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...

The volt was never popular enough, unfortunately. Right around the time we were looking to buy a new car, and had the Volt high on our list, the retired the product line.

GM will go down in history as the auto maker that had nine lives and blew them all on canceling EV and high efficiency products.

Or their customers, who bought less than 21,000 cars in a year -- I'd cancel that production line too.

I think they just didn't do a good enough job at advertising it. Even the salesmen at the dealers didn't seem to really understand the Volt

I've yet to meet a Volt owner who wasn't fanatically obsessed with theirs (myself included). One common theory for poor sales is that dealers tend to make more on service revenue than the actual sale, and Volts run forever with very little maintenance, but I don't know if that's just speculation. I've heard anecdotes of buyers walking in ready to write a check for a Volt, and the salesperson tried to discourage them and steer them towards an ICE vehicle instead.

GM stopped caring about younger buyers a really long time ago. It's worth remembering that the "bailout" was really a takeover.

GM has a good lineup of EVs now. They somehow don't get recognized for them, but they do. (I own one - the only problem is it doesn't support Android Auto which is enough that I give them a don't buy)

The Volt was promised to use the gas engine only for range extending but they ended up connecting it to the drivetrain for highway speeds...

There were several of them: the first and second generations of Chevy Volt, Fisker Karma, BMW i3, and a couple of Chinese brands.

They're less efficient than parallel hybrids at high speeds (on a freeway). And you also need a fairly sizeable engine to keep up with the consumption at freeway speed, so at this point you might as well just throw in a planetary gearbox.

The Chevy Volt (and it's predecessor the GM 2-mode hybrid, and the Allison power-split hybrid) was a work of art. It is fundamentally a planetary gearbox, with 2 motor-generators.

In ICE mode, under 35 MPH, it worked as a series hybrid. Above 35, the engine mechanically connected to the wheels. One motor-gen extracted power and fed it to the other, acting as a CVT in parallel. This provided the ratio changes needed for the small engine.

It was way too complicated and expensive the two times they tried it (2008, then the Volt). It was successful and lives on to this day in its original application: city buses.

Planetary gear plus 2 motor-generators is 'Toyota Synergy Drive' and also used by Ford and Stellantis in some hybrid models. At least the Ford C-Max and Chrysler Pacifica hybrids use this style drive train. I'm not on top of all the hybrids, but I'd guess if 4 car makers do it, there's others to be found.

It makes a lot of sense, works well, and is very durable... as long as Ford didn't forget to heat treat a bearing or whatever they messed up in early C-Maxes.

I had a 2012 Chevy Volt. It was indeed a delightful car!

But I believe that the series mode was a mistake. The later versions of Volts removed it entirely, improving the fuel economy.

> It was way too complicated and expensive the two times they tried it (2008, then the Volt). It was successful and lives on to this day in its original application: city buses.

I don't think that it was too complicated. Hybrids are using essentially the same system, except that they have a smaller battery and less powerful electric motors.

Just a note: the Technology Connections video above goes over why this doesn't work well for cars (but does for train locomotives).

Theoretically couldn't you take an electric car and put an off-the-shelf generator in your frunk and wire it up to charge the battery as you drive?

My PHEV won't 'start' while plugged in. You'd need to bypass the usual charger mechanisms, and then the computer seems likely to get mad...

A minor inconvenience compared to the thousands of charger cables and wall boxes that would charge driving the cars for a very small moment.

>>and put an off-the-shelf generator

Even my really underpowered PHEV has a 65kW electric motor. No "off the shelf generator" can generate 65kW, in fact it would be a huge unit that could.

We could of course say - well, it doesn't need to match peak usage, it just has to charge the battery faster than it depletes - you still probably need around 20kW for steady motorway driving, and that's a pretty hefty generator.

I don't think you need to have it match the depletion rate. Even at say 10kW you'd doubling the effective range. The point is people want to be able to use their car for that twice a year road trip, or drive to the inlaws for Thanksgiving. If you can attach something that extends the range for these occasion then that's probably enough.

Furthermore, the generator can run 24/7, but realistically you will at most drive ~6 hours a day. So for a leisurely road-trip this may be enough to avoid needing stops at charging stations

20kw would be enough to maintain the battery though? So you could halve that and 'only' double the range in the worst case.

Not for cars, but Edison Motors in Canada seems to be going this route right now for their heavy duty trucks and heavy-duty pickup truck conversions.

Disclosure: I have a small investment in them.

I really love what Edison are doing, I have no skin in the game I just think it's a great business ethos.

Feom a fictional perspective I also dig the rugged blend of electric industrial equipment and utilitarian design. Like a mad-max solar punk, rather than a utopian one.

I picture them pulling up to a makeshift solar outpost en-route, in the middle of the wasteland desert, covered in red dust, the thick sheet metal scarred from raiders...

I really like Edison's ethos as well, although I do worry they make some of the classic startup mistakes of getting a bit distracted on things that aren't important.

Isn’t that how diesel trains operate?

Ford and Ram are both doing this with their next generation electric pickups. Range and towing on pure electric was deemed too compromised.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/what-is-an-erev-extended...

Already a big push with this. They call them EREV now, extended range electric vehicles.

You may be interested to read / watch videos of Audi's RS Q e-tron they raced in the Dakar Rally and even won with this type of powertrain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_RS_Q_e-tron

That is exactly what ePOWER is, that configuration is called a series hybrid and is more commonly seen in heavy industry like diesel trains or trucks in the mines (for better or worse).

More recently effort is also going into series hybrids for public road haulers, which I personally think is a great application for it since you can potentially put a lot of the equipment into a hot-swappable dolly.

I drove a Nissan Note (Nismo esition) with ePower and it could happily spin the wheels when taking off, not something you normally get out of a tiny economy hatchback. I think it has 140kw electric drivetrain? 140kw is pretty sporty when delivered instantly.

It seems to me you’re talking about a range extender, which lots of Chinese EV makers use. Many do buy them but sometimes you get the worst of both worlds: weighty like an EV and the heat, vibration, exhaust of a petro car. For most people the extended range is only needed very occasionally but you have to carry the ICE system the whole time.

Depending on the compromises you're willing to make, a small gas engine that doesn't run very often isn't a lot of excess weight, and it's not going to make heat, vibration, and exhaust except when it's running ... which could be 30 minutes a month (to keep it healthy) plus whenever you actually need the extended range.

Since it's just for range extension, you could maybe stuff the engine in the rear, so you don't have to pipe exhaust under the whole car. Although then you probably want to pipe coolant to a radiator in the front and have to protect that piping... but at least it's only coolant hot and not exhaust hot. The engine noise would be away from the driver at least.

You said you didn't want the heat of a gas car, but you might choose to run it a little bit more in the cold to help warm the interior on cold days (especially at startup).

Potentially, but not really likely, you could try to make it modular-ish... attach it when you need it, leave it in your garage otherwise. But I think it's going to be too heavy ... I have a 7200 W portable generator which is roughly half of what an EV uses at cruising speeds, and it takes two people to lift it. Automotive engineers do amazing things, but I don't think they're getting twice the power and less weight and easier to move...

the bmw i3 REx was this. it didn't sell well, for a variety of reasons.

