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Comment by Toutouxc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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...

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.

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.

> "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.

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 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

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 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.

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

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

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

>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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

How much does public charging cost where you live?

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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