I had an alcoholic neighbor with learning disabilities who had a PHEV minivan purchased for them, and they only kept the battery charged for the first few months of ownership. After that, they seemed to lose interest in plugging it in when they got home.
On the other hand, a friend of the family owns a PHEV sedan they keep charged religiously, and they need to buy fuel stabilizer because they almost never use any gas.
The second one sounds an awful lot like they would be better off with a pure ev rather than carrying around a complete ice setip plus tank of fuel.
It’s why plug ins rarely work for normal use, you’re either carrying around a heavy battery pack and motor you aren’t using or the ice and fuel you aren’t using.
Harry Medcalf loved his Range Rover PHEV because they only ever used it for short journeys, almost of all of which were on electric. It’s such a face palm moment making an already massively heavy car even heavier when a small EV with a small battery like a Leaf or even a small ICE would be far cheaper to buy and run, while fitting all of their actual requirements.
I get why people like them, as they let you dip your toe into evs but they just don’t offer the benefits that a straight ice or straight ev would.
I imagine that when the concept was first dreamt up they were thinking that cities would charge you if you entered using ICE, so the battery is for then and you get to the city using ICE savingyour battery. But that’s not happened.
That’s an edge case if it’s any more regular than could be addressed by hiring a car for those trips. And if it’s that regular, then a plain ICE would be a far far better fit as you aren’t trying to drag around a useless heavy battery and motor on them and you haven’t paid over the odds to do so.
It’s like the dumbasses that purchase a pickup truck for the flat bed, then use it at must a handful of times. For them, hiring a van or a trailer would be the sensible choice. If they ran a landscaping business or something, then yeah, a pickup is the way to go.
Buy the vehicle for whatever the majority of driving you need, not some random likely rare edge case, that’s dumb.
How long is a piece of string? So many variables with that you’d have to do your own numbers for your own situation and if you really can’t charge a long range ev for your trip.
However, most people who say they do big trips (more than 400 round trip) do so a handful of times a year where there is zero ability to recharge the car. That’s where I’d be looking at a hire car, and it’s going to be cheaper to do so.
A long-range EV works for me. About a third of my annual miles are towing on long trips (1000 mile round trips) with it, and it’s fine with planning.
Completely get why some people don’t want to do that, and for that, a suitable diesel is far better for them as its 10ks cheaper to buy in the first place.
PHEV makes fuck all sense for that sort of trip as it runs out of battery 30 miles or so into a 1000 mile trip. You paid for to buy it than a diesel, you get worse economy than a like to like diesel, just not good.
OK, so we’ve established a person can do the math and come up with some value of long trips where its not economical to rent.
Given that a person needs to make that many long trips, how many short trips would they also need to make for the gas savings from a PHEV in EV mode during short trips to exceed the gas loss from doing long trips in a vehicle that gets somewhat lower MPG on long trips compared to a pure hybrid?
How much value might a person reasonably assign to the flexibility to take a weekend road trip without having to plan ahead and make reservations with a rental company?
That’s such a strawman as it js such an edge case.
You have to include the additional purchasing and running costs of a more modern PHEV against an older diesel or an older small EV, this will be $10ks.
Booking ahead for hire cars for local pickup is rarely needed unless you have unusual requirements or live in a tourism black spot.
PHEV only made sense during the short period of time when EVs doing 300 miles or more looked to be very expensive but battery costs came down and now there are a significant list of evs than can beat 300 and a not insignificant list that can hit 400. They have become irrelevant.
Yeah, hmm, at some point you have to stop, thats where the momentum or at least some of it is returned to the battety. The return from regen is less than the energy spent to accelerate and overcome friction, in the first place, so you get significant losses of around 20% or more, so not really…
Believe me when I say that there are smart people working out the details to minimize losses. Like. Arguing here doesn’t make the cars more or less efficient. It’s a thing you can buy already and it’s appeal is that it saves fuel. So like unless it were to not actually save fuel, I would say that someone actually did their homework and figured out how to deal with any of theoretical problems such as this one.
What you are describing, for it to be of actual benefit, is at its minimum a perpetual motion device, as that’s what a zero loss system would be. Only people working on that also sell snake oil.
Anything less than 100% is a loss, which is going to be larger the heavier the car is due to friction (aero, drive train, and rolling) and extra energy to accelerate, that’s basic physics.
Very large batteries, 100kwh or over, solve what should be a medium term problem, they are an expensive dead end as they are often around half the cost of the car’s production cost and add . What I really don’t like is stupidly large bricks of cars that struggle to even do 3 miles per kwh and then use a massive battery to get around their comically small range, which further lowers their efficency.
Yeah, it depends on the user.
I had an alcoholic neighbor with learning disabilities who had a PHEV minivan purchased for them, and they only kept the battery charged for the first few months of ownership. After that, they seemed to lose interest in plugging it in when they got home.