The problem is all of that is competing with "just charge it". Over the lifetime of the vehicle now, whatever route you have that is underserved by chargers is likely to gain chargers soon.

Honda's current hybrid system and this e-POWER both work this way mostly

Aka EREV, thats becoming majority of “PHEVs” now.

Yes, this is an "Extended-range electric vehicle" or EREV

> an electric vehicle fitted with a fuel-powered internal combustion engine, acting as a range extender that drives a generator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended-range_electric_vehicl...

per wikipedia

>From mid-2025, EREV sales in China declined year-on-year for several consecutive months

just in time as Toyota decided to go all EREV https://electrek.co/2026/09/21/toyota-joins-extended-range-e...

>Toyota will make the EREV in China, aiming to produce 200,000 units in 2027. In 2028, production is expected to rise to around 400,000 units.

Hilarious, from promoting fail hydrogen fuel cells and producing anti EV propaganda to chasing fading trends. Anything but real EVs.

Range extender EVs made a lot more sense a decade a go when batteries were much more expensive, and fast chargers were not yet ubiquitous. Then range extenders were more affordable than EVs and could go to places EVs couldn't.

Now these EREVs are mostly luxury niche of big cars (where extra space taken by two power trains doesn't matter) for people who don't want to spend 20 minutes at rapid chargers on that yearly long trip they do. Or for people who live in some global warming ignoring backwater[1] that hasn't built out rapid charger yet.

[1] even China has ubiquitous fast charging network now

China is the first country I would expect to have ubiquitous fast charging. They are years ahead of the west in the EV rollout. Also high speed rail, robotics, high tech manufacturing in general is kind of their jam now.

> China is the first country I would expect to have ubiquitous fast charging.

Everywhere in China? China is a large place. My money would be on a small rich country that’s (almost) entirely a city. Monaco, Singapore, maybe Luxembourg.

Googling gives me https://transition-energetique.gouv.mc/en/themes/mobility/mo... which doesn’t mention fast C charging but says “Every Monegasque resident is now less than 200 metres from a free public charging point” ⇒ it wouldn’t surprise me if Monaco already meets your definition of “ubiquitous fast charging”

Maybe 80% of Monaco residents are millionaires / billionaires from other countries, be it Europe or rest of the world, mostly for tax evasion purposes. This includes many many professional sport persons who launder their sponsor income thus helping then getting millionaires surprisingly quickly, while public funds in their countries where they actually live and represent ie on olympics crumble.

#1 reason why I shy away from all professional sports with serious money involved, it just turns into typical ugly business with skewed incentives, while actual sport ends up being just a necessary afterthought.

Better apartments there cost often 10-20 million euros, there are special controls in laws (ie employment) ensuring better treatment of those few Monaco citizens that are there. Most tax avoiding folks like those sportsmen rent just po box to get some sort of special residence. Most people you can actually meet there live in France and commute daily.

That place is a special bubble even within bubbles, nothing that applies there should be expected to apply elsewhere, apart from similar places (of which I am not that aware of maybe apart from San Marino, ie Singapore is more like a real tiny country with actual serious business in trading and transportation).

> “Every Monegasque resident is now less than 200 metres from a free public charging point”

Given the area of the country is 2km, even given its narrow geography that would take all of 50 charging stations to achieve...

I's already pretty ubiquitous in many western european countries

In America we don’t have enough chargers for roadtrips.

The capacity issue is specially evident on long weekends or sundays when everyone needs to use the same few chargers.

I feel like this road trip thing is over exaggerated. What if we (as a society) rented a Toyota Sienna or something equally boring when we need to go on a road trip?

Every try to do that?

The cost of a rental car for a week is high - you can pay for a lot of gas for the cost of renting a car a few times a year.

More than one person I know has tried to rent a car and discovered they didn't have any on the day they went to pick it up. If your car can make the trip you avoid all the issue.

Note the above is about road trips. If you are flying (or taking the train) someplace than you will rent anyway (or have some other plans). However one of the advantages of road trips is you take your own car.

You realistically cannot rent an SUV from a non-airport car-rental branch on a public holiday long weekend. They simply don’t have inventory. I tried once, I had to uber to the airport get the suv from there, and then after returning it the airport I had to return back home via uber. Easily burned over $1000 for just the transportation for that long weekend.

Having done many road trips in a Tesla, I don't believe this is true. My trips were in the south west though. I'm sure there are areas where it is a problem but it depends.

I road trip the east coast a few times per year. I haven’t had to wait at a charger for years.

Just got a Tesla. I was worried about travel through western Iowa, it seemed fairly worst case looking at the map of my route, because I’m not on the interstate and the Tesla superchargers aren’t near my route. To my surprise, it was a non-issue. Modern EVs have enough range and there are indeed just enough chargers.

> just enough

That is my objection. There are just enough chargers. However only if you plan around chargers. There is a gas station in nearly every small town. You can safely say any town that can't support a gas station cannot support anything else (no stores, bars, restaurants) and only rarely be wrong. Most small towns don't have a charger at all, and if they do it is often level 2 which means stay overnight to get useful range. (I don't understand these - the ones I've seen are not near anyplace you might stay overnight)

I think there's a common misconception by non-EV drivers that every charge you have to wait until the battery is full - you don't. You just have to charge enough to get to your next stop.

If you're in a small town with a level 2 charger at a city park, you just charge enough to get back to civilization. Then hit the fast charger when you're back to the main highway.

Yeah, it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning. And the built-in navigation takes care of most of it for you anyway. I was genuinely surprised on my first trip (again, through not-EV-friendly territory) how much of a non-issue it was in practice, and how much I didn't feel like I was waiting on chargers (even relatively slow "fast chargers"). I just took my time using the restroom, grabbed a fresh drink, checked my notifications on my phone, and it was time to head out again.

I own and drive an EV. I know what they are really like and you are trying to wand wave away things as not a big deal that are a big deal.

You seem to have a misconception about how far it is from a small town to a anywhere else. Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road - where will find the closest public charger in the previous town that you just left. There are a lot of small towns there are over an hour drive to the nearest highway that has level 3 chargers. Even on the highway the level 3 chargers are often an hour apart. So figure 8 hours at the public charger in the small town to hit the nearest level 3 charger.

> it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning

You know how much planning I do when I take the gas car: almost always 0. I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station so I just plan on stopping at the next gas when the gauge start to get close to empty and I'm always fine. There is one trip I sometimes make where the gas states are 30 minutes apart (through desert that is almost uninhabited) , and I'm careful to ensure I have fuel before driving that section.

My EV is a GM where I can't use the car's nav system without paying a subscription which I don't. It works fine for most trips, but I wouldn't not recommenced it for road trips or when going small towns.

> Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road

A level 2 charger adds about 40 miles to a Model 3 or Model Y in an hour of charging. I don't know what you drive that is so much less efficient. 8 hours on a level 2 would fill the battery, not just get you to the next charger.

