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To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries. So, the problem is to get batteries on t

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries. So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity. Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".

tw04 5y ago
>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    There’s a wide range of “reasonable times” a car can get to 70 mph and the differences can definitely be noticed by normal drivers on public roads.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    Doesn't matter. Consumers like the specs, and showing off how quick they can get to 40mph on a residential street.
  - usefulcat 5y ago
    I guess that’s a rhetorical question? Because clearly many people do actually prefer a BMW to a geo metro, despite the price difference.
  - Armisael16 5y ago
    There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer). Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.
    - zenexer 5y ago
      I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration? It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideration for the trajectories of other vehicles? It’s not that difficult, and I live in an area with notoriously short on-ramps. You’ve still got plenty of road to match the speed of the cars on the highway and shift your position so you land between two cars. Accelerating as you’re about to merge just makes that more difficult, especially with a short on-ramp. Yeah, sometimes people don’t know how to drive and stop or slow down on on-ramps. I don’t care how fast my car can accelerate; if the person in front of me isn’t reaching the same speed as the cars on the highway, I’m going to stop much farther back on the ramp, wait for them to do their thing, and resume proper merging once they’re out of the way. I don’t want to have to deal with flooring it and trying to time everything while accelerating.
      - philistine 5y ago
        Have you ever driven a plug-in Prius (the Prius Prime here in Québec)? It's got wonderful acceleration when using the all-electric mode.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        What opportunity do you have for dramatic acceleration driving legally on a public road? 0-60 in 3s vs 20s how much time can that really add up to shaving off your drive?
  - gifnamething 5y ago
    Driving for fun on public roads is safe, legal, and popular. You won't wish it away.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- brightball 5y ago
  Our Pacifica plug-in hybrid minivan is fantastic. We go months without refueling.
- multjoy 5y ago
  The met police use a variety of PHEVs as response vehicles including BMWs and Mitsubishi. Performance is not an issue.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  My Volt has 300lb/ft of torque and accelerates quite lovely. Sport mode is a fun drive. Much more pep than the VW diesel I used to have. And the car drives for 80-90km on battery without touching the ICE. I go months without filling. I drive 93% electric, only using gas for road trips. You've looked at the wrong PHEVs.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    > You've looked at the wrong PHEVs. You’re looking at a PHEV that no longer exists.
- aserr 5y ago
  I would guess that performance isn’t the main consideration for most folks, but you should check out the BMW 330e and 530e. Both are plug-in hybrids with very respectable performance numbers. You can even get them with the M-sport package (not that it makes them faster, but it makes them a little sportier).
- mattlondon 5y ago
  Many I've seen in Europe are pretty fast - Merc 350e for example has 0-62mph of 5.9s and top speed of 155mph. BMW 330e is 6.1s and 140mph. Granted some are slower, but no one ever bought a brand like Toyota etc expecting high-performance, so it is not surprising if they are slower (FWIW my Toyota non-plugin hybrid is actually pretty fast from a standstill, but won't win any races beyond 20mph) 6s to 62mph is pretty nippy - if you need faster than 6s 0-62mph then you are likely in a fairly small niche group. Looks like the base Tesla 3 is 0-62 in 5.8s and 140mph top speed so pretty comparable.
  - tw04 5y ago
    A model 3 performance does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds with some guys going faster on a track with sticky tires. Someone looking at a Benz (at least in the US) isn’t buying the base model 3. The Benz starts at $54k in the US, that’s definitely model 3 performance territory.
    - mattlondon 5y ago
      In the UK, a Tesla 3 performance is £60k. A base Tesla 3 is about £43k. An equivalent Merc 300e is £45k. Base Tesla 3 and base 300e appear to be mostly the same price and mostly same 0-62 performance at 5.8s and 6.1s.
- afbadfatdh 5y ago
  >The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The Chevy Volt was pretty sporty (damn the suits who killed it), and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE >The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes Well there's your problem. The fact that EVs are toys is making you think PHEVs are also toys. There are PHEVs currently on the market that can compete with the Ford Focus and the Honda Accord.
