To answer the question in the thread title, I so far have not needed a hybrid nor an EV, so the question is irrelevant.
I just don't drive all that much the past 6 years so spending a lot of money to replace the cars sitting in my garage most of the time doesn't make a lot of sense.
I can see where one or the other (or both) may make sense for some people in some situations, so I guess it's a good thing that both are available.
I have a charging station in my garage, but I have to drive to a gas station :) There are potential charging stations everywhere, the infrastructure can build out very quickly if needed. If FM decided to offer an EV charging station for the public, it would be cake. If we wanted to provide gasoline, that's a lot more effort. If we wanted to provide gasoline and diesel, it would be exactly twice as much effort.
You don't need three competing charging centers at the same crossroads like you have with gas stations, you just need one where you need it.
I've been giving this a fair amount of thought lately. I don't drive every day, but when I do for work or to go shopping it tends to be a 50-60 mile round trip minimum, a good 200 for work, to the airport and back. An EV with a real world 230-250 mile range on the highway would work really well for me. Actually if I road trip my work drives that are longer than to the airport, I usually have a look at some EV trip planner or other to see if it would have been feasible, and TBH another half hour on a 5-6h trip wouldn't have killed me. Guess I must be one of those "coastal elite" people although the only coast I see from here is people coasting down the hill.
When I got the Alfa in May 2019, the leasing cost of a Model 3 was considerably more than for the similarly-priced Alfa, plus it was during the "you can't buy the car at the least of the lease because we'll all convert them into autonomous taxis muahahahahahah" phase of Tesla sales. Otherwise there might already be one in the garage.
My wife is a perfect candidate even for a shorter range BEV so we'll give the annouced Jeep BEVs a good look once they actually exist outside marketing material.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
That is the thing people don'tseem to want to understand... they want 5 minute "fillups", but there's usually 8 hours or so the vehicle is idle when you are asleep, or at work, and you can "fill up" in your garage.
We never needed hybrids. We needed to go from gas to electric. (Yeah yeah, "we needed the r&d", develope it through impractical cars like we did with gasoline engines.)
its the one gripe I had with hybrids, they weren't the "best of both worlds" they were the worst of both.
Every few months I drive roughly 1,000 miles with my wife down to Florida to see my parents for a weekend. We do it in a Prius and usually average around 55mpg on that trip. I tend to not like to take breaks either, I pretty much just drive straight down there. Taking longer breaks to charge, stretch, sit down and eat etc would certainly be healthier and make the trip more pleasant but I'm impatient and usually on a time budget. Our Prius makes an excellent highway car - even with the battery depleted it can get over 50mpg no problem. I do think they still currently have a place, however I will gladly admit that is shrinking. Once we move down to Florida my first big purchase will be a house, and my second big purchase will be a Tesla. Honestly I'm more excited about the Tesla. For 95% of people in 95% of situations it's more than enough car in every way. We find ourselves in that 5% minority sometimes, and that's fine. I still can't wait to get a BEV.
Keith Tanner said:If you live in San Angelo, you don't need a Supercharger. You charge at home. You only need the Supercharger when you leave. That's what a lot of people miss.
According to that map, you can go in almost any direction (starting with a full battery, as you always do when leaving home) and there's a Supercharger within a fairly decent radius.
You know I didn't see one EV in the 8 months I spent in San Angelo or in the surrounding areas. So much for your theory. It's also the kind of area where EVs aren't the hip thing to have. A F-350 is.
For most people, the fear of being caught out in the middle of nowhere with no way to charge their car is very strong. I know that's the first thought that comes to my head when I think all-electric car with no onboard generator. Rationally, though, most people on most days never drive more than that 200-300 mile range in a single sitting. And, like Keith said, it is much easier to deploy charging stations in most places than a gasoline station. We have no plans to add to the fleet or replace anything right now, but when it is time I would absolutely put a 100% electric vehicle in the mix when we shop if we were replacing the wifemobile. As the market sits right now, I don't know that there is an EV that I can buy that would tow 5000-8000 lbs for about 300 miles round-trip, otherwise I would consider it to replace my truck as well.
In reply to _ :
I tend to agree. As a professor in undergrad told me once "the problem with middle ground is that you inheret the weaknesses of both sides and the strength of neither". Hybrid cars are the logical fallacy of the automotive world. I don't see myself owning an EV anytime soon, not because I have issues with them inherenty, but because I'm not sure when a decent one will fall below the 5k mark (my arbitrary limit for anything automotive).
EVs have come a long way, but they are not (yet) a near-universal solution. The current model assumes you charge it at home, overnight -- that works great for people who own a house or rent one for a long-enough time to make an investment in a charger worthwhile. It doesn't work so well for people who live in apartments, and it really doesn't work well for people who live in a city and have to street park.