> I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station You're being dramatic the other direction here - plenty of routes have you more than 15 minutes from a gas station, including the one I described in my prior post.

I'm sure there are places where it actually is a little tricky. Maybe more so depending on vehicles (Tesla does seem to be the best experience, by a lot). That doesn't change the fact that good EVs are just not a big deal to travel with anymore.

The last level 2 charger I used added 15 miles of range over about an hour. I drove a Chevy Blazer, which undoubtedly gives different ranges for some amount of power. Not all level 2 chargers charge at the same rate. As a result YMMV.

The topic here is travel to small towns.

> The topic here is travel to small towns.

The solution is simple - plan ahead just enough to have enough charge to get back out of the small town.

That is a bludgeon masquerading as a solution. People are terrible at planning ahead. Even those who are good at it sometimes plan wrong. There are sometimes energencies which people have to deal with against their plans.

Eventually chargers will be everywhere, but not today. When gas was new in 1900 cars had the same problems.

The people living in small town rural areas never need to buy an EV. They are such a tiny sliver of the population that they can have their gas cars forever and the climate won't notice.

The fears and anxieties of that small shaving of people is simply a misguided talking point about EV viability.

It's called the "Gas Station Mindset"

I just got back from a Seattle to Yellowstone road trip with an EV and have to agree.

While it was possible to accomplish the mission, it wasn't exactly pleasant and required more planning and longer stops.

We just drove from the UK to Portugal (via ferry). They were in the electric car and anxious about the next charger almost entire time.

The only thing worse than the staple "all chargers except one broken, wait time 1h+", was the ghost charging station existing only on the map - they drove there only to see the empty field instead.

Needless to say we barely made it in time for the ferry (their refueling was about 3 hours total in the UK alone), and sadly won't make me getting EV as the main car anytime soon.

Second, small town car for errands, maybe, but that means having no comfort or equipment I'd like to have in the "main" car (and half of it is safety).

Also - note you seem to suggest the mythical ubiquity of the fast chargers is the solution to the range, but they're also so expensive to use that any savings from the local driving and charging at home (if someone is lucky enough to own a house with garage or off-street parking) is immediately burned on the first longer trip.

There exists a fringe of people who are constantly driving 5+ hours all the time in random directions and places.

These people stoke a lot of fear about EVs despite being a tiny fraction of the population.

Bet. Feel free to stroke your strawman, no need to ever engage with the arguments - peak "shallow dismissal" without substance.

Why would I engage when we have a gazillion statistics on driving habits and population density, and EVs work great to cover them?

We have a vocal minority that keeps stoking EV fears because their unique lifestyle can only be met with a 500 mile range that charges in 5 minutes from a charger located at every gas station, and costs $30k brand new.

The number of people driving ICE cars that would be better off in an EV is massive, and we know this, and these people still keep getting wrapped around the axle of outlier stories.

[1]https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...

[2]https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...

I think a big part of this in the US is that the country is just very big, and between cites are very large rural areas. Yes, for a lot of people their daily commute and errands are well covered by an EV. But there is the occasional 400-500 mile trip, it's just not that uncommon for many people to do that at least a few times a year. And if they don't want to own a second car for long trips, they rule out an EV because charging infrastructure still isn't adequate in many areas.

You might counter that by saying "rent an ICE car for those trips" and that's certainly possible but, renting a car outside of a major airport is such a miserable experience that many people don't want to deal with it. It only takes once or twice turning up to find that "we don't have the car you reserved" and being offered some unsuitable alternate (or simply no car at all) for people to sour on that idea.

What's wild to me is that people are so committed to not stopping when road tripping that the thought of two 15 minutes stops in a 6.5 hour drive is not worth giving up weekly trips to gas stations for that year.

It's not the stopping. It's finding a fast charging point that doesn't require a substantial detour off the route. That has improved, so it's less and less a valid reason. But there are still places where you might go a few hours between convenient commercial chargers. Now, does that impact the vast majority of drivers? Probably not, and the situation is improving. But people hear things like that and they decide to stay in their comfort zone.

Indeed.

I can only speak for myself, but I do get surprise trips sometimes. My phone could ring at any time and the person on the other end will tell me that I need to go to Detroit, or Columbus, or maybe some corn field in Indiana. This is a thing that happens in my life (and I do get paid for these drives).

But I never have a surprise trip that takes more than about 2 hours. And that's... well, that's well-within EV range. I might need to spend a bit of time charging up for the return trip, but whatever: The car has a high chance of starting at ~80% charge anyway because it is plugged in while it sits in my driveway.

I do take plenty of far-longer trips, but they always have some planning. Often days worth, sometimes whole weeks worth, but always at least a few hours. I'll have plenty of time to juice the thing all the way up beforehand (if that's even useful) and also to look at the anticipated route.

And besides: While I can eek ~500 miles out of a tank of gas if I work at doing so, I never do that in one shot. I take breaks. Even when I've got a co-driver who I can swap with on a 1,200 mile jaunt, we walk around, hit the bathroom, refill on libations, and et cetera when we stop to trade spots. We make time to kill.

Since I'm already taking breaks and it's not a race, then the addition of an EV to the game only affects where I take those breaks. But, really: Those intermediate points are not a big deal -- it doesn't really matter where they happen. It just matters that they do happen.

If it is a race: If the whole point of the trip is to catch a show or a game or a ferry or some other such thing that happens at a very specific time whether I'm there or not, then I can just leave earlier. Maybe I'll get some free time to explore the area when I show up, or maybe I'll edge into a parking lot with 5% battery remaining and a growing sense of fear about getting into the venue on time, but whatever. For all 1 or 2 times per year when that's actually important and also outside of normal EV range, I can accommodate them with a grant of some extra time.

But for the every-day stuff? Man. I could do very well with an EV. I could even do very OK with an EV if I lived in apartment, as long as I could plug into a regular wall socket for a few hours while at work (which is cheaper for the boss-man to pay for than the space heater that sits under Cindy's desk).

(I guess an EV might cut off my access to certain routes in places like Wyoming or the Dakotas, but I'll worry about that ability after I gain a desire to go there to begin with.)

New idea... cannonball run in an EV as fast as possible.

Old news. The first EV cannonball was run in 1968. 210 hours, 6 minutes. :)

The current EV record was set in 2024 at 39 hour hours and 29 minutes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge#Elect...

That's pretty much how the Chevy Volt worked. It was an incredibly good system in that car and GM did their usual thing and killed it

Personally I'm a big fan of the EREV (which only drives an alternator, rather than a PHEV which drives the wheels directly) due to the simpler mechanical design - however I'm not sure if it's a personal preference. I feel even a fairly small 30kw (40hp?) would make a huge difference to the utility of the vehicle, while still being small and economical.

The original/first BMW i3 (2013) was like this, full battery electric (with an admittedly small battery 80-160 miles range depending on model), with an "range extender" engine.