- pandaman 5y ago
  BMW's and Porsche's PHEVs are pretty good, why other companies cannot follow the same formula (add batteries and electric motor to a regular car without crippling the existing drivetrain) is a mystery. It appears most want you to buy their BEV so they intentionally make PHEVs unappealing.
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    We looked at the BMW X5 Hybrid recently and it’s kind of a joke. There’s a large (24kWh) battery pack but it only gets 31 miles of range on a full charge. The charge itself takes eight hours on a 240V circuit because they only installed a 16A charger (the i3 has a 32A charger.) Meanwhile it’s gas mileage is lower than the equivalent ICE version. It does not feel like a serious effort to move a lot of customers onto EV usage, more like a compliance car. No idea about the Porches but I understand those to be at an even less affordable price point.
    - pandaman 5y ago
      The message I replied to was about performance, not range. PHEVs do not have 300 miles electric range, even BMW. I have an 45e and have no problems with it: it fully charges in ~7 hours, I drove about 6K miles last year and filled total 5 times (not full tanks, I live in an apartment building with shared chargers that go out of order for weeks so I fill up when charger is broken and I have less than 1/4 tank), it still has 90% of tank filled in the early November.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      I live in a rural area and 31 miles of range is enough to drive into the largest town where everything is, and back again, without the ICE coming on. That's not a "joke."
      - matthewdgreen 5y ago
        31 miles with a small/light/inexpensive battery and reasonably rapid charging would not be a joke, particularly if you also got some gas-only efficiency benefits. But the X5 has a relatively huge and heavy 24kWh battery pack - nearly 1/3 the size of a Model Y, a car that gets 10x the electric range. The result is a substantial cost increase over the gas-only X5, plus gas mileage that is actually worse. Moreover, the internal charger is so weak that you can’t add any substantial range by charging at your destination unless you occupy a charger all day long (the Model Y charges at up to 42 miles/hr on AC, the BMW will add maybe 4.)
- VintageCool 5y ago
  I've carpooled in a Prius and a Honda Civic Hybrid. Both of those cars seemed to be extremely capable of accelerating to pass other cars on the freeway. I was riding in the Prius one time and my friend was complaining about the Prius being slow, when we got stuck behind a car going 60 mph. Beep boop, he idly jumped up to 80, passed the guy, dropped back to 67, and went back to complaining that his car was slow. I was terribly impressed; my car would've had to put more work in to do that.
- ypzhang2 5y ago
  Panamera turbo s e-hybrid or the cayenne turbo s e-hybrid certainly doesn’t have “abysmal” performance
gpm 5y ago
Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Cost isn’t the same thing as complexity. EVs are probably more expensive because batteries are expensive.
  - natch 5y ago
    You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question… Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?
    - mulmen 5y ago
      How do the EV incentives compare to fossil fuel subsidies?
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Where are the incentives taking the price of a Bolt that low? My LEAF just turned 7 and I'd probably buy a Bolt immediately if I could get one in the $11K range. (The LEAF has been great all around, but only being able to count on 75 miles is annoying from time to time.)
      - natch 5y ago
        California. I have to admit it’s second hand (and outdated.. last year…) information, but worth looking into imho even though I’d rather see anyone get a Tesla.
R0b0t1 5y ago
> Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs". Yes, but this exists now, with the government handouts and tax credits. They overwhelmingly go to affluent people who need these things the least. There are unsexy trades like replacing oil burning heaters for gas or wood pellet stoves but these often aren't viewed as green enough and the people who would benefit have no one advocating for them.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  consumers don't prefer oil, but what matters is whether their properly had a gas line.
brightball 5y ago
You need lighter, more energy dense batteries that can charge faster. You get all of that with Graphene. It’s just a question of cost. I’m honestly shocked that they haven’t put them in the top end Tesla’s yet to showcase the technology.
hannob 5y ago
> For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity. There have been studies on how PHEVs are used in the real world and this is just not what's happening, see e.g.: https://theicct.org/publications/phev-real-world-usage-sept2020 https://theicct.org/publications/phev-real-world-usage-sept2...
