I just don't understand it. A car that can drive ~40 miles on pure electric that has an ICE for longer trips would satisfy the needs of everyone. For like 90+% of people, it would mean never using gas for their commute while also eliminating range anxiety.
I'm especially surprised about the lack of plug-in hybrids for semi trucks. I'd think having a little extra electronic torque would help considerably when accelerating. It doesn't need to go 0-60 in 20 seconds while carrying 80K lbs like the Tesla Semi claims, but certainly having extra power could be useful in some scenarios. Heck, just having regen braking would be a game changer when going down hills. No noise from a Jake Brake, and no worries about burning up brake pads.
This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight, has much lower battery capacity, and still sticks you with the maintenance work required for the ICE.
Plus gas is a very volatile mix that degrades; you must run the ICE regularly to ensure the tank gets cycled.
hybrid systems are complex but really not much more complex than traditional ICE when you consider that they no longer need starters or alternators, have transmissions with no shifting components, and can use electric A/C compressors to avoid accessory belts entirely.
They also have much longer maintenance intervals because the engine is only running ~2/3rds of the time.
Electric cars are of course simpler but have cost and range issues that are prohibitive for some use cases, not to mention will usually weigh much more than even an equivalent plugin hybrid.
Suffice to say there is a reason that the best taxi vehicle has been the Prius for more than a decade. efficient and rock solid reliable despite increased complexity.
Most importantly though, you can make 10 plugin hybrids with the battery from one BEV. As long as raw materials for batteries are a bottleneck then we should be seriously considering PHEVs as a stopgap if as we can make sure they are getting charged.
If you know ahead of time that the engine is going to run infrequently, there are lots of ways to mitigate this. The ICE is tantamount to a backup generator, and there are very reliable backup generators.
> This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight
I mean, US consumers already put up with this when it came to automatic transmissions. But the cost/maintenance problems were a fair trade-off for convenience.
And in the case of plug-in hybrids, they are VERY convenient. You almost never need to get gas, but you can still go on a road trip without any pre-planning.
A Toyota Synergy style hybrid has a more mechanically simple transmission than an ICE plus a traditional transmission. I haven't seen numbers, but I'd be surprised if ICE plus a fuel system weighs more than 300 miles worth of batteries, but you get 600 miles of range with the ICE. You could easily get more, but PHEVs seem to be stuck with a 12 gallon tank.
My PHEV has a two year maintenance cycle, and the ICE portion is changing the oil, mostly. Yes, at some point you'll need to do a timing chain/belt, and there's incidentals; you'll never need to replace emissions equipment on a BEV, and most of the unscheduled maintenance on my ICE equipped cars has been related to emissions: EGR valves, o2 sensors, EVAP canisters, etc.
The engine control system takes care of running the ICE regularly, it's not something you have to worry about. I'd expect it to push you to fill up the tank about twice a year if you're mostly driving electric. I drive my PHEV mostly gas, and not that often anyway, so I just fill up every 500 miles or so.
It doesn't have to double complexity. Look at the BMW i3 Rex - it used a basic range-extending generator and was ahead of its time. The weight savings of the Rex vs. a larger battery are significant. Most EVs carry around a battery that they'll only use 10% of on a typical day.
As to your last point, designers of range extenders are obviously aware of this and handle it automatically. It'll chose to kick on occasionally even if the batter is nearly full.
You want to run an engine once a month or so to keep all the internal parts protected from rust by a thin film of oil. It is best to let it heat up all the way to drive out as much moisture as possible.
Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough. The first thing to go are the cam shafts.
> It is best to let it heat up all the way to drive out as much moisture as possible.
> Internal rusting is a big issue on airplanes that do not get flown often enough.
I was always told to take the car for an actual drive (including a highway stretch) to achieve these ends, otherwise the moisture you're expelling accumulates in the exhaust system.
Looking around the neighborhood, I assume the people with the rusted-out mufflers are the ones that just let it idle.
