jeremy_clarkson

Also cars, do not have to be today's cars. Like, the market fucked us all over with this SUV craze. It should be first priority to reverse this madness. Nobody needs to drive around in a 5ton tank. Second, inner city driving should be done in even smaller cars. You do not need a full sized car, designed for seating 5, just for commuting or to go shopping.

The argument is purely technical so you can divorce it from the mouth it is being uttered from and consider it on its own merits.

To me it makes sense, but I had similar thoughts independently before reading this article. The only assumption is that battery manufacturing will remain challenging for the near future.

I think I share support for this argument and might have even posted it on HN previously.

Basically, BEVs need to have huge batteries to sell well. Not because the consumer is actually using this huge battery to its full extent, but because otherwise the consumer will not buy the car due to range anxiety. This huge battery, of which maybe 1/4 or 1/3 is used throughout a day, is a huge inefficiency to manufacture and adds significantly to the CO2 footprint of BEVs. For a lot of people it might therefore make more sense to have a PHEV with a battery big enough for one day of driving, and a range extender, which ideally would not be used in day to day driving. The range extender is an ICE engine or gas turbine, which is made of more common materials. In the future it might even make sense to combine PHEV with synthetic fuels.

The argument I heard against this is that people with PHEVs ignore the plug-in functionality and drive it on gas the whole time. But while this might be true, it does not counter the technical argument above. It is a completely other problem.