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  On the other hand, the study proves that PHEVs with decent battery capacity actually do that, the average is just too low: >. Most PHEVs have type-approval all-electric ranges of 30–60 km and electrify 5,000–10,000 km a year. PHEVs with high all-electric ranges of 80 km or more achieve 12,000–20,000 km mean annual electric mileages, which is comparable to the annual mileage of the car fleet in Germany and the United States.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  > For private cars, the average utility factor (UF)—the portion of kilometers driven on electric motor versus kilometers driven on combustion engine—is 69% for NEDC type approval but only around 37% for real-world driving Not a majority, but 37% of your driving on electric is a significant chunk. Would And to take a Prius Prime for an example, you can still have a very efficient vehicle when you're running in normal hybrid mode: > C/D observed 75-mph highway driving (hybrid mode): 47 mpg / 49 mpg / 47 mpg If you're trying to make the most difference with limited battery production, that's 8.8 kWh of batteries for a Prius Prime. You can make more than 6 of them with the batteries that go into a single "low range" Model 3 (54 kWh). Six cars doing a bit over 1/3 of their miles in electric mode, or one car doing all of its miles in electric mode? That's a relatively short electric range car, if 25 miles isn't doing enough for most people there's probably a good middle ground where you use half the batteries of a long range EV but cover 90% of your milage in EV mode. This is of course ignoring that the Model 3 is a lot more fun to drive than a Prius Prime, but just to make the point about battery usage.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    It was kinda my dream to have drop-in kits that would turn any ICE into a plug-in micro-hybrid and just run the electric system off extra batteries for as long as possible, and then kicking in the alternator once finally required. Could work as more and more stuff becomes electric in cars instead of running off accessory belt.
speedgoose 5y ago
Almost all affordable PHEV are not very good cars though. They are basically shitty electric cars and a shitty fossil cars combined.
afbadfatdh 5y ago
>Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs". I already view them as battery hogs. It baffles me that anyone thinks they make sense. We have the battery supply to either make a small minority of cars EVs or to make all cars PHEVs. PHEVs are cheaper, more practical, and more environmentally sound.
alex_young 5y ago
Do you know how to get more batteries on the road? Make more batteries and sell them for less. This is Tesla’s business model and a huge reason Li batteries are so much less expensive today. I’d say the inverted logic is more like buy electric cars now even though they don’t hold their resale value due to economies of scale catching up on you.
Gravityloss 5y ago
Yes, exactly. One can think of it this way also: if 85 kWh of battery modules is made, how should they be placed to reduce the most CO2. You can put them into 8 plugin hybrid cars with 10 kWh battery in each, and it's used for commuting in each of them, replacing 80% of yearly kilometers with electric ones, that's maybe 10 x 20,000 x 0.8 = 160,000 km electric driving. Those cars still drive 10 x 20,000 x 0.2 = 40,000 km with gasoline (for long road trips etc). Or you can put them all into one Tesla. If it's a regular private car, it drives 20,000 km per year and thus we have 20,000 km of electric driving. So in this calculation, it would make more sense from environmental point of view to put the battery modules in hybrid cars. Now, maybe the Tesla is a Taxi and is actually driven 100,000 km per year, then it's different. Or maybe the luxury Teslas that sit on driveways as status symbols are changing how people think, or are driving innovation and have massive leverage that way. But it's complicated.
- Retric 5y ago
  Plug in batteries don’t last very long because they charge and discharge every day. Due to this they end up either costing several times as much manufacturing capacity as you’re assuming or they simply get driven as non plug in hybrids which makes them less efficient than EV’s. Further ramping up battery production isn’t any kind of long term barrier, so plug end hybrids just result in less investment in battery manufacturing and thus slower adoption of EV’s.
  - zeckalpha 5y ago
    Better to use the batteries than hauling around mostly unused batteries all the time.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Plug in hybrids need to haul around an engine, gas tank, transmission, exhaust system etc. They also need extra batteries over a standard hybrid.
      - 5y ago
afarrell 5y ago
> I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs". Adding social punishments here would hurt momentum. It is far better to reward imperfect progress than to create a social environment where people feel like they'll never be good enough.
nebula8804 5y ago