Since I have yet to see any of these various claims having any impact on the maintainability or function of my car, I think I'll stick to my plan of not wasting the gas in my engine for months at a time.
It's unlikely to be a one time thing. But recurrently letting gas sit for extended periods of time could cause issues. This mostly only applies to ethanol containing fuels. This is why boats need to use 100% gas. You should do the same for a plugin hybrid if you don't cycle the tank at least every 2-3 weeks. That's all it takes to damage a boat if it sits. Cars will be better but the repeated exposure would certainly take a toll.
What does "take a toll" mean? Sorry to be difficult but people tell me a lot of things will damage my car in the long term, but I haven't been able to reproduce any of those problems yet. The only thing that damaged my car was putting too much oil in it, that caused it to fail nearly immediately, and was covered by the warranty so it was free to replace the whole engine.
Eh, your car will run a little shitty with the old gas, leaving an engine without running it for extended periods can cause somewhat faster corrosion depending on your environment, and old gas can increase things like various gunk getting deposited around your engine.
All in all, a mild shortening of the life of your engine and perhaps triggering some maintenance sooner than otherwise.
Realistically, not much. The people saying “bad for you” aren’t wrong but they also fail to mention the effect size. It’s not particularly relevant unless you want to own the same car for a few hundred thousand miles and absolutely minimize maintenance. (Small aircraft for example, you want to care a lot about these things because they’re very expensive, when the engine fails you’ll be thousands of feet above the ground, and a well maintained plane can last decades. Your daily driver probably doesn’t have any of these issues)
There are various preventative things you can do to minimize the effects anyway. It’s one of those internet things where yeah they’re not wrong exactly but they need to relax. Having too much beer and cheeseburgers last night long term probably wasn’t the best decision, but you know what I’ll probably be fine.
Leaking gas in a car for a long time is like eating too much fast food. Ok yeah not the greatest but are you the type of person who cares enough to never eat McDonald’s? Make your decisions according to your disposition and don’t take people telling you you’re wrong too seriously.
But seriously, change your oil more often. There’s some simple chemistry going on where the oil gets worse at being oil over time and you get extra engine wear, and if you’re not paying attention and burning oil your engine can get bricked in seconds.
I only change my oil every 10k miles (or really 6-8k most often) but in an engine and with an oil specifically rated for such. Your jiffylube 5w30 (if that’s what you’re doing, if you’ve actually got an oil rated for 10k you’re fine) isn’t going to do great. It’s maybe 50-50 whether bad oil change schedule will be the thing that kills your car.
I think 6K or 7.5K miles is the typical recommendation for modern cars that use synthetic oil. I know my BRZ's manual recommended 7.5K unless I'm taking it to the race track.
10K is probably fine with full synthetic oil if you're driving conservatively.
Ethanol is hygroscopic. As long as you burn the fuel in a reasonable amount of time it's not a problem, but when ethanol sits over time it collects water. Next time you run your engine, it pulls water into the engine.
Now, if the engine runs long enough to fully warm up, this isn't the end of the world. Any water will turn to steam and be pushed out through the exhaust. However, if the engine only runs for a short period of time, water can sit inside of it and cause corrosion. Realistically this is only a problem if you repeatedly allow ethanol-containing fuel to sit for a long time, and also repeatedly run an ICE for very short periods of time.
It is a bigger problem for boat motors, because they operate in a wet environment already. It is also a bigger problem for carbureted engines, where fuel sits in the carburetor bowl while the engine is not running. This allows hygroscopic fuels to corrode the inside of the carburetor while the engine sits.
Ignoring ethanol, it is also true that gasoline breaks down over time. However, it typically takes many months before gasoline breaks down enough to worry. There are also additives that help stabilize gasoline for longer storage.
TL;DR in a reasonably modern-ish car, it's probably fine. In small engines like lawn mowers, it is best to either use ethanol-free gasoline or to completely drain the fuel before storing the mower for the winter. In antique cars with carburetors, it is best to use ethanol-free gasoline.
