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>Hybrids were a mediocre half-measure That is not true. Hybrids can be greener than an full EV. To make EVs palatable, automakers realized they need to use hu

>Hybrids were a mediocre half-measure That is not true. Hybrids can be greener than an full EV. To make EVs palatable, automakers realized they need to use huge batteries with 400+ miles of range. But the average daily commute is much much less than that. The result of which is that you waste a lot of money and CO2 emissions to produce a battery that is 3x too big. A hybrid with a range extender and 1/3 of the battery, can better accommodate the needs of daily commuters while actually being cleaner than an EV since the CO2 emissions from EV manufacturing is almost entirely due to the battery and it takes years (two to three depending on your commute) to offset those emission even against a new ICE car.

lumost 5y ago
This assumes the engine, fuel infrastructure, and weight of the ICE engine is free. It also assumes that the electric infrastructure cannot be fully converted to carbon neutral sources. Lastly it assumes that battery technology will improve at a comparable rate to ICE technology which has been extremely wrong in the last 10 years.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Well, the fuel infrastructure already exists, and the weight of the ICE engine is at least partially offset by the smaller battery. I'm extremely skeptical of any claim that hybrids are better for the environment than EVs in aggregate, but for specific use cases over certain timeframes the difference may be small.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    This assumes that a hybrid has to have a smaller battery to fit the ICE engine and/or that the ICE engine has equivalent weight/density. On the one hand, volume versus weight an ICE engine is generally "lighter" than if that equivalent space were tightly packed with battery cells. But on the other hand a car is not going to tightly pack the equivalent volume, most modern EV designs are a "skateboard" layout with all the batteries on the floor of the car. The front hood of the car is typically at that point unused space and many modern electrics place there now a "frunk" ("front trunk" or "froot"/"front boot" if you prefer Britishisms) for "bonus" cargo space. From that perspective, a hybrid has "free" space for a gas generator by taking "back" the frunk space, but they have to shrink the battery because of the added weight of the gas generator. (The skateboard has the physical space either way, it shrinks to keep the overall car weight below an aerodynamic threshold, not to yield space for the gas generator.)
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Yes. I have a lot of problems with the assertion ab ove you. It takes carbon to produce a ICE car too
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Not one that's already on the road.
  - pkolaczk 5y ago
    It takes carbon to produce a BEV as well. And somehow BEVs are a lot more expensive (up to 40% more, when there are no subsidies) to produce than HEVs, which suggests more resources and energy is spent on producing a BEV. For many people that initial price difference is high enough that buying a BEV instead of HEV makes totally no economical sense - so likely the lower emissions from usage are not going to offset higher emissions on production, for the whole lifetime of a car. The BEV economics work only if you drive really a lot on long distances, but that's unfortunately the area where BEVs lose to HEVs on convenience.
glogla 5y ago
Only when you take for granted the whole infrastructure of mining millions of years old ferns, shipping them around world in pipelines and ships and trucks to burn them in tiny explosions many times a second to get wheels to turn. Which, taking a step back, if franky ridiculous. Why not use a battery and the planet-wide instant power delivery system we built and are using for most of everything else?
- fossuser 5y ago
  I think people get blinded by status quo bias. Imagine we were operating with 100% EVs today, would people be advocating for adding in gasoline tech as hybrids?
  - glogla 5y ago
    That's why I like this (10 years old, wow!) Nissan Leaf ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn__9hLJKAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn__9hLJKAk It is obviously ridiculously over the top, but I think it paints interesting analogy.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Why not can you imagine having the freedom to change your car nearly instantly and go wherever you want. No range anxiety
    - loonster 5y ago
      Imagine how cheap gas would be if no one wanted it.
      - fossuser 5y ago
        I’d guess it’d be obscenely expensive without economies of scale based on current demand and distribution. As far as “no range anxiety” people in that world would just be making similar arguments, “what if there’s no nearby gas station”, “what if it’s out of gas”, “I can’t just plug-in anywhere” etc.
epmaybe 5y ago
I think that you’re assuming that the hybrid in mind has plug in, otherwise you’re not really making the case for using gas to inevitably charge the battery (regenerative braking still requires having had some speed generated by gas). As far as I know, the vast majority of hybrids that Toyota makes are not plug in.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  > I think that you’re assuming that the hybrid in mind has plug in, otherwise you’re not really making the case for using gas to inevitably charge the battery (regenerative braking still requires having had some speed generated by gas). This logic is plain silly. You're not simultaneously on the gas and the brakes at the same time. The weight of the batteries and electric motors pales in comparison to the whole vehicle.