I mean your logic is sound but car companies dragged their feet for years on even plug in hybrids and so just like the mulled wine example in the article, it wouldn't work in the real world. GM had an amazing things with the Voltec architecture. ~50 miles on electric was more than enough for even the most discerning customers yet they never really extended it past the Chevy Volt. It should have been rolled out to all of their vehicles. That would help push them to also drive down the cost and eventually make it the standard powertrain on their cars. Over the course of 1 generation you have eliminated a large chunk of co2 emissions from transportation. Instead they never introduced it to other cars, now they have discontinued the Volt(because who wants an overpriced Chevy Cruze anyway?) and now they nothing for sale because of battery issues. Battery issues will be resolved in the next few years as more factories come online so I don't see how a "battery hog" issue will arise unless there is a fundamental shortage of raw materials. Seems like the battery companies are also investing in recycling so this eventually becomes a closed loop system.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  There is also something counter-intuitive - we are making better and cheaper batteries because we are using so many batteries and planning to use _so much_ more. The cost curve and the profit motive are wonderful things.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China, because our leadership thinks that since we don't have a planned economy, no planning of any kind is needed at all.
- bruce511 5y ago
  I could not agree with you more, except for the small problem of range. I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day. Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet) But I concur with the premise-work on reducing driven-miles not on "what percentage of vehicles" are electric.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    For vehicles which are in nearly continuous use, the capital costs are essentially irrelevant next to fuel and maintenance, both of which are far cheaper for EVs. It might take a few years to pay for replacements.
    - ianai 5y ago
      Right, electrics can be optimized to a usage. Some buses could have capacitor banks recharged at every stop. That sort of tactic would be nonsense for a daily driver.
      - pjerem 5y ago
        There is that in my city. A new bus line able to recharge bus capacitors at some stops. It looked like pretty hard to implement but it’s working interestingly well.
Pxtl 5y ago
Except that the kind of long distance drivers you suggest in the first paragraph would get minimal benefit from a PHEV, since it only covers the first 40km or thereabouts. My wife and I only put like 10000km per year on our car, so I generally run down the battery fully on my PHEV and just touch a bit of the gas. That would barely make a dent in a multi-hour commuter's usage. The hard part is the short-term solutions are unpalatable: pushing back hard on oversized vehicles that are wasteful of fuel and hazardous to people who choose small, efficient, green options. A Hummer EV uses so much battery to build you could make three Nissan Leafs... but if you didn't make the Hummer EV, the driver would stick to a monstrous huge gas-burner. So fundamentally, fighting climate change in a world without plentiful batteries demands strong disincentive to driving oversized vehicles. Which is, of course, politically unpalatable because destroying the earth, obstructing visibility, and threatening your fellow drivers in a hypermassive oaf of a truck is freedom.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
I read somewhere PHEV users don’t really bother charging effectively making them even worse than gas guzzlers. Also that seems what Toyota is thinking with their anti-BEV lobbyism.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Hugely variable. I only burn about 20 gallons of gas per year. About one third of that is to avoid fuel spoiling, one third of that is for when I need longer trips, and one third when I screw up charging. Even so, I get about 40MPG, so much better than an average vehicle. It does sting to maintain an engine for 800 miles a year.
  - alliao 5y ago
    never thought about that, do the oil come out looking new?
    - mlyle 5y ago
      I don't change my own oil anymore, but I imagine that it's just barely picked up some color-- Honda specifies synthetic and it's only a few hundred miles per change. Pretty soon I'm going to be out of warranty and I'm going to stretch the oil change interval a bit beyond what they suggest-- 16 mos instead of a year. It just feels wasteful.
jnsaff2 5y ago
This also has an econ person fallacy in it. PHEV is only ever more environmently friendly when it gets plugged in as much as possible (in reality every night to cover next days drives). And people rarely do as PHEV is marketed to sell SUV’s by the BMW’s of the world and also reduce their fleet emission fines on paper by not making their customers inconvenience themselves.

