Like putting in the final optimizations in the crossbow right as others have figured out machine guns.
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.
You surely mean that it is not recognized as plug-in hybrid vehicle.
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.
There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
I'm not familiar with this; don't you just plug it in?
[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".......
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).
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
You got your answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.