  - w-j-w 5y ago
    The difference is how the electricity in the battery is generated. Even if your local power grid runs on coal, the electricity coming out of the wall is WAY greener than electricity coming from the gas motor. If a hybrid doesn't plug in, then the only way to get electricity into the battery is by using energy which is created by running the gas engine. Sometimes this is direct, and sometimes this energy first gets turned into momentum of the car to be later reclaimed by regenerative braking. It doesn't matter that they don't happen at the same time.
- dekhn 5y ago
  regenerative braking doesn't care what mechanism you used to get to a speed. If I want to charge the battery, I can press a button and the gas engine comes on and charges the battery directly. Regen is just to reduce loss due to wasted kintec energy.
- pkolaczk 5y ago
  The non-plugin hybrids are just as environmentally friendly as full electric cars, because they have 10x-20x smaller battery and that makes a huge difference in initial emissions. The OP likely wrote about PHEVs which indeed have batteries 3x-5x smaller than BEVs. If you count in all the related emissions, hybrids seems to be the greenest cars you can get now: https://greenercars.org/greenest-meanest/greenest https://greenercars.org/greenest-meanest/greenest
Forbo 5y ago
Average age of a car as of 2016 was 11.6 years and climbing, so it seems like the vast majority of those in operation would easily hit the offset threshold.
- irrational 5y ago
  Yeah, I have one car that is 21 years old and the other is 17 years old. They still drive great and have no issues. I truly don't understand people that get new cars every 2-3 years. Not having a car payment for decades is great. Plus our insurance is super cheap.
  - Infinitesimus 5y ago
    2-3 years is leasing territory (which some people do because they enjoy changing vehicles often.) Car safety is much much better now than they were 5+ years ago however so it is not unreasonable for someone to change cars that often. I'd certainly not want to be in a 10yr old car in a highway accident if I could help it. (Also, some newer cars are just nicer to drive with creature comforts people care about)
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    if you grow up with old unreliable cars, you dont want to repeat that experience.
    - vmladenov 5y ago
      But old and unreliable are not necessarily dependent metrics.
    - irrational 5y ago
      That sounds like a maintenance problem rather than an old problem. If you stay on top of maintenance old cars can be just as reliable as a new car (and potentially even more reliable since new doesn't necessarily mean bug free).
- majormajor 5y ago
notJim 5y ago
> Hybrids can be greener than an full EV Any cite for this? It's not totally implausible to me, at least given current power generation.
- Forge36 5y ago
  My entire commute is covered by a 22 mile battery. I've put 600 miles on the battery this current tank of gas. I've not used gas yet. While perhaps not typical, the compromise can be a massive improvement.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Same here. Got a Volvo XC60 T8, last time I filled up with fuel was in March. Almost all my local journeys are covered in EV mode entirely and I drive pretty much daily. And last year I was able to do a cross-continent journey without worrying where to charge on the way. Having said all of the above - even according to Volvo's own stats, something absolutely stupid like 60% of all buyers never ever plug these in, it's just a tax dodge scam for a lot of people. But if you are one of the people who do, it works fantastically well.
    - erik_seaberg 5y ago
      Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today. My next car might be a hybrid, but I can’t really consider a BEV until I see that a large majority of apartment parking spaces have chargers.
      - gambiting 5y ago
        >>Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today. Well, I'd love to believe this, but the matter of fact is that the tax structure around hybrids is completely messed up here in UK. When I got my Volvo, basically as a company car you could either get the highest non-hybrid model, the T6, with about 300bhp and pay like 30% tax on it every year, or get the T8 hybrid, with 400bhp, and pay zero tax on it every year. And of course the government never checks whether you actually ever plug your hybrid in or not, so if you never do it's actually much worse for economy and emissions than the T6 which is much more to tax. It's insanity.
onethought 5y ago
This doesn’t make sense. The battery is 100% recyclable, and if you never use it’s full range the battery literally lasts longer. This sounds like ICE shilling devoid of the actual facts
bsder 5y ago
> A hybrid with a range extender and 1/3 of the battery, can better accommodate the needs of daily commuters You are describing the Chevy Volt (hybrid). And GM quit making them because the Bolt (all electric) is so much cheaper to produce. Consumer convenience or emissions is irrelevant. Hybrids are, unfortunately, a dead end because everybody is assuming that they are going to get swept away by all-electric once the infrastructure is in place. They're right--but everybody is assuming that will take 10 years when in reality it will take more like 25.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > And GM quit making them because ...they couldn't compete with the offerings, including plug-ins, from firms with established track records in the hybrid space; especially Toyota.