tw04 5y ago

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  There’s a wide range of “reasonable times” a car can get to 70 mph and the differences can definitely be noticed by normal drivers on public roads.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Doesn't matter. Consumers like the specs, and showing off how quick they can get to 40mph on a residential street.
- usefulcat 5y ago
  I guess that’s a rhetorical question? Because clearly many people do actually prefer a BMW to a geo metro, despite the price difference.
- Armisael16 5y ago
  There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer). Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.
  - zenexer 5y ago
    I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration? It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideration for the trajectories of other vehicles? It’s not that difficult, and I live in an area with notoriously short on-ramps. You’ve still got plenty of road to match the speed of the cars on the highway and shift your position so you land between two cars. Accelerating as you’re about to merge just makes that more difficult, especially with a short on-ramp. Yeah, sometimes people don’t know how to drive and stop or slow down on on-ramps. I don’t care how fast my car can accelerate; if the person in front of me isn’t reaching the same speed as the cars on the highway, I’m going to stop much farther back on the ramp, wait for them to do their thing, and resume proper merging once they’re out of the way. I don’t want to have to deal with flooring it and trying to time everything while accelerating.
    - philistine 5y ago
      Have you ever driven a plug-in Prius (the Prius Prime here in Québec)? It's got wonderful acceleration when using the all-electric mode.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        What opportunity do you have for dramatic acceleration driving legally on a public road? 0-60 in 3s vs 20s how much time can that really add up to shaving off your drive?
- gifnamething 5y ago
  Driving for fun on public roads is safe, legal, and popular. You won't wish it away.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
brightball 5y ago
Our Pacifica plug-in hybrid minivan is fantastic. We go months without refueling.
multjoy 5y ago
The met police use a variety of PHEVs as response vehicles including BMWs and Mitsubishi. Performance is not an issue.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
My Volt has 300lb/ft of torque and accelerates quite lovely. Sport mode is a fun drive. Much more pep than the VW diesel I used to have. And the car drives for 80-90km on battery without touching the ICE. I go months without filling. I drive 93% electric, only using gas for road trips. You've looked at the wrong PHEVs.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > You've looked at the wrong PHEVs. You’re looking at a PHEV that no longer exists.
aserr 5y ago
I would guess that performance isn’t the main consideration for most folks, but you should check out the BMW 330e and 530e. Both are plug-in hybrids with very respectable performance numbers. You can even get them with the M-sport package (not that it makes them faster, but it makes them a little sportier).
mattlondon 5y ago
Many I've seen in Europe are pretty fast - Merc 350e for example has 0-62mph of 5.9s and top speed of 155mph. BMW 330e is 6.1s and 140mph. Granted some are slower, but no one ever bought a brand like Toyota etc expecting high-performance, so it is not surprising if they are slower (FWIW my Toyota non-plugin hybrid is actually pretty fast from a standstill, but won't win any races beyond 20mph) 6s to 62mph is pretty nippy - if you need faster than 6s 0-62mph then you are likely in a fairly small niche group. Looks like the base Tesla 3 is 0-62 in 5.8s and 140mph top speed so pretty comparable.
- tw04 5y ago
  A model 3 performance does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds with some guys going faster on a track with sticky tires. Someone looking at a Benz (at least in the US) isn’t buying the base model 3. The Benz starts at $54k in the US, that’s definitely model 3 performance territory.
  - mattlondon 5y ago
    In the UK, a Tesla 3 performance is £60k. A base Tesla 3 is about £43k. An equivalent Merc 300e is £45k. Base Tesla 3 and base 300e appear to be mostly the same price and mostly same 0-62 performance at 5.8s and 6.1s.
afbadfatdh 5y ago
>The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The Chevy Volt was pretty sporty (damn the suits who killed it), and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE >The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes Well there's your problem. The fact that EVs are toys is making you think PHEVs are also toys. There are PHEVs currently on the market that can compete with the Ford Focus and the Honda Accord.
pandaman 5y ago
BMW's and Porsche's PHEVs are pretty good, why other companies cannot follow the same formula (add batteries and electric motor to a regular car without crippling the existing drivetrain) is a mystery. It appears most want you to buy their BEV so they intentionally make PHEVs unappealing.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  We looked at the BMW X5 Hybrid recently and it’s kind of a joke. There’s a large (24kWh) battery pack but it only gets 31 miles of range on a full charge. The charge itself takes eight hours on a 240V circuit because they only installed a 16A charger (the i3 has a 32A charger.) Meanwhile it’s gas mileage is lower than the equivalent ICE version. It does not feel like a serious effort to move a lot of customers onto EV usage, more like a compliance car. No idea about the Porches but I understand those to be at an even less affordable price point.
  - pandaman 5y ago
    The message I replied to was about performance, not range. PHEVs do not have 300 miles electric range, even BMW. I have an 45e and have no problems with it: it fully charges in ~7 hours, I drove about 6K miles last year and filled total 5 times (not full tanks, I live in an apartment building with shared chargers that go out of order for weeks so I fill up when charger is broken and I have less than 1/4 tank), it still has 90% of tank filled in the early November.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    I live in a rural area and 31 miles of range is enough to drive into the largest town where everything is, and back again, without the ICE coming on. That's not a "joke."
    - matthewdgreen 5y ago
      31 miles with a small/light/inexpensive battery and reasonably rapid charging would not be a joke, particularly if you also got some gas-only efficiency benefits. But the X5 has a relatively huge and heavy 24kWh battery pack - nearly 1/3 the size of a Model Y, a car that gets 10x the electric range. The result is a substantial cost increase over the gas-only X5, plus gas mileage that is actually worse. Moreover, the internal charger is so weak that you can’t add any substantial range by charging at your destination unless you occupy a charger all day long (the Model Y charges at up to 42 miles/hr on AC, the BMW will add maybe 4.)
VintageCool 5y ago
I've carpooled in a Prius and a Honda Civic Hybrid. Both of those cars seemed to be extremely capable of accelerating to pass other cars on the freeway. I was riding in the Prius one time and my friend was complaining about the Prius being slow, when we got stuck behind a car going 60 mph. Beep boop, he idly jumped up to 80, passed the guy, dropped back to 67, and went back to complaining that his car was slow. I was terribly impressed; my car would've had to put more work in to do that.
ypzhang2 5y ago
Panamera turbo s e-hybrid or the cayenne turbo s e-hybrid certainly doesn’t have “abysmal” performance