Edison in Canada is doing diesel electric hybrid trucks

The concept is called range extenders, and the video does explain why it’s one of those false great ideas and every production vehicle has failed: EVs with range extenders are at best bad EVs and at worst terrible hybrids.

What you are referring to is usually referred to as an EREV (Extended Range Electrical Vehicle). The reason legacy manufacturers market their less efficient plugin hybrid and non plugin hybrids (100% of the power comes from petrol) instead is because that's what they have and want to milk for as long as possible. In terms of drive train these are more complex to manufacture and more costly to maintain than an EREV. EREVs typically have slightly larger batteries than a typical PHEV as well. Typical electrical ranges are at least 80-100 miles or more in some cases. Usually the cars are available as without the range extender as well. This is less common for PHEVs and hybrids. Though of course some legacy manufacturers are still trying to push compromise cars. Like Nissan in this case.

Nissan has been really struggling for the last few years, this new hybrid engine doesn't look like it will turn things around for them to me.

EREVs are an idea that is not new and also relevant in shipping and aviation. Many modern large ships (oil tankers, cruise ships, etc.) are already EREVs effectively: an electrical motor drives the propeller and a generator powers the motor.

And there are are a few plane designs that are using small batteries + generators to power flight. It makes a lot of sense: electrical motors are a lot simpler, lighter and cheaper to maintain. Engine maintenance is very costly in aviation. And so is fuel. The recently announced X1 is a good example of a plane that does this. There are a few other manufacturers working on this as well. Early days but the potentially large fuel savings probably ensure this is going to happen one way or another.

EREVs aren't magic. They make sense for some applications but less efficient than mechanically coupling the engine to the wheels. If the user is going to run mostly on fossil fuels due to trip distance or lack of available battery chargers then a parallel hybrid design like the standard Toyota Prius model is generally a better design.

> In terms of drive train these are more complex to manufacture and more costly to maintain than an EREV

They really aren't, an EREV needs two electric motors and fixed gears connecting to the engine and wheels. Toyota-style hybrids (also Ford, Chrysler, Subaru, Mazda) need... two electric motors and fixed gears connecting to the engine and wheels. Everything else is quite similar, though the hybrid will obviously have much smaller and cheaper batteries, onboard chargers, battery temperature management systems, etc.

TFA is exactly that...

I think it's also because EREVs need a performant generator that isn't much different from the drive motor. So you'll have a full ICE+EV drivetrain on top of an EV as its battery for it to work, which is not ideal.

Compared to that, other hybrid systems like the motor-clutch combo packs that sit between the ICE and gearbox, as well as the fixed gear Toyota systems, can have motors that are weaker, lighter, and cheaper than the ICE, while being able to be additive to the ICE power output. That makes more efficient use of steel and copper than full serial setups.

BMW i3 had such EREV option, but it apparently used a cheap OEM bike engine(not like a BMW Motorrad engine) and also could not overcome power draw of the EV drive motor. So it literally just extended the range, not allowing it to run indefinitely at highway speeds with just refueling. Nissan e-POWER system is powerful enough to do that, but then the readers of comment will have to back to the line 3.

I've done some long trips with my i3. The key is to turn the engine on when the battery reaches 75%. The battery then absorbed the large power draws when accelerating or going up big hills. The engine does vary in RPM depending on my power draw, and by the end of my trip, the battery is usually not significantly lower, maybe around 60%. I usually turn off the engine when I'm almost at my destination so I can use the remaining battery energy.

Yeah. I'd love a decent plug-in EREV in the US. The 2027 Rogue appears to NOT have a plug-in option at the moment.

I can't fathom buying an EV and still only getting 40 MPG and needing to buy gas. Ninety percent of my trips are < 40 miles round trip and could be handled by a modest 15kWh battery. For that last ten percent, I'd happily use some gas to not have to worry about charging on the route.

Mazda had (has?) some cool EREVs using rotary engines as the power plant. Though sadly without plans to bring them to the US.

People claim the EREV i3 won't do extended highway but I did Boston MA to Wichita KS in one shot in my 2014 with a hurt battery using Hold State Of Charge mode starting at a 75% battery charge and using a 7 gallon fuel cell in the frunk with a transfer pump to allow longer stretches between refueling. It worked a treat. I have since removed the additional fuel system once I got to Wichita and now it is my daily commuter and goes 2000+ miles between fillups.

The above comment’s video explains why.

You lose energy converting the the gas power to electrical power to mechanical power. Constant RPM doesn’t matter as much as you think.

You mean like a BMW i3 with a range extender? Little two-cylinder petrol that just spins a genny.

They work, they're not terribly efficient in terms of converting fuel to distance travelled, and really batteries are getting so good these days there's little point any more.

There’s a lot of good replies here but I’ll add mine too:

The simples reason is this. What you’re describing is having a gas motor spin a thing (the generator) -> charge battery -> discharge battery -> spin a thing (the wheels) to make car go. Each of those steps has efficiency losses.

That’s why most hybrids are parallel hybrids, where both the gas engine and the battery+motors can spin the wheels more or less directly, even at the same time.

you still basically get the engine spinning at a more constant rpm, and the battery kicks in for acceleration (and charges on deceleration), and now highway cruising doesn’t have any lossy conversion steps, while acceleration and braking uses the advantages of the electric drive chain.

BMW i3 with REX came out in 2013

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3_(hatchback)

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fi...

> a weird stroke geometry where the power stroke is longer than the other strokes to extract more energy from the expanding gasses

A.k.a. Atkinson-cycle (1882): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_cycle

Yes, gas engines have very bad efficiency. The best way to run them is with constant torque and RPM, that is, charging a battery

And yes the Atkinson cycle helps

Yes, but it doesn't mean the overall system is better because of losses during the power conversion. It's usually better to have the engine driving the wheels directly which is possible with a continuously-variable transmission (CVT).

That and Weber Auto's teardown of Toyota's hybrid drivetrain which is referenced by TC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O61WihMRdjM

wow this seems like a great video and a channel overall. Following it.

One of the best channels on YouTube.

You will not be disappointed if you like dishwashers!

Or heat pumps!

Or the power of buying two of things!

Or Christmas lights

Glad you discovered the gem he is! What made me appreciate his expertise first? Most people use a dish washer wrong. His video will break it all down to help one understand how to use the typical dish washer in the right practical ways in which it was engineered.

Some of the trends in these comments are wild.

>>EREVs/series hybrids don't get better fuel economy

They sure do if 80% of your driving is done purely on battery, which is how nearly every Volt owner I know operates. Once every couple weeks they'll exceed their EV range, let the gas engine take over, and be done with it. The fuel is sipped so infrequently the car will require a "maintenance mode" to run fluids through the ICE but the car is still perfectly useful for a last minute blitz to St Louis or whatever.

I love the Volt. I personally have an i3 REX and I love it even more because it is absurdly lightweight and RWD.

>>Just get an EV

What about renters who don't have access to level 2 charging? The small battery in an EREV can be easily topped up with a normal extension cord (20 amp rated) run out of a rented house or apartment to the car.

