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What I actually _want_ is a range extended EV: that is 1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train 2. A small (~20hp) internal

What I actually _want_ is a range extended EV: that is 1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train 2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving. This would allow me to do 95%+ of my trips in full EV mode while keeping the battery quite small, and when I want to go long distance I still can. Most plug in hybrids are designed with the internal combustion engine as an integral part of the drivetrain which isn't really what I'm after as it means even if you only use the car for short trips you will still sometimes start the engine. EDIT: I should add to this, the Volt is definitely the closest to what I'm after but it's not available in my country (Australia) and probably never will be.

teruakohatu 3y ago
The good news is that this type of car has been around since at least 1900 with the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus [1] which had a version with a motor to top up the battery. The bad news is that they haven't been that popular. You might be able to find a used BMW i3 REx in Australia, but it was discontinued in 2019. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche
theluketaylor 3y ago
BMW i3 REx is pretty much exactly as described. It has a 38 hp twin cylinder motorcycle engine which is more than your ideal 20, but even that is known to slowly lose charge while climbing long hills since the engine can't output much power. The engine is not mechanically connected to the wheels. Interesting oddity of incentives. California's zero emission vehicle rules state that range extended EVs count for more zero emission credit, but to qualify as range extended the gas range can't exceed the battery range. Since i3 had a pretty small battery and BMW didn't want to go to the expense of building a different, smaller tank for the US they shipped the i3 with a software locked portion of the gas tank. You can flash the firmware to unlock the full gas tank (which is still pretty small). i3 wasn't a huge success. BMW made a bet battery prices would stay extremely high and weight would really matter in an EV. i3 and i8 were experiments to see if they could build cars from carbon fibre re-enforced plastic at scale economically. Spoiler alert: they couldn't. That meant i3 was shockingly expensive to buy and even minor collisions can write the entire car off since even hairline cracks in the CFRP shell can result in catastrophic failure. Unfortunately for you I don't see any new vehicles being designed to fill that niche. Designing a ground up PHEV is far too expensive, so every manufacturer is just electrifying their existing gas designs and stuffing batteries anywhere they can find a spare bit of space. Since engines give off waste heat for free no one is going to bother making a full heating system just for the plug in version since it would drive the sticker price up on a plug-in even higher (and they are already a tough sell since they get up into full EV range). Combined with the charging network getting better very rapidly and PHEVs are a bit of an investment dead end. They will continue to exist (especially in the EU market), but everyone is putting the absolute barest possible engineering effort into them.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Now there are many PHEVs with heat pump.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Excellent summary but i bought an i3 (pure electric) in the US in 2014 and it was not shockingly expensive to buy (roughly 1/2 tesla model S) and at 128,000km had only a single service for brake fluid flush. It was awesome but couldn’t go far enough for an only car once we moved to where mountains were over half its range away.
  - theluketaylor 3y ago
    i3's were $50,000+ dollar cars when the US average selling price was under $35,000. That's for a supermini car (but well packaged) with a pretty spartan interior. It was selling for the same price as extremely well equipped 3 series and lower end 5 series. I'd call that shocking. The depreciation curve on them was also extreme, since they were worth under 30k within just a couple of years. Much more scary is the repair costs. Yours as the pure electric needed very little, but the REx repairs were expensive. You had to pay BMW dealer prices since it was a weird little engine you couldn't get parts for. And as I said, even minor collision damage was pretty catastrophic.
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  How does a software locked fuel tank work? When it gets below x%, it just acts like it's empty and stops the engine?
  - theluketaylor 3y ago
    I believe they used the fuel flow monitor that cars have anyway to just shut the fuel pump off after 7.1L when there is actually 9L of fuel in the tank. It's a pressurized tank, so the extra fuel you can't reach takes way longer to go foul. Happily the software fix to remove the restriction is easy to find.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
rektide 3y ago
Mazda is supposedly making a MX-30 R-EV, which has a extending rotary engine in it. At 74HP though the rotary probably can act as a full-series generator. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42485033/mazda-mx-30-r-ev-hybrid-revealed/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42485033/mazda-mx-30-r-ev... I was hoping there'd be a much smaller rotary creatively tucked away somewhere, but this is a fairly conventional car design & there's a big old engine bay with the rotary taking up a bunch of space.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  This is close to what I'm after, though in a smaller car than the MX-30. Rotaries are a good choice for this since they're very compact, but 74HP still seems excessive to me.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    What's the reason you want a very small HP engine? Isn't it compact enough?