gpm 5y ago

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

willcipriano 5y ago
I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Cost isn’t the same thing as complexity. EVs are probably more expensive because batteries are expensive.
- natch 5y ago
  You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question… Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?
  - mulmen 5y ago
    How do the EV incentives compare to fossil fuel subsidies?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Where are the incentives taking the price of a Bolt that low? My LEAF just turned 7 and I'd probably buy a Bolt immediately if I could get one in the $11K range. (The LEAF has been great all around, but only being able to count on 75 miles is annoying from time to time.)
    - natch 5y ago
      California. I have to admit it’s second hand (and outdated.. last year…) information, but worth looking into imho even though I’d rather see anyone get a Tesla.

R0b0t1 5y ago

> Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs". Yes, but this exists now, with the government handouts and tax credits. They overwhelmingly go to affluent people who need these things the least. There are unsexy trades like replacing oil burning heaters for gas or wood pellet stoves but these often aren't viewed as green enough and the people who would benefit have no one advocating for them.

alisonkisk 5y ago
consumers don't prefer oil, but what matters is whether their properly had a gas line.

brightball 5y ago

You need lighter, more energy dense batteries that can charge faster. You get all of that with Graphene. It’s just a question of cost. I’m honestly shocked that they haven’t put them in the top end Tesla’s yet to showcase the technology.

hannob 5y ago

> For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity. There have been studies on how PHEVs are used in the real world and this is just not what's happening, see e.g.: https://theicct.org/publications/phev-real-world-usage-sept2020 https://theicct.org/publications/phev-real-world-usage-sept2...