Alternately, what about people who can only afford or have the space for one car? Not everyone wants to own the small city EV + ICE road trip car wombo combo, nor do people want to spin the roulette wheel of charging infrastructure that is still barley adequate, especially in the flyover states.

For most people's regular driving, level 1 charging is often adequate to cover their daily needs. They can just plug it into a wall outlet. (If they have one that can be used for this; many apartment dwellers do not.)

A Chevy Bolt EV gains around 5 miles per hour when charging at 12 amps from a 120v socket; it's similar to an i3 in this way.

If it's home half of the time and it sits plugged in for 12 hours every day, then it it can gain ~60 miles during that time.

60 miles per day is not enough to cover everyone's needs all of the time, but it's more than enough for all kinds of folks who would otherwise be afraid of having some kind of electrical upgrade required before considering an EV.

Now add a gas-powered range extender to that Bolt EV and it could easily be the only car that a person would have to own, subsisting just fine on 120vac charging most of the time and requiring a top off of fuel any time an unexpected errand comes up or a road trip is tendered.

A Bolt EV can already easily be the only car that a person would have to own.

Those goalposts are behind us.

Like putting in the final optimizations in the crossbow right as others have figured out machine guns.

Exactly, as owner of one of the latest versions of Nissan cars with e-Power, I just can say that it is extremely inefficient, especially during winter, plus it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany (it misses the "E" at the end of the car plate).

For comparison, the full classic gasoline engine with manual gearbox consumes less gasoline than the e-Power one. This is just some pure greenwashing, that isn't even explained at car dealerships and people can't say anything about it, when you ask for information.

Works like (?) an EV, it isn't an EV.

> it isn't recognised at all as hybrid vehicle in Germany

You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.

Non-plugin hybrids are just regular gas cars. It would be bizarre to give them any sort of preferential treatment in anything, though their rules are already strange to begin with (giving tax advantages to PHEVs and EREVs, which are almost exclusively used as pure gas cars).

With the current fuel prices, I see a lot of plug in using public chargers. Last year, I would never see this.

We had the X-Trail AWD version of this. The plus side was getting around 850km to a tank of petrol. However, the EV-only range was very poor and the engine was quite harsh sounding when it spun up. Super happy to get rid of it and switch to BEV.

The EV range is just 3km for me. Very much a joke

Could you please elaborate what is crossbow and what is machine guns in your metaphor?

Not OP, but I'm going to guess:

- Nissan's petrol engine is the crossbow, a well optimised generator for onboard battery

- Every other brand's EV is the machine gun. About 4 times as energy efficient as a petrol car when you take into account the lifecycle of the vehicle, so probably more when you talk about a hybrid car.

> Every other brand's EV is the machine gun.

Nissan have decent BEVs, though - the new LEAF is great to drive.

I know the United States is significantly behind the curve on EV adoption, but I really don't understand who would want this, it's the worst of both worlds.

I think they mean they're polishing a turd.

Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)? Why not spend that money researching 100% EV (machinegun) drive trains?

Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles (yes yes yes I am sure I will get loads of responses where people need to drive 750 miles a day non-stop every day, both ways, towing a boat, up a mountain etc).

It surprises me that these manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota and Honda seem incapable of reacting and changing their product line-up. You can get 100% EV porsches, mercedes, BMWs - hell even Range Rover now and yet these guys are dithering and have basically got only very very half-hearted efforts in EV offerings while apparently trying to pretend its not happening and relying on hybrids.

Meanwhile, at least here in London, I am seeing more and more and more EV BYDs & Jaecoos & MGs etc... so if you care about outward appearances you buy the merc/porsche/etc EV, if you just need a car and don't care what people think you buy the cheap & decent Chinese EV. Toyota, Honda et al don't compete at the luxury end, and they've got nothing to compete with against Chinese EV brands who seem to be taking over the lower end where Toyotas and Nissans etc used to be popular.

Japanese brands’ customers are typically the US, and Americans don’t like EVs.

You got your answer.

I don't think that's the only element.

We saw the same kind of thing with electronics. I'm old enough to remember Sony being the brand to have. But they never really made to jump to digital (or wherever you want to draw the line).

Problem is, EVs are disruptive. Many car companies don't want them because it involves too much change to how they want to do business. They'll try to change when it's too late.

It's because street parking is banned nationwide and none of big cities in Japan are interested in EVs. There are close to zero will to make EVs viable in Japanese cities, and people aren't buying unviable products, and Japanese automakers which primarily make products for Japanese middle class which somehow magically sell like hotcakes globally therefore aren't making many EVs.

Nissan is a bit of an outlier in that they are a bit more charitable and more invested in electrification, but they can't ignore the Japanese consumer demand that cars need to be able to run on gas. So they do exactly that, and make an EV with a gas engine that works with existing gas stations.

> Why bother going to all this effort for an internal combustion engine (crossbow)?

Because it sells well? Because it's what a significant portion of people want?

> Its pretty obvious where the future is headed for personal vehicles

"Where", yes. "When" is a big question mark. If the transition will take several years to complete, which many bet it will, it makes perfectly sense to offer a car that people is willing to buy in the meanwhile.

The Chinese brands that you mention also offer hybrids: indeed most BYDs I see in the streets have the "DMi" tag, which is BYD's codename for hybrid. And they are investing in fuel engines, too. Only short-sighted euro burocrats think that since EV are the future we should immediately stop selling and innovating fuel cars.

The EV cars in UK have a green panel on the license plate so they're very easy to identify.

FWIW in most European countries I think sales of new fuel cars are scheduled to be banned within the next 5-10 years, so that puts a date on it I guess.

I read a thing recently that in the UK the used price of EVs is soaring now too due to the increase in demand. Diesel especially is really expensive now so people are looking to switch. At least in the UK there are more charging stations now than gas stations - totally viable to drive an EV anywhere and find a charger, you even get e.g. 350kw chargers in grocery store car parks now. I think the transition is well underway - I can't think of a reason you'd not but an EV if you were in the market for a new car in the UK. The only thing I guess is not having off-street charging at home, but more and more lampposts have chargers in them now et. It's only 400 miles between London and Edinburgh (about an 8 hour drive give or take) and some current EVs can do that without stopping.

There is really no excuse for it I think - the range is there, the chargers are there, the competition/manufacturer options are there - apart from just not wanting one for your own personal reasons.

But hey each to your own.

You can get a permit for a gun easily compared to a permit for a modern crossbow in some countries and in others crossbows are e.g. entirely forbidden for hunting.

Your point? In some countries it's easier to get a cross bow.

I think these kinds of vehicles are fine for countries were fast charging networks are still not widespread. I drove a rental X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great given the quality of the powertrain. Of course a low displacement manual can get better fuel economy, and an electric will be cheaper, but if you are driving 800km on a country with little charging infrastructure, powertrains like this one or Toyota's eCVTs make sense.

>X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great

10L/100km on highway, worse than cheaper comparably powerful ordinary diesel. Seems like a pointless car, X-Trail 2.0 dCi M9R was better in every possible way.