My friends LOVE their i3 and it was like their gateway drug to EVs. I think if BMW had kept going on that concept, it would have create a true winner. They NEVER needed to refill their backup tank in the 2 or 3 years they leased. I think BMW did something special to make the gas tank keep the gasoline that long. In that span of time, battery mode satisfied all their needs and they loved driving it.
I don't recall specific models, but I have read some (many? most?) plug-in hybrids monitor how long since the tank was last filled and at a certain point will run the gas engine to work through the fuel before it goes bad.
I've always wondered why there aren't diesel hybrids on the market given the higher energy density of diesel plus its long term stability. It would seem to be the ideal use-case since the diesel engine could be run at the RPM needed to be to minimize emissions.
Most people would never plug it in. This would only be ideal if you could make using gas significantly more cost inefficient (i.e. astronomically higher gas prices), which will always be unpalatable in the US. Hopefully some states eventually have the guts to do it.
Oil is a finite resource. Eventually economics will force people to abandon gas (my bet is sooner than the 50 years the industry projects there are reserves for).
EV benefits to the climate are always congingent on getting rid of fossils.
If we don't ramp down fossils by regulation, all this EV business is worse than useless anyway (we'll just end up with the emissions from battery production in addition to burning up all the oil we can pump - maybe sold abroad if domestically there's a lot of renewables available, but still burned).
I live in an apartment. I drive a full EV and the 200+ miles range allows me to get away with charging at public chargers intermittently rather than having to plug in basically every night.
If I had a plug in hybrid, it wouldn’t get plugged in.
I think there is a sweet spot for city size and how many people are using EVs for apartment EV users now. Your city needs to be large enough to draw investment for this infrastructure, but it can't be so large that each and every charger in town has someone already parked there, which is what seemingly happens when I see the few dozen chargers installed around my neighborhood.
You also don't want most people to be driving EVs, because then it quickly becomes a situation like bikes are with last mile transport: if everyone used them, they wouldn't work so well, but so long as only a few people are using them it works great for you. If everyone brought a bike on the train we'd have to redesign trains to be far longer and lengthen underground stations to match; right now its fine because its only maybe 2-3 people per train car with a bike in my experience, but if that changes the fixes are expensive.
Likewise with EV chargers, if we see mass adoption, we'd have to foot the bill to turn every basically zero cost spit of pavement people park on into dedicated charging infrastructure. I'm assuming a municipal charger will have to be substantially more rugged and able to handle more abuse than your average home charger installation. Estimates on the internet vary for what a l2 charger costs, lets say its $10000 for one fit for a public parking spot. That would put the cost to convert the 6 million parking spots in Los Angeles at $60 billion. Sure that's probably not sound math, but it doesn't seem cheap, especially factoring in ongoing maintenance and replacement.
A decent L2 charger should be installable at scale for ~$1K per unit IMHO. I'm basing this on the fact that a singular L2 home charger can be installed for about that. Figure the industrial variant costs a little more, but you get savings from the mass scale of deployment. They probably cost more now, but competition will bring it down as we scale.
Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because many will be able to charge at home or use fast-chargers in emergencies. You don't have to be near-full at all times. You could deploy them at only 1/N spots, say something closer to 1/4 of all the spots, if even that (apartments might need 1/1, but streets and business parking lots/garages would need far less. You don't need them in any short-term street parking areas, as L2 is mostly-useless unless the car is sitting in place for hours).
You also don't necessarily need to have the raw power to run them all simultaneously: you can have local groups powershare (e.g. deploy 8 chargers with a feed-in that supports 4, and the chargers can coordinate to drop their charge rate as more people plug in).
If those wild assumptions are true ($1k, 1/4 of parking spots), LA's bill drops to $1.5B, which seems much more reasonable. The capacity will build up organically over time as EV adoption grows, starting with corporate and apartment parking lots.