KptMarchewa 5y ago
On the other hand, the study proves that PHEVs with decent battery capacity actually do that, the average is just too low: >. Most PHEVs have type-approval all-electric ranges of 30–60 km and electrify 5,000–10,000 km a year. PHEVs with high all-electric ranges of 80 km or more achieve 12,000–20,000 km mean annual electric mileages, which is comparable to the annual mileage of the car fleet in Germany and the United States.
wlesieutre 5y ago
> For private cars, the average utility factor (UF)—the portion of kilometers driven on electric motor versus kilometers driven on combustion engine—is 69% for NEDC type approval but only around 37% for real-world driving Not a majority, but 37% of your driving on electric is a significant chunk. Would And to take a Prius Prime for an example, you can still have a very efficient vehicle when you're running in normal hybrid mode: > C/D observed 75-mph highway driving (hybrid mode): 47 mpg / 49 mpg / 47 mpg If you're trying to make the most difference with limited battery production, that's 8.8 kWh of batteries for a Prius Prime. You can make more than 6 of them with the batteries that go into a single "low range" Model 3 (54 kWh). Six cars doing a bit over 1/3 of their miles in electric mode, or one car doing all of its miles in electric mode? That's a relatively short electric range car, if 25 miles isn't doing enough for most people there's probably a good middle ground where you use half the batteries of a long range EV but cover 90% of your milage in EV mode. This is of course ignoring that the Model 3 is a lot more fun to drive than a Prius Prime, but just to make the point about battery usage.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  It was kinda my dream to have drop-in kits that would turn any ICE into a plug-in micro-hybrid and just run the electric system off extra batteries for as long as possible, and then kicking in the alternator once finally required. Could work as more and more stuff becomes electric in cars instead of running off accessory belt.

speedgoose 5y ago

Almost all affordable PHEV are not very good cars though. They are basically shitty electric cars and a shitty fossil cars combined.

afbadfatdh 5y ago

>Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs". I already view them as battery hogs. It baffles me that anyone thinks they make sense. We have the battery supply to either make a small minority of cars EVs or to make all cars PHEVs. PHEVs are cheaper, more practical, and more environmentally sound.

alex_young 5y ago

Do you know how to get more batteries on the road? Make more batteries and sell them for less. This is Tesla’s business model and a huge reason Li batteries are so much less expensive today. I’d say the inverted logic is more like buy electric cars now even though they don’t hold their resale value due to economies of scale catching up on you.

Gravityloss 5y ago

Yes, exactly. One can think of it this way also: if 85 kWh of battery modules is made, how should they be placed to reduce the most CO2. You can put them into 8 plugin hybrid cars with 10 kWh battery in each, and it's used for commuting in each of them, replacing 80% of yearly kilometers with electric ones, that's maybe 10 x 20,000 x 0.8 = 160,000 km electric driving. Those cars still drive 10 x 20,000 x 0.2 = 40,000 km with gasoline (for long road trips etc). Or you can put them all into one Tesla. If it's a regular private car, it drives 20,000 km per year and thus we have 20,000 km of electric driving. So in this calculation, it would make more sense from environmental point of view to put the battery modules in hybrid cars. Now, maybe the Tesla is a Taxi and is actually driven 100,000 km per year, then it's different. Or maybe the luxury Teslas that sit on driveways as status symbols are changing how people think, or are driving innovation and have massive leverage that way. But it's complicated.

Retric 5y ago
Plug in batteries don’t last very long because they charge and discharge every day. Due to this they end up either costing several times as much manufacturing capacity as you’re assuming or they simply get driven as non plug in hybrids which makes them less efficient than EV’s. Further ramping up battery production isn’t any kind of long term barrier, so plug end hybrids just result in less investment in battery manufacturing and thus slower adoption of EV’s.
- zeckalpha 5y ago
  Better to use the batteries than hauling around mostly unused batteries all the time.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Plug in hybrids need to haul around an engine, gas tank, transmission, exhaust system etc. They also need extra batteries over a standard hybrid.
    - 5y ago

afarrell 5y ago

> I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs". Adding social punishments here would hurt momentum. It is far better to reward imperfect progress than to create a social environment where people feel like they'll never be good enough.