At some point we my have chargers in every space in an apartment complex parking lot, or charging systems that will be done in ~ 5 minutes so that you can treat a trip to the charging station the way you currently treat a trip to the gas station.
The other reason for building hybrids rather than EVs is the one that Toyota cites -- the world does not have the infrastructure to produce that many lithium ion batteries, not by a long shot. This infrastructure is growing, but it's an enormous capital investment so it doesn't happen overnight.
As much as we enthusiasts hate them, the Prius really is a remarkable achievement as a practical economy car. Despite the added complexity of the battery, generator, etc, it goes hundreds of thousands of miles with only minor maintenance, far more than many of the ICE-only vehicle engines that we love. 300K miles with just fluid changes? Try that on an S54...
DirtyBird222 said:You know I didn't see one EV in the 8 months I spent in San Angelo or in the surrounding areas. So much for your theory. It's also the kind of area where EVs aren't the hip thing to have. A F-350 is.
What theory? Keith said there's already enough infrastructure around San Angelo to own a Tesla and travel from there. Which there is. There are Tesla Superchargers in any direction you might head from there. You even posted the map! Where residents of San Angelo buy Teslas or not is not the point.
mtn said:For most drivers, probably over 95%, the EV is just fine.
That same numbers can apply to every driver and a car like a Honda CRX HF that just carried two people and got 50mpg. So just want to point out that using that kind of logic does not apply to the car buying market.
Had it, the odds that the CO2 issue would be as it is would be much less likely.
Was thinking about that when we were just on a run.
I would prefer something like the volt(but in a 4wd truck),the ICE only acts as a generator when needed so it can be relatively small and unsaddled with the task of propelling anything.
Small engine,no transmission for the ICE and a (plug in)reasonably sized battery pack all save weight.
Do short trips(that generally provide the worst fuel economy)on the battery and the ICE can hum away all day while you tow that race car.
STM317 said:My PHEV allows me to do half my commute, and all of my weekend errands around town on electrons. The ICE means I can take on a trip of any distance with no concerns and limited planning at the drop of a hat. I can fully charge with a normal 120v outlet in a regular overnight period. With a full charge and a full tank of fuel, I've got over 600 miles of range if needed.
I think that hybrids still have a place. Especially as a way to introduce electrification to new market segments. We see this occurring now with upcoming PHEV Rav-4, Jeep Wrangler, etc. And at some point PHEV trucks are likely to be an option as well.
A PHEV also means smaller battery, which means either less overall mining for materials, or it means you electrify more vehicles for the same amount of mined materials. If we're trying to make more environmental impact, we need as many vehicles to be cleaned up as possible. I think PHEVs do that better than BEVs. I'd rather have 2 or 3 PHEVs on the road, using 100% of their EV range on their 30 mile daily commutes than a single BEV doing its 30 mile commute and using 10% of its battery capacity while the other 90% of that lithium sits unused most of the time.
This post is underappreciated and shows a better real world engineering solution than what media/people want. Too many people want a silver bullet...when they just do not exist. Otherwise we are just looking to change our reliance on oil to a reliance on rare earth earth metals.
An electric car would cover my commute just fine all summer long. I easily pound 75 miles a day, half that rated range. My concern starts when the temperature drops. For those of us who typically deal with significantly below freezing temperatures 4 months out of the year, a 200 mile max range in ideal conditions is greatly reduced. Batteries don't like cold, and heating the interior takes a lot of juice, as does defrosting windows. Between those factors, if my actual driving range is now closer to 100 miles or so, that's a potential problem for me, especially if I got stuck in traffic due to an accident on the highway (which happens irritatingly frequently here, especially in the winter) where relatively long idle times are a thing. Now, cars like the Model 3 with 300 mile range that eliminates most of the concern, as there's enough cushion there for any weather and delays I'll face. But that's also, what, a 45-50k dollar car?
As more and more electric vehicles are on the roadways, I suspect long wait times to use chargers will become a persistent thing. Charge times might be a half hour, but if someone's in front of you, it's now potentially an hour. Maybe that's a unfounded concern, time will tell.
Give me an affordable car that hits 300+ mile range on a charge and I'll be happy. They don't exist yet, so plug in hybrids or even standard hybrids fill that gap. We are getting closer. in 5-10 years when I'm car shopping again, I hope the next one I buy is electric.
In reply to kevlarcorolla :
I've always thought that the diesel-electric locomotive was a great blueprint for how to make a more efficient road-going truck. I can only assume that there are packaging concerns and costs that prevent that from being as good of an idea in reality as it is inside my own head. What better way to get lots of torque for towing than a decently-sized electric motor with an on-board generator to keep it running when you need all the torques but enough battery pack to let you plug in overnight and commute to the office without burning any gasoline. But there are people way smarter than I am doing this for a living so I can only assume there are lots of good reasons that won't work.