I think in this hypothetical all-EV future, there would be other compensating changes to the city as well. Like, all gas stations would go poof, and their tanks, and the fuel delivery trucks, and most of the refineries, and all of the associated impacts on peoples' health from both the fueling and the car exhausts, etc. There's a lot of potential upside to offset any reasonable electrification costs.
I'd be curious to see where the money ends up coming from long term. Hopefully it doesn't mean shifting money that could have gone towards mass transit into subsidizing private ownership of single occupant vehicles.
I’ve had a couple of apartments install ev chargers in every parking space in the last few years. That kind of thing is going to get progressively more common.
I think the "if I had a hybrid, it wouldn't get plugged in" part is what they were calling out: that is now a fossil fuel car even though they could quite comfortably plug it in.
Hybrid cars are, effectively, enablers. The not-even temptation to just top it up, in under a minute, at an entirely acceptable cost (given that you could afford a hybrid, you can afford gas) is the best way to prevent people from actually going electric.
Plus, from an industry perspective, hybrids are the perfect excuse for manufacturers to just keep spending on ICE improvements rather than EV improvements: as long as the total package seems to get more mileage every year, no one's paying attention to the fact that the EV parts don't get improved nearly as much as the ICE parts do. And because hybrids cut into EV sales, manufacturers have the perfect excuse to keep working on ICE tech because "the majority of people are still buying cars with an ICE or ICE component".
Hybrids would be great if people were rational. Instead, people are the exact opposite, and hybrids are the perfect "let's not move to full EV" excuse for consumers and manufacturers alike.
Why do we need chargers in every parking space? Is every space allotted? In our parking structure (five floors) we have about 50 EVs and only four chargers, there’s always at least one spot available. I guess there’s no real harm in it but seems like a waste of resources.
If everybody has an EV it becomes more of a problem and shuffling your car around to leave space for your neighbors is a time sink.
For a while I commuted 80 miles a day which would have meant daily charges were more or less necessary. Having to take the car out for a walk every night would have been irritating.
Generally not really any better or worse. The electric bits added in a PHEV is relatively ancient, simple and reliable tech - ~5 to 20kwh battery plus a small electric motor added to the end of the existing transmission in most cases. Electric motors in vehicles generally have little to no maintenance requirements and just last the lifespan of the vehicle - the stator/rotor never "touch" so there isn't anything that "wears" anything like as much as in a combustion engine and no complex lubrication challenges. The battery will wear over time, but again generally lasts most to all of the lifespan of the vehicle.
In some cases reliability actually improves, as the extremely reliable electric motor can replace things such as reverse gear and the starter motor, reducing complexity of the ICE system and transmission. The only parts being serviced that you pay for continue to be the gas bits exactly as before.
I'll play the devil's advocate here: its because hybrids are boring. Specifically, they accelerate slowly. We live in a world of instant gratification (tweets, tiktok, etc..) People want the same with their cars. Which is why TSLA was successful. Personally, when I think TSLA I think of a car that dominates the 0 to 60 charts for a fraction of a cost the ICE cars on the list.
The idea that hybrids accelerate slowly is probably a leftover stereotype from when the only hybrids for sale were econoboxes like the Prius. The instant torque from an electric motor actually helps with acceleration. These days many of the quickest supercars are hybrids. And there are a bunch of consumer cars where there the hybrid is quicker than the ICE version.
I just don't understand it. A car that can drive ~40 miles on pure electric that has an ICE for longer trips would satisfy the needs of everyone. For like 90+% of people, it would mean never using gas for their commute while also eliminating range anxiety.
I'm especially surprised about the lack of plug-in hybrids for semi trucks. I'd think having a little extra electronic torque would help considerably when accelerating. It doesn't need to go 0-60 in 20 seconds while carrying 80K lbs like the Tesla Semi claims, but certainly having extra power could be useful in some scenarios. Heck, just having regen braking would be a game changer when going down hills. No noise from a Jake Brake, and no worries about burning up brake pads.