lumost 5y ago

This assumes the engine, fuel infrastructure, and weight of the ICE engine is free. It also assumes that the electric infrastructure cannot be fully converted to carbon neutral sources. Lastly it assumes that battery technology will improve at a comparable rate to ICE technology which has been extremely wrong in the last 10 years.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Well, the fuel infrastructure already exists, and the weight of the ICE engine is at least partially offset by the smaller battery. I'm extremely skeptical of any claim that hybrids are better for the environment than EVs in aggregate, but for specific use cases over certain timeframes the difference may be small.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  This assumes that a hybrid has to have a smaller battery to fit the ICE engine and/or that the ICE engine has equivalent weight/density. On the one hand, volume versus weight an ICE engine is generally "lighter" than if that equivalent space were tightly packed with battery cells. But on the other hand a car is not going to tightly pack the equivalent volume, most modern EV designs are a "skateboard" layout with all the batteries on the floor of the car. The front hood of the car is typically at that point unused space and many modern electrics place there now a "frunk" ("front trunk" or "froot"/"front boot" if you prefer Britishisms) for "bonus" cargo space. From that perspective, a hybrid has "free" space for a gas generator by taking "back" the frunk space, but they have to shrink the battery because of the added weight of the gas generator. (The skateboard has the physical space either way, it shrinks to keep the overall car weight below an aerodynamic threshold, not to yield space for the gas generator.)
N1H1L 5y ago
Yes. I have a lot of problems with the assertion ab ove you. It takes carbon to produce a ICE car too
- beerandt 5y ago
  Not one that's already on the road.
- pkolaczk 5y ago
  It takes carbon to produce a BEV as well. And somehow BEVs are a lot more expensive (up to 40% more, when there are no subsidies) to produce than HEVs, which suggests more resources and energy is spent on producing a BEV. For many people that initial price difference is high enough that buying a BEV instead of HEV makes totally no economical sense - so likely the lower emissions from usage are not going to offset higher emissions on production, for the whole lifetime of a car. The BEV economics work only if you drive really a lot on long distances, but that's unfortunately the area where BEVs lose to HEVs on convenience.

glogla 5y ago

Only when you take for granted the whole infrastructure of mining millions of years old ferns, shipping them around world in pipelines and ships and trucks to burn them in tiny explosions many times a second to get wheels to turn. Which, taking a step back, if franky ridiculous. Why not use a battery and the planet-wide instant power delivery system we built and are using for most of everything else?

fossuser 5y ago
I think people get blinded by status quo bias. Imagine we were operating with 100% EVs today, would people be advocating for adding in gasoline tech as hybrids?
- glogla 5y ago
  That's why I like this (10 years old, wow!) Nissan Leaf ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn__9hLJKAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn__9hLJKAk It is obviously ridiculously over the top, but I think it paints interesting analogy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Why not can you imagine having the freedom to change your car nearly instantly and go wherever you want. No range anxiety
  - loonster 5y ago
    Imagine how cheap gas would be if no one wanted it.
    - fossuser 5y ago
      I’d guess it’d be obscenely expensive without economies of scale based on current demand and distribution. As far as “no range anxiety” people in that world would just be making similar arguments, “what if there’s no nearby gas station”, “what if it’s out of gas”, “I can’t just plug-in anywhere” etc.