_hypx 3y ago
This the basic idea behind hydrogen fuel cell cars too, only with a fuel cell instead of an engine. The goal is 100% zero emissions with 100% the functionality of existing cars. It is also why existing BEVs are almost certainly a fad. After all, why will innovation suddenly stop in transportation, and fundamental ideas like low weight and fast refueling suddenly became irrelevant? All signs point to BEVs being an idea from the mid-2000s, and for whatever reason had become stuck in our brain.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  The killer feature of BEVs is that you never actually have to take them somewhere to charge if you're charging them at home. It's only on long trips that you need to stop. If you're doing hundreds of km multiple days per week then Hydrogen might make sense, but I'd say that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Given that Hydrogen is also _always_ going to cost more than direct electricity, I don't think it's ever going to be mainstream.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    And if you don't have a home with a garage to charge your car? How do apartment dwellers charge their car? And the rest of your post is bullshit. You want a centralized system that can meet all refueling needs by itself. And as we make hydrogen from excess green electricity, it will drop to nearly nothing in terms of cost. Anti-hydrogen rhetoric is a repeat of anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      The cost of generating the hydrogen is only one part of it. We need the electricity grid anyway, and bolstering it is already a necessary part of a 100% green grid. If we want to use Hydrogen for vehicles then that means constructing an entire second distribution system. Even if you use trucks, we will need to build thousands of trucks with Hydrogen tanks (which are much harder to make than regular pressure vessels, by the way) in order to distribute it. All this, and you think adding chargers to apartment complexes is too hard?
toast0 3y ago
> 1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train > 2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving. I don't think a 20 hp engine is going to be big enough, unless you're talking a microcar. PHEVs I'm aware of don't have the battery range you're looking for either. And I don't know what's available in Australia. My PHEV has an 'ev only' mode where it will rarely start the ICE unless you use up the battery, but it's slow to get up to highway speeds without the ICE (it will prompt you when accerator input calls for more than the battery and motor can deliver, and if you floor it, it will start the ICE without you accepting the prompt) and battery range drops sharply at highway speeds anyway. If the battery is charged enough, it already doesn't run the ICE that much at city street speeds, unless you've asked for the heater. In mine, EV only range is about 20 miles, and running in auto after a full charge is likely to use up the battery within 35 miles in auto mode.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  20hp should be plenty, since the generator only has to output the average power rather than peak. PHEVs don't have the range because they're really just ICE cars with batteries for low speed and energy regeneration under braking. For them, electric is still the secondary rather than the primary means of movement. You would think there was a market for this, given that batteries are still a large part of the price tag for a BEV and a smaller and simpler generator should save on cost and packaging size relative to the duplicated drivetrain required for a true PHEV.
  - repiret 3y ago
    20hp is about 15kW. My EV consumes at least twice that at highway speeds. Adding that to my EV would let me drive as far as I wanted to in a day in the extreme case, but would be a nice range extender, and assuming it could run and charge while the car was parked, would let me take it on trips to places that are too far to round trip on a single charge and don’t have L3 chargers. I don’t know how many such places exist for most people, but there’s a few of them near me because I live in a very rural area.
sidewndr46 3y ago
buy a Rivian and put a generator in the bed of it?
- Turskarama 3y ago
  Then I'm paying for a massive battery when the whole point was to not do that.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    wouldn't you use the battery on in-town trips?
fomine3 3y ago
Chinese manufacturers are now focusing on long range PHEVs https://carnewschina.com/2023/01/11/2023-changan-uni-k-gasoline-and-phev-versions-arrived-at-dealers-in-china/ https://carnewschina.com/2023/01/11/2023-changan-uni-k-gasol... https://carnewschina.com/2023/04/18/byd-destroyer-07-phev-debuts-in-shanghai-with-a-200-km-range/ https://carnewschina.com/2023/04/18/byd-destroyer-07-phev-de...
deepsun 3y ago
That's basically a hybrid vehicle where the engine is not connected to driveshaft. The thing is -- it's more efficient to connect engine directly to the driveshaft when driving at a reasonable speed, as there's no extra conversion of gas to battery charge (generator losses + battery charging losses + battery discharging losses).
