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Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Important to know that real-world testing shows that PHEVs are rarely plugged in and just burn oil much of the time
That’s a shame. I love my PHEV because it’s an EV for driving around the city, but I can still use gas stations on road trips. I plug it in everywhere I can.
Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.
They still get way better gas mileage. They also don't cost $15,000 when the battery goes bad. I replaced my 12 year old prius battery myself in like two hours after buying a brand new $2,900 replacement from the Toyota dealership. Could have just bought and replaced the bad cell in it, but in a 12 year old battery I'd probably have another to replace within a year and just have to keep going in and replacing one after the other, which would be a pain.
Thanks for sharing this. Very interesting and a little surprising. I love my phev and keep it charged as much as possible because I notice acceleration benefits, pre-conditioning benefits, and obvious fuel savings, as well as time saving not having to gas up. I also have no fears of battery discharge like I would with full electric. I live in the states and charging stations are still pretty rare outside major metro areas and a lot of things are pretty spread out here so I still find full EV unfortunately a bit impractical. I CN imagine anyone not charging their phev whenever the opportunity presents.
That makes no sense. The entire point of a PHEV is that you can just plug it in at your house and drive to work for virtually free, well still being able to visit people who live a decent distance away on the weekends.
45-49% on privately owned cars isn't rarely, but 10-15% on the corporate side totally is. However I can also understand employees not wanting to give their company free electricity every night, while simultaneously companies do not have plans in place for employees to charge at work.
Company purchasing managers would be better off just buying regular hybrids if they're not going to set up a plan to keep these charged, otherwise they'll never get the financial benefits that sold them on the phev in the first place.
This was a problem with government owned Volts, they reimbursed for gas as this was already happening for the rest of the ICE fleet but had no way to reimburse for charging. Would not be surprised if this trend is the same for many company fleets too. Fix that and you would probably see similar numbers to private ownership.
And burn even more than pure ICEs since they also carry the added weight from the electric stuff. At a time where we need much less cars overall, including EVs.
That's news to me considering the EPA-rated fuel economy of vehicles with both hybrid and pure ICE drivetrains is universally higher for the hybrid versions.
An ICE vehicle needs a much larger engine than is truly necessary due to the inefficiencies and limitations of mechanical transmissions, whereas a hybrid can have a much smaller, more efficient engine.
A hybrid can potentially act like a 'perfect' transmission, capable of taking in power from an engine running at its single most efficient RPM and, with the aid of battery storage, produce any combination of speed and torque that has an average power less than the output of the ICE.
I think what he might be saying is running a Plug in hybrid only on gas takes more than a regular hybrid because of the extra weight. That makes sense to me but I'm not sure if that's what he means
They said "pure ICE," so I don't think that's what they're saying. But yes, a non-plugin hybrid should do better than a plugin hybrid if the plugin is never plugged in.
But it doesn’t. PHEVs can still regenerate during braking though. ICE only vehicles can cut fuel when off throttle, but that’s not going reclaim the heat lost to braking.
PHEVs should still be more efficient overall especially in cities and stop and go traffic.
If we had ICE only vehicles with tiny engines maybe your point could work, but we don’t anymore at least not in the US.
Because they make certain assumptions. Fortunately the EU mandated that cars measures those things since various years. That caused a review of those hybrids. They're usually not charged.
Nothing in that comment discussed plugin hybrids though.
A non plug-in hybrid will be more efficient than a full gas vehicle because of the efficiency you can gain through minimizing the engine and tuning it for a more limited rpm range.
This ideally carries over to a plug-in hybrid in the same way even if it's never plugged in, if all the gas engine does is charge the battery it can be more efficient than a gas only car due to reduced engine size requirements.
And electric is better for acceleration, so you get the best of both worlds.
I love how you completely ignored the context of my comment and thus completely missed the point.