Are you comparing (hybrid) gasoline figures to diesel on a liter per km basis? What about cost per km now that diesel prices have shot up?

Where did you get the 10L/100km figure from? I saw closer to 7L/100km when driving it, and the 2.2 diesel on the older X-Trails has about 100 less horsepower.

7L mixed cycle, stay on highway and you get 10 because no recuperation and 250kg heavier.

Machine guns are just paperweights if arrows are dime a dozen but 6.8x51mm is still at advanced stages of development. EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem and gas filling experience remains more than tolerable.

I am always a bit confused by this argument. You have to drive to a gas station to get fuel but it's not okay to drive to a specific place to charge. Most of the gas station where I live already have a few charging points backed by a big battery. Maybe that's not everywhere but I am not sure they are as rare as they are made out to be.

The queues can get bad if there are too few chargers.

You ever gone to Costco Gas? Often queued up the block.

This prompted me to check how the UK Costco rollout of EV chargers is going, which seems to be proceeding slowly and is not all that much of a discount at £0.50/kWh. Type 2 plugs so slowish?

And they fill up in a few minutes. Now try the same queue length when it takes 30 minutes to fill up.

Why? I've never seen that queue length for EVs. Have you?

I don't live in the US, but yes. I've seen people get into punch-ups because of the queues (although that happens with gas queues as well). All I'm saying is that queues are not improved by having longer servicing times. If you have the same ratio of cars to fuel pumps / chargers, the one that takes 30 minutes to fill up will be worse.

You can usually get gas and get back home in under ten minutes, versus hours to get to an EV place and charge.

Hours? Is this a joke?

Most of the public chargers around me are level 2 - hours is correct. Though most are in places where I would expect someone is parking there all day anyway - the parking ramps downtown, campgrounds, and beaches. I don't know what the grocery store with level-2 chargers is thinking though - the range you can get level 2 charging during the typical grocery run isn't worth it. (if the chargers were on the far end where employees park it would make sense, but they are customer parking only)

There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.

Yes, AC chargers aren't meant to be the equivalent of "get gas and get back home". They're sometimes called "destination chargers". You plug your car in because you already need to be there.

If you need to charge the car as fast as possible, you go to a DC charger and you generally spend 5-20 minutes there. In fact, many faster DC chargers will start adding fees for hogging the charger for more than 30 minutes.

Problem is level 3 chargers are a lot less common than level 2 - at least where I live. Some of those chargers are free which is nice when I happen to be in that area anyway, but most are not.

I think a lot more places like grocery stores and restaurants and what not should probably prioritize 50kW-ish DC fast chargers. Not so big you need to radically change the electricity at the property (some systems even have batteries to spread the load out), but still fast enough that customers hanging out for half an hour to a little over an hour will get a very solid charge.

EV charging needs to sort out the one thing they didn't have to innovate on: payment.

All the novel parts of supplying megawatts of power to consumers were sorted out and work perfectly, which is really impressive work! But paying with a credit card is often impossible? And forget about cash. You often need an app, and god forbid you don't have a data connection.

Sadly, it it should be simpler to charge an EV: power distribution is already ubiquitous, much more so than gas distribution.

In practice (in my experience) the EV infrastructure needs a serious central push before we get there. Beyond payment there are a few more things to sort out:

- High capacity charging is nowhere near as common as gas stations are in most of the US (and everywhere else I've been).

- Charging protocols are mostly sorted out via adapters, but residual annoyances remain, some of which won't be fixed soon (the US mostly distributing 2-phase AC while Europe distributes 3-phase drives one of these).

I've been driving a non-Tesla EV for several years now in the US, and have gone on many road trips. I sometimes make a point to try out new DC fast chargers around me, even if I don't really need the charge, just to see what their experience is like with a lot of the newer networks.

I haven't had to use an app to deal with payment for a fast charger in years. Practically all the major networks these days have ways to pay at the dispenser with a credit card.

The last time I used an app to charge was with some chargers at my office which were free for a few hours for tenants in the building, the app was needed to add my car to my approved account and once added it auto-detected and the app wasn't needed.

My car doesn't exactly go to Europe very often, its a pretty challenging drive. So I don't get why Europe having a different plug really makes that big of a difference in the end. Would it be nice if we could just have one world plug? Sure, but not too many cars from North America are going to accidentally find themselves in Europe without much planning.

As for charging protocols and plugs in the US, I've never really had too much of an issue. For a while it was pretty much just choose a non-Tesla charger and it'll be compatible. These days in this mixed period, lots of chargers support NACS and CCS, even Tesla. I got a free adapter from Ford but outside of using it once to test it out I've never used it.

That's encouraging, about the payment.

My information is 6 months old: I borrowed an EV to travel around while visiting friends in the US. I've never had any issues paying with a credit card at a gas pump, but had an O(0.1) success rate with the EV charger. But I guess wherever you are the payment is sorted out better.

The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure. As I said, it was one of the few things they could just copy from the working model.

The working model has less data tracking

>The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure

You definitely have enough info to figure this out, but let me walk you through it.

What is the profit margin on the business of transporting or distributing commodity energy like electricity or a tanker full of gas? Not very good. It's a commodity, so you can't do much to improve your margins without someone else undercutting you.

Modern Businesses in America do not like the small profit margin of selling commodities. They like the "tech" standard of insisting that an app is a "Platform" or community and being able to extract whatever rent you want from it.

So they tried to control a "Platform" through the cars. It somewhat failed because it's finally a bridge too far for consumers, just barely.

Basically, a classic horror story of consumer rights is "What if your ford car only worked with ford gas?" which was not something possible to really do back in the early 1900s, but companies saw an opportunity to do exactly that with EVs, and they don't care that it made things worse and slower to roll out and harmed adoption, because there was a chance of infinite money!

In SoCal at least, public chargers are barely cheaper than gas, even with gas at $6.30/gal. Electric only makes economic sense if you can mostly charge at home.

> EV charging in mechanical parking system is still an unsolved problem

I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?

The entire metal platform that holds the car is moved around like a data tape in a tape library in mechanical systems. A third rail system to handle L1/L2 EV charging do exist, but upgrades aren't common. I think not many are being newly built but there are many operating in ultra dense areas.

The stupid thing is, yes, modern petrol and diesel cars are stupidly efficient[0], it's not uncommon to see 50-60mpg in a golf-sized car almost regardless of whether it's diesel or petrol.

[0] as long as you don't put them in gigantic american trucks, if I read one more american review saying that 20mpg is "pretty decent".......

50-60 miles per U.K. gallon. Or 11-13 miles per litre.

20 miles per us gallon is terrible, but it’s more like 25 miles per U.K. gallon, which isn’t much below what by 1984 Nissan mid sized car used to get 27 years ago.

I tend to use 45mpg/10mpl now, as both my old micra and my newer Skoda got about that. That’s about 37mpg (us).