- Turskarama 3y ago
  Sure, but you need a driveshaft and a gearbox for this to work. It's worth it if you're using it all the time, but for something only used on rare occasions I'll take the _maybe_ 10% efficiency loss to not lug around the extra weight and have more things that can break.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Take a look at the 'hybrid synergy drive' model. It's a pretty streamlined gearbox. ICE output shaft connects to motor/generator 1, MG1 connects to MG2 via planetary gear, MG2 connects to wheels more or less. There's gears in there, but there's no gear selection. Depending on how you control the ICE and the motor/generators, you can any of the three movers power the wheels individually or in concert. It's not much more complex than an ICE, a generator, and a motor for the wheels.
- edude03 3y ago
  Bmw argues that their model is more efficient since the engine always runs at its most efficient RPM range
  - deepsun 3y ago
    That's why I added "at reasonable speeds". At start-stop busy city driving it might be worse to use ICE engine (although it might combine both ICE power with electric engine power, to keep the ICE at its optimal range anyway).
wilg 3y ago
This is not a long term solution because we need to entirely stop barfing CO2 into the atmosphere and extract the CO2 we’ve already put there.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  That's not happening in the next 10-20 years either way. As far as I'm concerned, a 95% reduction in emissions is a big win, and a 95% reduction in 5 years is better than a 100% reduction in 30 years.
  - wilg 3y ago
    Sure. Whatever helps. People should be switching their cars to the lowest lifecycle emission cars they can. Battery-electric vehicles handily beat hybrids on this metric. (Perhaps your proposed hybrid ratio would close the gap more.) But as long as you're lowering this number as significantly as you can over your previous car each time you buy, you'll be doing your best. https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-mar22/ https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-m... FWIW, a ~300 mile EV like the ones on the market today are pretty much there for long distance travel. If you're going camping or something away from the charging network, you can still charge anywhere there is electricity, and quite fast if you find an RV campsite with hookups you can plug into.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      Yeah the long range EVs are certainly long enough range for me. My problem with them is that I'm paying for about 3x as much battery as I really want for 99% of my driving, and even though they're getting cheaper they're still a significant cost.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  Cheaper, lighter, smaller, safer higher capacity batteries charged using renewable energy in ubiquitous charging points or even electrified roads are a long term solution. But we don't have it yet. However, we know how to make the kind of plug-in hybrids GP is talking about, we already did. For people who have the occasional long range / frequent short range pattern, unfortunately, today, a gas car is the better value proposition. A small electric-first plug-in hybrid could be a good alternative. Probably not in the future, but some people need a car today, and for most of them, it will be a gas car.
tuatoru 3y ago
In addition to the BMW there is the Nissan Note e-Power and the Honda Fit/Jazz hybrid -- just off the top of my head. The Note is rated for 800km (500 mi) per tankful, IIRC. I believe the Jazz is no longer sold in AU but there are used imports from Japan, probably. The thing you want is called a "series hybrid" design. 1. Nissan e-Power: https://carbuzz.com/news/what-is-nissan-e-power-and-why-cant-we-have-it https://carbuzz.com/news/what-is-nissan-e-power-and-why-cant...
jacknews 3y ago
The engine would only need to run at a constant speed/load, etc, so this might be where some alternative engine designs, some very compact, could be effective.
a4000 3y ago
FYI they did sell the Volt in Australia as the Holden Volt between 2012 and 2015, they only sold 246 in that whole time though, so not a lot of choice out there on the second hand market. The closest thing in a new car will probably be the Mazda MX30 R.EV hybrid coming to Australia in 2024, which is primarily electric drivetrain but uses a small petrol rotary engine to charger batteries as a range extender, but that is a very niche vehicle and the rotary engine isn't particularly fuel efficient on petrol use, but it is small and lightweight compared to a piston engine. Nissans Qashqai and X-Trail hybrids also use a primarily electric drivetrain with the petrol motor only providing power to the electric drivetrain, similar but not quite the same thing as the motor is in use a lot of the time.
6510 3y ago
A most sensible idea, first one I see in EV context! The US and Australia are very different but for other places in the west I think fully electric driven for 100 km is to much. The combustion engine would grow along with the weight that grows along with the battery weight. Making the engine and fuel tank larger and would make them and the frame heavier which in turn would ask for a larger battery which asks for more hp again and so the circle continues. The lower limit seems safety which depends on the other clunkers [allowed] on the road. Solar seems a good way to add weight and strengthen the structure. Another sound idea is to swap the battery or parts of it. The bigger it is the harder that puzzle gets. I want to see swap while moving tech.