In reply to TGMF :
But how neat would it be to have your car run its heater overnight at just enough of a level to keep the windows defrosted and then fire up the seat heaters and bring the cabin to 74 degrees by 7am when you typically get in to head to work? If it's plugged in, no impact on battery life and it's so much nicer than having to go scrape windows and then burn tons of battery (relatively) to get the cabin up to temp.
I have no idea if any EVs do that already, but if I were king...
Keith Tanner said:You don't need three competing charging centers at the same crossroads like you have with gas stations.
You do if you want competitive pricing per watt. Besides, it's perfectly possible to put 15 gallons of gas into an ICE vehicle in 5 minutes. That means a lot of customer throughput per pump.
When it takes 20 minutes per charge, that means your vehicles-per-pump just fell from somewhere around 10 per hour to 3 per hour.
Unless you have a lot of charging stations immediately available, that will be like every single customer leaves their car at the pump while they go into the station to use the restroom, order a sandwich, get a fancy coffee, play their favorite lottery numbers, and have a cigarette.
In reply to wae :
IMHO, Diesel-electric works because 1- you can move a MASSIVE load from zero speed, and 2- the are normally used in a narrower range of operation. On the massive diesel-electric set ups - one of the "throttles" is how many numbers of engines are running (ships).
In reply to DirtyBird222 :
Funny how you have to poke nonsequiters into every thread on Evs. Keith didn't say anybody owned evs at all.
Duke said:Keith Tanner said:You don't need three competing charging centers at the same crossroads like you have with gas stations.
You do if you want competitive pricing per watt. Besides, it's perfectly possible to put 15 gallons of gas into an ICE vehicle in 5 minutes. That means a lot of customer throughput per pump.
When it takes 20 minutes per charge, that means your vehicles-per-pump just fell from somewhere around 10 per hour to 3 per hour.
Unless you have a lot of charging stations immediately available, that will be like every single customer leaves their car at the pump while they go into the station to use the restroom, order a sandwich, get a fancy coffee, play their favorite lottery numbers, and have a cigarette.
That's exactly how people in California refuel :) It's true that considerate drivers will move their car from the pump after refuelling is done, so the theoretical throughput is higher. Which means more chargers would be necessary. This is not an insurmountable problem.
Wae, I think all EVs offer the ability to pre-warm or pre-cool the car while it's on shore power.
wae said:In reply to kevlarcorolla :
I've always thought that the diesel-electric locomotive was a great blueprint for how to make a more efficient road-going truck. I can only assume that there are packaging concerns and costs that prevent that from being as good of an idea in reality as it is inside my own head. What better way to get lots of torque for towing than a decently-sized electric motor with an on-board generator to keep it running when you need all the torques but enough battery pack to let you plug in overnight and commute to the office without burning any gasoline. But there are people way smarter than I am doing this for a living so I can only assume there are lots of good reasons that won't work.
Weight. From the mouth of someone who wanted the same thing, the issue is they can't afford the weight. That is why they run the engine all night for heat or air conditioning, instead of just carrying a secondary APU (also running on Diesel, running the same cooling circuits) that would be much more efficient.
He also had stories about being so close to max weight that he was told to just add fuel every hundred miles, full fuel tanks would have put him over.
It's a great idea, and maybe if there was some regulatory leeway for hybrid systems' weight, but that would ruffle all kinds feathers for all manner of reasons, I'm sure.
In reply to Duke :
But you're missing a part there. With the availability of home charging, aside from turnpike and interstate rest stops, why would there be a line?
I don't honestly know this answer, but going from the 12k/mile/year thing on leases, that's 4 to 5 fill ups from empty per month. If you can always leave the house with a full charge, why bother stopping unless you're on a road trip?
I just can't imagine the number of people that daily 100+ miles each way is all that high outside of delivery drivers or maintenance techs. Or more, I don't understand why someone would drive 2.5-3 hours each way to work.
wae said:In reply to TGMF :
But how neat would it be to have your car run its heater overnight at just enough of a level to keep the windows defrosted and then fire up the seat heaters and bring the cabin to 74 degrees by 7am when you typically get in to head to work? If it's plugged in, no impact on battery life and it's so much nicer than having to go scrape windows and then burn tons of battery (relatively) to get the cabin up to temp.
I have no idea if any EVs do that already, but if I were king...
Most EVs will be able to preheat/precool on shore power, and some hybrids will do it too.
That is a major bonus in favor of them, IMO.
If there's going to be an on-board generator, I'd love to see it along the locomotive concept. Have it chug along generating electricity to fill the battery. No physical connection to the wheels, which takes a complicated transmission out of the picture. Since it's just a generator running at its ideal speed and load, it's easier to optimize for efficiency and emissions. Heck, make it a microturbine! it worked for the Adam West batmobile.
This will definitely not be a good solution for those who love the sounds and feel of an ICE, it would be the exact opposite.
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