nebula8804 5y ago

I mean your logic is sound but car companies dragged their feet for years on even plug in hybrids and so just like the mulled wine example in the article, it wouldn't work in the real world. GM had an amazing things with the Voltec architecture. ~50 miles on electric was more than enough for even the most discerning customers yet they never really extended it past the Chevy Volt. It should have been rolled out to all of their vehicles. That would help push them to also drive down the cost and eventually make it the standard powertrain on their cars. Over the course of 1 generation you have eliminated a large chunk of co2 emissions from transportation. Instead they never introduced it to other cars, now they have discontinued the Volt(because who wants an overpriced Chevy Cruze anyway?) and now they nothing for sale because of battery issues. Battery issues will be resolved in the next few years as more factories come online so I don't see how a "battery hog" issue will arise unless there is a fundamental shortage of raw materials. Seems like the battery companies are also investing in recycling so this eventually becomes a closed loop system.

N1H1L 5y ago
There is also something counter-intuitive - we are making better and cheaper batteries because we are using so many batteries and planning to use _so much_ more. The cost curve and the profit motive are wonderful things.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China, because our leadership thinks that since we don't have a planned economy, no planning of any kind is needed at all.

bruce511 5y ago
I could not agree with you more, except for the small problem of range. I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day. Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet) But I concur with the premise-work on reducing driven-miles not on "what percentage of vehicles" are electric.
- danielheath 5y ago
  For vehicles which are in nearly continuous use, the capital costs are essentially irrelevant next to fuel and maintenance, both of which are far cheaper for EVs. It might take a few years to pay for replacements.
  - ianai 5y ago
    Right, electrics can be optimized to a usage. Some buses could have capacitor banks recharged at every stop. That sort of tactic would be nonsense for a daily driver.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      There is that in my city. A new bus line able to recharge bus capacitors at some stops. It looked like pretty hard to implement but it’s working interestingly well.

Pxtl 5y ago

Except that the kind of long distance drivers you suggest in the first paragraph would get minimal benefit from a PHEV, since it only covers the first 40km or thereabouts. My wife and I only put like 10000km per year on our car, so I generally run down the battery fully on my PHEV and just touch a bit of the gas. That would barely make a dent in a multi-hour commuter's usage. The hard part is the short-term solutions are unpalatable: pushing back hard on oversized vehicles that are wasteful of fuel and hazardous to people who choose small, efficient, green options. A Hummer EV uses so much battery to build you could make three Nissan Leafs... but if you didn't make the Hummer EV, the driver would stick to a monstrous huge gas-burner. So fundamentally, fighting climate change in a world without plentiful batteries demands strong disincentive to driving oversized vehicles. Which is, of course, politically unpalatable because destroying the earth, obstructing visibility, and threatening your fellow drivers in a hypermassive oaf of a truck is freedom.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

I read somewhere PHEV users don’t really bother charging effectively making them even worse than gas guzzlers. Also that seems what Toyota is thinking with their anti-BEV lobbyism.

mlyle 5y ago
Hugely variable. I only burn about 20 gallons of gas per year. About one third of that is to avoid fuel spoiling, one third of that is for when I need longer trips, and one third when I screw up charging. Even so, I get about 40MPG, so much better than an average vehicle. It does sting to maintain an engine for 800 miles a year.
- alliao 5y ago
  never thought about that, do the oil come out looking new?
  - mlyle 5y ago
    I don't change my own oil anymore, but I imagine that it's just barely picked up some color-- Honda specifies synthetic and it's only a few hundred miles per change. Pretty soon I'm going to be out of warranty and I'm going to stretch the oil change interval a bit beyond what they suggest-- 16 mos instead of a year. It just feels wasteful.

jnsaff2 5y ago

This also has an econ person fallacy in it. PHEV is only ever more environmently friendly when it gets plugged in as much as possible (in reality every night to cover next days drives). And people rarely do as PHEV is marketed to sell SUV’s by the BMW’s of the world and also reduce their fleet emission fines on paper by not making their customers inconvenience themselves.