teruakohatu 3y ago

The good news is that this type of car has been around since at least 1900 with the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus [1] which had a version with a motor to top up the battery. The bad news is that they haven't been that popular. You might be able to find a used BMW i3 REx in Australia, but it was discontinued in 2019. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche

theluketaylor 3y ago

BMW i3 REx is pretty much exactly as described. It has a 38 hp twin cylinder motorcycle engine which is more than your ideal 20, but even that is known to slowly lose charge while climbing long hills since the engine can't output much power. The engine is not mechanically connected to the wheels. Interesting oddity of incentives. California's zero emission vehicle rules state that range extended EVs count for more zero emission credit, but to qualify as range extended the gas range can't exceed the battery range. Since i3 had a pretty small battery and BMW didn't want to go to the expense of building a different, smaller tank for the US they shipped the i3 with a software locked portion of the gas tank. You can flash the firmware to unlock the full gas tank (which is still pretty small). i3 wasn't a huge success. BMW made a bet battery prices would stay extremely high and weight would really matter in an EV. i3 and i8 were experiments to see if they could build cars from carbon fibre re-enforced plastic at scale economically. Spoiler alert: they couldn't. That meant i3 was shockingly expensive to buy and even minor collisions can write the entire car off since even hairline cracks in the CFRP shell can result in catastrophic failure. Unfortunately for you I don't see any new vehicles being designed to fill that niche. Designing a ground up PHEV is far too expensive, so every manufacturer is just electrifying their existing gas designs and stuffing batteries anywhere they can find a spare bit of space. Since engines give off waste heat for free no one is going to bother making a full heating system just for the plug in version since it would drive the sticker price up on a plug-in even higher (and they are already a tough sell since they get up into full EV range). Combined with the charging network getting better very rapidly and PHEVs are a bit of an investment dead end. They will continue to exist (especially in the EU market), but everyone is putting the absolute barest possible engineering effort into them.

fomine3 3y ago
Now there are many PHEVs with heat pump.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
Excellent summary but i bought an i3 (pure electric) in the US in 2014 and it was not shockingly expensive to buy (roughly 1/2 tesla model S) and at 128,000km had only a single service for brake fluid flush. It was awesome but couldn’t go far enough for an only car once we moved to where mountains were over half its range away.
- theluketaylor 3y ago
  i3's were $50,000+ dollar cars when the US average selling price was under $35,000. That's for a supermini car (but well packaged) with a pretty spartan interior. It was selling for the same price as extremely well equipped 3 series and lower end 5 series. I'd call that shocking. The depreciation curve on them was also extreme, since they were worth under 30k within just a couple of years. Much more scary is the repair costs. Yours as the pure electric needed very little, but the REx repairs were expensive. You had to pay BMW dealer prices since it was a weird little engine you couldn't get parts for. And as I said, even minor collision damage was pretty catastrophic.
upon_drumhead 3y ago
How does a software locked fuel tank work? When it gets below x%, it just acts like it's empty and stops the engine?
- theluketaylor 3y ago
  I believe they used the fuel flow monitor that cars have anyway to just shut the fuel pump off after 7.1L when there is actually 9L of fuel in the tank. It's a pressurized tank, so the extra fuel you can't reach takes way longer to go foul. Happily the software fix to remove the restriction is easy to find.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago

rektide 3y ago

Mazda is supposedly making a MX-30 R-EV, which has a extending rotary engine in it. At 74HP though the rotary probably can act as a full-series generator. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42485033/mazda-mx-30-r-ev-hybrid-revealed/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42485033/mazda-mx-30-r-ev... I was hoping there'd be a much smaller rotary creatively tucked away somewhere, but this is a fairly conventional car design & there's a big old engine bay with the rotary taking up a bunch of space.

Turskarama 3y ago
This is close to what I'm after, though in a smaller car than the MX-30. Rotaries are a good choice for this since they're very compact, but 74HP still seems excessive to me.
- fomine3 3y ago
  What's the reason you want a very small HP engine? Isn't it compact enough?