I had an automatic Micra (2016). It was a gas guzzler in the city, striking at 10l/100km at times. When shopping for a car to replace it, I did check out the 5 speed manual version. That stupidly asks you to rev 3000 RPM in 5th gear at 100 km/h. There is a 6th gear missing there, or a taller fifth: oops, fail! And they thought that someone who wants a manual car won't be needing air conditioning or power windows, etc. the idiotic, outdated thinking that the manual transmission is just an ingredient in making the cheapest possible version of the car, and not somehing that is a special feature to the enthusiast. Double fail ...

Manual 2005 micra which I drove until last January was reliably 6.3l/100km. No aircon but did have electric windows. And a cd player.

Manual skoda kamiq which I drove until May was about 6l/100km

Those are real “how many miles did I drive, how many litres did I put in to fill the tank” figuresc although tend not to do a lot of inner city driving - because that’s what public transports for.

> To further improve fuel efficiency and output, ZR15DDTe engine uses Nissan's unique STARC*2 concept paired with a large turbocharger.

If we are able to consider fixed RPM operation and are willing to endure turbomachinery, I don't know why we wouldn't just go all in on a gas turbine. You can reduce the number of moving parts dramatically and accept a much wider range of fuels.

Being able to engineer everything around a one fixed operating speed makes a huge engineering difference. Reciprocating engines are responsive to load and speed changes, but there are trade offs in many other categories.

You can also make a gas turbine power module quite small relative to the alternatives. Replacing the it at major service intervals could be made economically viable.

I suspect that the improvement in efficiency is small enough at the scale of an automotive power plant that it wouldn't be worth it.

Reading around suggests that in order to achieve decent efficiency from a gas turbine, you need quite a few supporting systems that only really make economic sense at larger scales (like the 10's of MW scales, not the 100's of kW).

(Although just from a fun technology angle I'd love to see a gas turbine in a car).

Chrysler built one in the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car

Yes, although I believe there were some issues - e.g. they got rather hot around the exhaust?

And maybe fuel economy wasn't great, although I remember hearing that they could use a very wide variety of fuels?

I hadn't realised there had been other attempts as well, including a Jaguar, that get mentioned in your linked Wikipedia article.

The trick in this scenario is the fact that you can run it at a constant RPM + load for a reasonably long duration. The cost of warming up a recuperator and other masses is amortized across a dependable schedule each time. The controller can ensure that the turbine (assuming the drive is long enough) will run for a minimum duration given a certain battery charge level.

The reason this stuff didn't work before is because we couldn't run the turbine this way. Now we have viable energy storage technology and can make some of the most difficult variables into constants.

afaik microturbines are less efficient, louder and hotter than piston engines.

That would be very cool. I wonder if you could get it through legislation though. I think all the legislation is based around reciprocating IC engines.

Gas turbines are not very fuel efficient.

Yeah but I suppose you'd only use them if your hybrid ran out of battery power.

You might as well just use a small regular petrol/diesel engine.

The argument about fewer moving parts is often made. But generally turbines are more expensive to make. They require precision engineering. Whereas regular engines (if you've ever worked on one) don't require that nearly as much.

I appreciate this if it's for turbochargers, but turbines share many similarities with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bZu8atQ8lY

BTW, Garett builds/rebuilds turbochargers in many vehicles. If you have a vehicle with a turbo, see if it says 'Garett' on the side.

> They require precision engineering.

A turbocharger (compressor) is already about half of a typical Brayton cycle. The power turbine itself can also be radial in design.

Unless you need insane mass flow rates, radial is probably superior to axial.

Brayton cycle does not necessitate a free flowing jet engine style design.

This has been tried, but back in the day the automatic transmissions weren't really up to it, and they don't really like thermal cycling. And they're noisy. Exact opposite of modern stop/start petrol engines for urban driving.

I also suspect all attempts to keep doing combustion engines for mainstream driving are going to get gradually overtaken and lapped by BEVs.

It was tried in the 60s and 70s, most seriously by Chrysler, and the emissions and drivability weren't great because it was in the "we need to get it working good before we go back and mop up all the other stuff" phase or R&D. The fuel crisis plus the state of automatic transmissions at the tie kept it a back burner item so development was slow and not a priority nor did other OEMs invest seriously.

Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.

Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.

I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.

It's also worth noting the degree to which facilities and talent pool overlapped between Chrysler, Chrysler Defense, how much more porous the corporate world was 50yr ago and that that Chrysler did ultimately get someone else's turbine into a running driving mass production vehicles in the form of the M1 Abrams so it's not like the technology is unsuitable on a fundamental level.

Think if it like this - is the turbine exhaust hot? Then you are losing energy.

You can extract more energy by adding stages but that increases weight.

While a small and light weight diesel engine is already very close to the theoretical limit.

>Think if it like this - is the turbine exhaust hot? Then you are losing energy.

Turbines for land uses have heat exchangers to get a lot of this back. Even after those the turbine is still lighter for a given power output and lifetime. But normal engines are a lot cheaper.

> why we wouldn't just go all in on a gas turbine

Cost, reliability.

The solid state battery people continue to inch forward to 500Wh/Kg.[1] That's about 2x lithium-ion. There are now a small number of prototype cars on the road with solid state batteries. There's even a Dodge Charger, from Stellantis. But nobody has solved the production cost problem yet. CATL has a summary of their approach.[2]

This is the real win, but it's hard to make it work in production. Eventually it will displace hybrids, but not before 2030.

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/08/20/geely-500-wh-kg-solid-state-b...

[2] https://www.intelligentliving.co/catl-500-whkg-solid-state-b...

China's regulators have recently issued an official definition of "solid state battery".[1] This applies to advertising, and, importantly, to investment fund-raising. Semi solid state batteries, with gels or some liquid, do not qualify. They will officially be called “hybrid solid-liquid battery.”

The test is simple and tough. Heat a cut battery to 120C, and the weight must not decrease by more than 0.5%. Once the standard takes effect, only batteries passing that test can be called "solid state". Nobody has this yet outside of lab samples.

This will help avoid fake solid state battery claims such as the Donut Labs fiasco [2]

[1] https://www.intelligentliving.co/solid-state-battery-standar...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/home/electric-vehicles/donut-lab-solid-...

This is coming out end of year in the U.S. in the 2027 Rogue. There will also be a gas powered 2027 with a CVT. It will be interesting how they compare, and also how the series hybrid compares to Rav4 or Corolla Cross with a parallel hybrid.

These EREVs are going to last one cycle; the solid state battery tech is going to decimate their principal and you will be forced to choose between EREVs that cost slightly less than EVs and still inherit all complications of a hybrid powertrain or just go with the BEV for a few thousand more.

Ironically, these solutions would be perfect for boating use, if only they used a diesel engine instead. Regular ICE will not go away anytime soon in marine world and I don't think they see the sales potential here if they developed their powertrains with that usage in mind as well.

Aren't boats typically highly geared direct drive? Hybrid only really benefits when you have lots of changes in speed or are using it for torque conversion as in diesel-electric trains.

This Nissan is a serial hybrid, as in diesel electric trains.