epmaybe 5y ago

I think that you’re assuming that the hybrid in mind has plug in, otherwise you’re not really making the case for using gas to inevitably charge the battery (regenerative braking still requires having had some speed generated by gas). As far as I know, the vast majority of hybrids that Toyota makes are not plug in.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
> I think that you’re assuming that the hybrid in mind has plug in, otherwise you’re not really making the case for using gas to inevitably charge the battery (regenerative braking still requires having had some speed generated by gas). This logic is plain silly. You're not simultaneously on the gas and the brakes at the same time. The weight of the batteries and electric motors pales in comparison to the whole vehicle.
- w-j-w 5y ago
  The difference is how the electricity in the battery is generated. Even if your local power grid runs on coal, the electricity coming out of the wall is WAY greener than electricity coming from the gas motor. If a hybrid doesn't plug in, then the only way to get electricity into the battery is by using energy which is created by running the gas engine. Sometimes this is direct, and sometimes this energy first gets turned into momentum of the car to be later reclaimed by regenerative braking. It doesn't matter that they don't happen at the same time.
dekhn 5y ago
regenerative braking doesn't care what mechanism you used to get to a speed. If I want to charge the battery, I can press a button and the gas engine comes on and charges the battery directly. Regen is just to reduce loss due to wasted kintec energy.
pkolaczk 5y ago
The non-plugin hybrids are just as environmentally friendly as full electric cars, because they have 10x-20x smaller battery and that makes a huge difference in initial emissions. The OP likely wrote about PHEVs which indeed have batteries 3x-5x smaller than BEVs. If you count in all the related emissions, hybrids seems to be the greenest cars you can get now: https://greenercars.org/greenest-meanest/greenest https://greenercars.org/greenest-meanest/greenest

Forbo 5y ago

Average age of a car as of 2016 was 11.6 years and climbing, so it seems like the vast majority of those in operation would easily hit the offset threshold.

irrational 5y ago
Yeah, I have one car that is 21 years old and the other is 17 years old. They still drive great and have no issues. I truly don't understand people that get new cars every 2-3 years. Not having a car payment for decades is great. Plus our insurance is super cheap.
- Infinitesimus 5y ago
  2-3 years is leasing territory (which some people do because they enjoy changing vehicles often.) Car safety is much much better now than they were 5+ years ago however so it is not unreasonable for someone to change cars that often. I'd certainly not want to be in a 10yr old car in a highway accident if I could help it. (Also, some newer cars are just nicer to drive with creature comforts people care about)
- lallysingh 5y ago
  if you grow up with old unreliable cars, you dont want to repeat that experience.
  - vmladenov 5y ago
    But old and unreliable are not necessarily dependent metrics.
  - irrational 5y ago
    That sounds like a maintenance problem rather than an old problem. If you stay on top of maintenance old cars can be just as reliable as a new car (and potentially even more reliable since new doesn't necessarily mean bug free).
majormajor 5y ago

notJim 5y ago

> Hybrids can be greener than an full EV Any cite for this? It's not totally implausible to me, at least given current power generation.

Forge36 5y ago
My entire commute is covered by a 22 mile battery. I've put 600 miles on the battery this current tank of gas. I've not used gas yet. While perhaps not typical, the compromise can be a massive improvement.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Same here. Got a Volvo XC60 T8, last time I filled up with fuel was in March. Almost all my local journeys are covered in EV mode entirely and I drive pretty much daily. And last year I was able to do a cross-continent journey without worrying where to charge on the way. Having said all of the above - even according to Volvo's own stats, something absolutely stupid like 60% of all buyers never ever plug these in, it's just a tax dodge scam for a lot of people. But if you are one of the people who do, it works fantastically well.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today. My next car might be a hybrid, but I can’t really consider a BEV until I see that a large majority of apartment parking spaces have chargers.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      >>Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today. Well, I'd love to believe this, but the matter of fact is that the tax structure around hybrids is completely messed up here in UK. When I got my Volvo, basically as a company car you could either get the highest non-hybrid model, the T6, with about 300bhp and pay like 30% tax on it every year, or get the T8 hybrid, with 400bhp, and pay zero tax on it every year. And of course the government never checks whether you actually ever plug your hybrid in or not, so if you never do it's actually much worse for economy and emissions than the T6 which is much more to tax. It's insanity.

onethought 5y ago

This doesn’t make sense. The battery is 100% recyclable, and if you never use it’s full range the battery literally lasts longer. This sounds like ICE shilling devoid of the actual facts

bsder 5y ago

> A hybrid with a range extender and 1/3 of the battery, can better accommodate the needs of daily commuters You are describing the Chevy Volt (hybrid). And GM quit making them because the Bolt (all electric) is so much cheaper to produce. Consumer convenience or emissions is irrelevant. Hybrids are, unfortunately, a dead end because everybody is assuming that they are going to get swept away by all-electric once the infrastructure is in place. They're right--but everybody is assuming that will take 10 years when in reality it will take more like 25.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> And GM quit making them because ...they couldn't compete with the offerings, including plug-ins, from firms with established track records in the hybrid space; especially Toyota.