_hypx 3y ago

This the basic idea behind hydrogen fuel cell cars too, only with a fuel cell instead of an engine. The goal is 100% zero emissions with 100% the functionality of existing cars. It is also why existing BEVs are almost certainly a fad. After all, why will innovation suddenly stop in transportation, and fundamental ideas like low weight and fast refueling suddenly became irrelevant? All signs point to BEVs being an idea from the mid-2000s, and for whatever reason had become stuck in our brain.

Turskarama 3y ago
The killer feature of BEVs is that you never actually have to take them somewhere to charge if you're charging them at home. It's only on long trips that you need to stop. If you're doing hundreds of km multiple days per week then Hydrogen might make sense, but I'd say that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Given that Hydrogen is also _always_ going to cost more than direct electricity, I don't think it's ever going to be mainstream.
- _hypx 3y ago
  And if you don't have a home with a garage to charge your car? How do apartment dwellers charge their car? And the rest of your post is bullshit. You want a centralized system that can meet all refueling needs by itself. And as we make hydrogen from excess green electricity, it will drop to nearly nothing in terms of cost. Anti-hydrogen rhetoric is a repeat of anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    The cost of generating the hydrogen is only one part of it. We need the electricity grid anyway, and bolstering it is already a necessary part of a 100% green grid. If we want to use Hydrogen for vehicles then that means constructing an entire second distribution system. Even if you use trucks, we will need to build thousands of trucks with Hydrogen tanks (which are much harder to make than regular pressure vessels, by the way) in order to distribute it. All this, and you think adding chargers to apartment complexes is too hard?

toast0 3y ago

> 1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train > 2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving. I don't think a 20 hp engine is going to be big enough, unless you're talking a microcar. PHEVs I'm aware of don't have the battery range you're looking for either. And I don't know what's available in Australia. My PHEV has an 'ev only' mode where it will rarely start the ICE unless you use up the battery, but it's slow to get up to highway speeds without the ICE (it will prompt you when accerator input calls for more than the battery and motor can deliver, and if you floor it, it will start the ICE without you accepting the prompt) and battery range drops sharply at highway speeds anyway. If the battery is charged enough, it already doesn't run the ICE that much at city street speeds, unless you've asked for the heater. In mine, EV only range is about 20 miles, and running in auto after a full charge is likely to use up the battery within 35 miles in auto mode.

Turskarama 3y ago
20hp should be plenty, since the generator only has to output the average power rather than peak. PHEVs don't have the range because they're really just ICE cars with batteries for low speed and energy regeneration under braking. For them, electric is still the secondary rather than the primary means of movement. You would think there was a market for this, given that batteries are still a large part of the price tag for a BEV and a smaller and simpler generator should save on cost and packaging size relative to the duplicated drivetrain required for a true PHEV.
- repiret 3y ago
  20hp is about 15kW. My EV consumes at least twice that at highway speeds. Adding that to my EV would let me drive as far as I wanted to in a day in the extreme case, but would be a nice range extender, and assuming it could run and charge while the car was parked, would let me take it on trips to places that are too far to round trip on a single charge and don’t have L3 chargers. I don’t know how many such places exist for most people, but there’s a few of them near me because I live in a very rural area.

sidewndr46 3y ago

buy a Rivian and put a generator in the bed of it?

Turskarama 3y ago
Then I'm paying for a massive battery when the whole point was to not do that.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  wouldn't you use the battery on in-town trips?

fomine3 3y ago

Chinese manufacturers are now focusing on long range PHEVs https://carnewschina.com/2023/01/11/2023-changan-uni-k-gasoline-and-phev-versions-arrived-at-dealers-in-china/ https://carnewschina.com/2023/01/11/2023-changan-uni-k-gasol... https://carnewschina.com/2023/04/18/byd-destroyer-07-phev-debuts-in-shanghai-with-a-200-km-range/ https://carnewschina.com/2023/04/18/byd-destroyer-07-phev-de...

deepsun 3y ago

That's basically a hybrid vehicle where the engine is not connected to driveshaft. The thing is -- it's more efficient to connect engine directly to the driveshaft when driving at a reasonable speed, as there's no extra conversion of gas to battery charge (generator losses + battery charging losses + battery discharging losses).