On the other hand, a friend of the family owns a PHEV sedan they keep charged religiously, and they need to buy fuel stabilizer because they almost never use any gas.
An alcoholic neighbour and someone purchased a car for them?
don’t get me started
The second one sounds an awful lot like they would be better off with a pure ev rather than carrying around a complete ice setip plus tank of fuel.
It’s why plug ins rarely work for normal use, you’re either carrying around a heavy battery pack and motor you aren’t using or the ice and fuel you aren’t using.
Harry Medcalf loved his Range Rover PHEV because they only ever used it for short journeys, almost of all of which were on electric. It’s such a face palm moment making an already massively heavy car even heavier when a small EV with a small battery like a Leaf or even a small ICE would be far cheaper to buy and run, while fitting all of their actual requirements.
I get why people like them, as they let you dip your toe into evs but they just don’t offer the benefits that a straight ice or straight ev would.
I imagine that when the concept was first dreamt up they were thinking that cities would charge you if you entered using ICE, so the battery is for then and you get to the city using ICE savingyour battery. But that’s not happened.
Cheaper to own one car than two.
Exactly. You can’t choose to occasionally take road/business trips into the under developed parts of the world in a Leaf.
That’s an edge case if it’s any more regular than could be addressed by hiring a car for those trips. And if it’s that regular, then a plain ICE would be a far far better fit as you aren’t trying to drag around a useless heavy battery and motor on them and you haven’t paid over the odds to do so.
It’s like the dumbasses that purchase a pickup truck for the flat bed, then use it at must a handful of times. For them, hiring a van or a trailer would be the sensible choice. If they ran a landscaping business or something, then yeah, a pickup is the way to go.
Buy the vehicle for whatever the majority of driving you need, not some random likely rare edge case, that’s dumb.
How frequently would you need to make that trip for it to be more expensive to rent a car each time?
How long is a piece of string? So many variables with that you’d have to do your own numbers for your own situation and if you really can’t charge a long range ev for your trip.
However, most people who say they do big trips (more than 400 round trip) do so a handful of times a year where there is zero ability to recharge the car. That’s where I’d be looking at a hire car, and it’s going to be cheaper to do so.
A long-range EV works for me. About a third of my annual miles are towing on long trips (1000 mile round trips) with it, and it’s fine with planning.
Completely get why some people don’t want to do that, and for that, a suitable diesel is far better for them as its 10ks cheaper to buy in the first place.
PHEV makes fuck all sense for that sort of trip as it runs out of battery 30 miles or so into a 1000 mile trip. You paid for to buy it than a diesel, you get worse economy than a like to like diesel, just not good.
OK, so we’ve established a person can do the math and come up with some value of long trips where its not economical to rent.
Given that a person needs to make that many long trips, how many short trips would they also need to make for the gas savings from a PHEV in EV mode during short trips to exceed the gas loss from doing long trips in a vehicle that gets somewhat lower MPG on long trips compared to a pure hybrid?
How much value might a person reasonably assign to the flexibility to take a weekend road trip without having to plan ahead and make reservations with a rental company?
That’s such a strawman as it js such an edge case.
You have to include the additional purchasing and running costs of a more modern PHEV against an older diesel or an older small EV, this will be $10ks.
Booking ahead for hire cars for local pickup is rarely needed unless you have unusual requirements or live in a tourism black spot.
PHEV only made sense during the short period of time when EVs doing 300 miles or more looked to be very expensive but battery costs came down and now there are a significant list of evs than can beat 300 and a not insignificant list that can hit 400. They have become irrelevant.
For what exactly? Hire cars exist.
Mass is mass. It has momentum. So a large battery can help you store energy as momentum just by it being heavy.
Yeah, hmm, at some point you have to stop, thats where the momentum or at least some of it is returned to the battety. The return from regen is less than the energy spent to accelerate and overcome friction, in the first place, so you get significant losses of around 20% or more, so not really…
Believe me when I say that there are smart people working out the details to minimize losses. Like. Arguing here doesn’t make the cars more or less efficient. It’s a thing you can buy already and it’s appeal is that it saves fuel. So like unless it were to not actually save fuel, I would say that someone actually did their homework and figured out how to deal with any of theoretical problems such as this one.
What you are describing, for it to be of actual benefit, is at its minimum a perpetual motion device, as that’s what a zero loss system would be. Only people working on that also sell snake oil.
Anything less than 100% is a loss, which is going to be larger the heavier the car is due to friction (aero, drive train, and rolling) and extra energy to accelerate, that’s basic physics.
Very large batteries, 100kwh or over, solve what should be a medium term problem, they are an expensive dead end as they are often around half the cost of the car’s production cost and add . What I really don’t like is stupidly large bricks of cars that struggle to even do 3 miles per kwh and then use a massive battery to get around their comically small range, which further lowers their efficency.