An every-day diesel-electric locomotive solves the gearing (torque) problem, and can let the engine run at the most-efficient speed that can produce the required power output. The required output power is dynamic, though, so in practice the diesel engine runs at a variety of speeds along a given route across the plains or over the pass or whatever.

It's hard to make an engine that runs at peak efficiency at a range of speeds and power demands. But when batteries are added, the picture can change quite a lot.

The engine can be built and sized to run efficiently at a fixed speed, and its power output never needs to exceed whatever the generator that it drives is able to accept.

So when it runs, the combined engine+generator set can be run full-assed. No half-assing required. It's a binary state. On, or off. Full-staff, or flaccid.

By reducing variables in this way, all of the fuel that is burned gets converted to electrical power as efficiently it can be for the process at-hand. (It's also easier to quiet an engine that runs at a fixed speed than one that runs at variable speeds; things get a lot simpler when there's only one set of identified frequencies to bother with.)

While the engine is on, some of that electrical power can get used for driving an electric motor for propulsion and the rest can go into a battery.

If it is on and the vehicle is stationary, then all of that electrical power can go into a battery while the engine is remains at full-chooch.

When the battery gets full-enough and/or demand is low-enough, then the engine can just turn completely off. In this mode, all of the electrical power used for propulsion then comes from the battery.

It works. There's even some boats[1] that use these concepts.

It's just an unusual arrangement for now. (It may always be an unusual arrangement if the goal is to eliminate localized combustion of fuel. But as we keep being reminded over and over on these pages, whenever a headline about vehicular electrification comes by: We aren't quite uniformly there yet.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_ferry

I’m moray the government subsidies rural petrol stations because demand is falling (about half of stations have closed in the last 15 years). About 40% of cars on the road are electric now, and that’s increasing rapidly as 95% of new cars are electric.

It will be interesting to see how much more subsidy ICE cars require as they disappear over the next 10 years.

Where you at?

Around me (Ohio, USA), nearly every car I see is gas-fired. I only see an occasional EV; they tend to stick out, and they're very unusual.

Things look different when I travel to different areas of the US, though. Poorer areas have even fewer EVs than I see around here, while wealthier areas have a lot more of them.

It's a little bit unusual for me to encounter an EV at all during my ~daily driving (often about 40 miles, all said).

---

For my part: My lifestyle requires a minivan that can serve as a work truck. There are zero EV options for that here.

But if I could get one with 250 or 300 miles of capacity, then I'd have a new goal. :)

Person you're replying to is in Moray, Scotland, referring to local tax relief for petrol stations: https://www.moray.gov.uk/media/yrcjso12/file79893.pdf

Probably not all that rural by US standards, but it is by UK standards.

The EV rollout is still early stages here too. If we had regional electricity pricing (contentious question!), Scotland would have cheaper electricity and potentially at zero on many occasions.

(ID Buzz? Very expensive though)

In Norway, damn autocorrect on the phone!

I’m in the U.K. and couldn’t afford to not have an EV, could cost over £2500 a year more to drive a petrol car.

I frankly don't understand how people who rent can use EV. The closest charger is 10 minutes away drive one way, not always available, takes a long time to charge, and I am talking about a big metropolitan area. Clearly EV proponents don't see all the consequences of owning an EV for the majority of people.

Hopefully it’s better than the second gen. Gas engine front only puts power to one wheel and electric rear only puts power to one wheel while the other two sit idle. Bad state for a mild 4x4 unless you keep it on pavement.

Wait, what? 1WD? Or 2WD, but then 1 front and 1 back? Which is referred to as 'mild 4x4'?

So many questions.

IIRC both Nissan and Toyota have a dual motor options with super weak rear motors, largely to cover "but snows" arguments. The entire car largely remains to be boring family FWD cars, not like beefy Tesla duals. Maybe GP is referring to those.

Sounds like a pretentious way to say "the car isn't hardcore enough because it doesn't have locking diffs".

this is basically the same as the hybrid system in the Honda CR-V, except the CR-V can clutch the engine in directly to the wheels at highway speeds.

Which AFAIK is more efficient (no losses on converting kinetic to electric, electric to chemical, and back: chemical to electric and then to kinetic).

Toyota has the best one. No clutch at all, can drive only combustion engine

Renault's version doesn't have a clutch either.

Renault has a dog clutch.

And the Toyota has planetary gears.

Both offer direct, mechanical engagement that avoids the continuous friction slip of a wet clutch.

Which was the point.

I forgot which marketing name it was, but one of Honda 1-motor systems that used the motor in clutch pack had a major design oversight that it can't handle a traffic jam in an incline, which happens in (of all places)Japan; the HV battery runs out and the car needs to be towed and/or driven at higher speed to both cool down and fill back up. Generator plus traction 2-motor systems feel stupid but it's necessary to cover those situations.

I remember one review of Mazda CX-90 hybrid (not plug-in) that reviewer genuinely didn't know why Mazda put such a small battery in there that's not enough for anything.

I drove a little Toyota Tahoe with the same tiny battery and the reason is clear -- it replaces first gear. So you can have much simpler and reliable transmission, and be more efficient at cities stop signs.

What's the Pareto principle, but for cars? My cx90 battery range is just over 35km... so in US that's a round trip of 10mi, i.e. 70% of all US car trips[0].

It does the daily commute a few times over, or one day of errands. It does a full charge overnight anywhere with a standard plug; but I have enjoyed EV only parking and fast charge when I'm on the road. I've only used gas for intercity trips, and then it still gets better milage than my 6-speed mazda 3 sedan. And it tows! My partner and I got a short camper trailer and we've spent this last summer doing campouts we never would have bothered with a tent.

Very versatile vehicle, I'm super satisfied with mine.

My cx90 convinces me that neighbourhood range evs are to cars what the air fryer is to ovens. I would ditch the beater mazda3 for ev kei car if I could. The petrol and Detroit 3 lobby is holding back the future on this continent.

[0] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10318

This powertrain is great for people that want to drive an EV, but they live in places with poor charging infrastructure.

Two motors and e-Pedal driving is the cherry on top imho (e.g. in the 2027 Rouge).

Nice to see the packaging improvements, but the modularity of the original leaf motor enabled them to be come a budget staple motor choice for ev conversion

the mileage numbers are still worse than a standard current generation Prius and certainly worse than a plug-in version

It's amazing no one has yet beat the efficiency of the hybrid model Toyota designed 30 years ago.

isn't the future Axial Flux motors

very small, very light (under 30 pounds for a car) with massive power and torque

no stator yoke, less or no rare-earths

Even more moving parts (turbo), and such a compact packaging... I wouldn't trust even Toyota for this

That’s all well and good, but can we get something other than a yet another fucking “an box” car with “slightly different headlights”?

In my mind the alternative to a box car is something like the 8th generation Corolla liftbacks, or station wagons. If they were a little larger, I think they could compete with SUVs with regards to the trade-offs between style and space. I think that station wagons and liftbacks have more room for style than SUVs do.

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