Turskarama 3y ago
Sure, but you need a driveshaft and a gearbox for this to work. It's worth it if you're using it all the time, but for something only used on rare occasions I'll take the _maybe_ 10% efficiency loss to not lug around the extra weight and have more things that can break.
- toast0 3y ago
  Take a look at the 'hybrid synergy drive' model. It's a pretty streamlined gearbox. ICE output shaft connects to motor/generator 1, MG1 connects to MG2 via planetary gear, MG2 connects to wheels more or less. There's gears in there, but there's no gear selection. Depending on how you control the ICE and the motor/generators, you can any of the three movers power the wheels individually or in concert. It's not much more complex than an ICE, a generator, and a motor for the wheels.
edude03 3y ago
Bmw argues that their model is more efficient since the engine always runs at its most efficient RPM range
- deepsun 3y ago
  That's why I added "at reasonable speeds". At start-stop busy city driving it might be worse to use ICE engine (although it might combine both ICE power with electric engine power, to keep the ICE at its optimal range anyway).

wilg 3y ago

This is not a long term solution because we need to entirely stop barfing CO2 into the atmosphere and extract the CO2 we’ve already put there.

Turskarama 3y ago
That's not happening in the next 10-20 years either way. As far as I'm concerned, a 95% reduction in emissions is a big win, and a 95% reduction in 5 years is better than a 100% reduction in 30 years.
- wilg 3y ago
  Sure. Whatever helps. People should be switching their cars to the lowest lifecycle emission cars they can. Battery-electric vehicles handily beat hybrids on this metric. (Perhaps your proposed hybrid ratio would close the gap more.) But as long as you're lowering this number as significantly as you can over your previous car each time you buy, you'll be doing your best. https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-mar22/ https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-m... FWIW, a ~300 mile EV like the ones on the market today are pretty much there for long distance travel. If you're going camping or something away from the charging network, you can still charge anywhere there is electricity, and quite fast if you find an RV campsite with hookups you can plug into.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    Yeah the long range EVs are certainly long enough range for me. My problem with them is that I'm paying for about 3x as much battery as I really want for 99% of my driving, and even though they're getting cheaper they're still a significant cost.
GuB-42 3y ago
Cheaper, lighter, smaller, safer higher capacity batteries charged using renewable energy in ubiquitous charging points or even electrified roads are a long term solution. But we don't have it yet. However, we know how to make the kind of plug-in hybrids GP is talking about, we already did. For people who have the occasional long range / frequent short range pattern, unfortunately, today, a gas car is the better value proposition. A small electric-first plug-in hybrid could be a good alternative. Probably not in the future, but some people need a car today, and for most of them, it will be a gas car.

tuatoru 3y ago

In addition to the BMW there is the Nissan Note e-Power and the Honda Fit/Jazz hybrid -- just off the top of my head. The Note is rated for 800km (500 mi) per tankful, IIRC. I believe the Jazz is no longer sold in AU but there are used imports from Japan, probably. The thing you want is called a "series hybrid" design. 1. Nissan e-Power: https://carbuzz.com/news/what-is-nissan-e-power-and-why-cant-we-have-it https://carbuzz.com/news/what-is-nissan-e-power-and-why-cant...

jacknews 3y ago

The engine would only need to run at a constant speed/load, etc, so this might be where some alternative engine designs, some very compact, could be effective.

a4000 3y ago

FYI they did sell the Volt in Australia as the Holden Volt between 2012 and 2015, they only sold 246 in that whole time though, so not a lot of choice out there on the second hand market. The closest thing in a new car will probably be the Mazda MX30 R.EV hybrid coming to Australia in 2024, which is primarily electric drivetrain but uses a small petrol rotary engine to charger batteries as a range extender, but that is a very niche vehicle and the rotary engine isn't particularly fuel efficient on petrol use, but it is small and lightweight compared to a piston engine. Nissans Qashqai and X-Trail hybrids also use a primarily electric drivetrain with the petrol motor only providing power to the electric drivetrain, similar but not quite the same thing as the motor is in use a lot of the time.

6510 3y ago

A most sensible idea, first one I see in EV context! The US and Australia are very different but for other places in the west I think fully electric driven for 100 km is to much. The combustion engine would grow along with the weight that grows along with the battery weight. Making the engine and fuel tank larger and would make them and the frame heavier which in turn would ask for a larger battery which asks for more hp again and so the circle continues. The lower limit seems safety which depends on the other clunkers [allowed] on the road. Solar seems a good way to add weight and strengthen the structure. Another sound idea is to swap the battery or parts of it. The bigger it is the harder that puzzle gets. I want to see swap while moving tech.