It’s what people care about.
An EV that can only travel 300 miles on a charge is a complete nonstarter for me. It’s simply not enough for trips I take with regularity.
How about the 2024 Ford Escape PHEV. 37 mile range on electric, which will cover most of dialy driving, and then it switches to gas. Should work out that you can pay 1/3 cost for fuel most percent of your driving, and not have to worry about long range trips. Base price is like 41k, meaning a used vehicle would drop quick.
Edit: apparently the 2025 now starts at 38k. So price came down didn’t find range.
I think the complaint is most people don’t bother using the ‘P’ so it turns into an ICE with extra steps
I really don’t get why PHEV never ramped up to be the next thing instead of all this push to go full electric when the tech and infrastructure isn’t good enough yet.
I agree with the first part, but the second is in the past.
I don’t see why hybrids and plug-in hybrids weren’t huge in the past decade or two, but now the technology is here to go full electric and we just need that little push to get legacy manufacturers onboard, to get prices down and charging locations up. iTs no longer a technology problem but a scaling problem
There has been a problem with owners not charging PHEVs.
But I suspect the main reason is profit margins. Companies learned that selling fewer premium products could be more profitable than selling lots of cheaper models with tighter margins.
So they all basically fucked on out of the cheap car market. Except for Hyundai/Kia, Mitsubishi and Nissan, you can’t really buy an econobox anymore.
PHEVs are like high end econoboxes with an expensive mix of technologies that make margins too thin. Which sucks because I live in a cold climate and have long weekend drives to help family and occasional traveling jobs that make a hybrid the best choice for the time being.
I have a 150mi EV and a PHEV. I won’t be bothering with another PHEV, unless I need something that can tow long distances. Every long distance trip I’ve taken in our PHEV since ~2020 would have been almost identical to a trip in an EV. Drive about 3 hours, and stop for 20 minutes for food/restroom, and back on the road. Even with our PHEV, which can do over 600mi on a tank, we were naturally stopping at almost the exact same points as I would when I planned out the same route in an EV.
As minimal as it is in a modern car, dealing with the ICE side of it just isn’t worth it in a daily driver from my perspective. I have an old classic that’s ICE, and if I’m going to be doing oil changes and such, I’d much rather do them for fun on that, than be required to on my commuter.
Yeah but PHEVs could be made a lot better. There has not been any push to improve on them, and there’s plenty of room for it.
Toyota had a rad PHEV supercar concept that got 100mpg that never even came close to moving toward production. (As just one example)
I feel like you missed the point. The point is that you probably want to stop every few hours anyway so there’s not a lot of point getting a PHEV. You’re buying two engines for the price of two, with the maintenance costs of a gas engine (higher) and extra weight. It’s just fear that gets people to buy PHEV. There’s hardly any mpg benefit over a gas car in real world usage, and there’s hardly any of the lively acceleration of a proper EV. No fun, no cost savings, just all initial expense. Get an EV or stick with your old gas car, PHEV is absolutely not the best of both.
I’m still rocking my second generation Chevy Volt! 50ish miles on a full charge (if you live someplace flat) then 30-40 MPG after that, and it’s a reasonably sized hatchback and not an annoyingly large crossover or SUV. I would upgrade to a Bolt but god that car is ugly.
I have an older fusion energi and don’t plug it in because charging every day is a hassle.
I’m not anti-anything though. Clean energy is good, efficiency is good, the luggage space wasted isn’t awesome but whatever. I’m just explaining why I care about range. That’s not a long weekend camping trip and the infrastructure for pure battery in the places I like to be don’t make low range viable.
How so, I’m curious? Do you drive into no mans land hundreds of miles away from civilization or are you a robot that never needs to take a break?
That’s a 3 hour drive into the mountains, and running out before I get back. It’s not a long trip.
But, yes, stopping on a road trip is also a massive issue, and turning a 5 minute stop once a day into 20 3 times a day (on the limited routes where there are charging options) on an actual long trip would also be a dealbreaker by itself.
I don’t know how remote your mountains are, here there would likely be a charge point less than 50km away but I don’t know where you drive. I give you that.
Your second point though, you might want to reconsider your driving habits. Random google result for breaks when driving: “If driving long distances, you should stop for at least 15 minutes every two hours. Stop often to rest for at least 45 minutes every 4.5 hours of driving to avoid getting tired and stay alert. Plan to stop for a break every 100 miles on your long road trip so that you can relax. Try to only drive for 9 hours a day.”
If there was a charge point within 50 miles I wouldn’t want to be there.
A five minute stop once for gas is already more than too much of a waste of time. I absolutely will not throw away hours a day for no reason.
Even with a 10-15 mins recharge? A couple of times a year I do make a 500 mile journey and if there wasn’t a sea in the way I would happily do it all in one sitting. But as a teeny tiny compromise I wouldn’t mind stopping to charge once or twice along the way! It would add about 20 mins to the journey sure, but seems like it’s worth the benefits to me.
I don’t go places where recharging is an option.
The long trips are ones where I’d be turning one 5 minute stop into at least an hour of stops per day. That’s not a small compromise any more.
You drive a full day with only one five minute stop? I think taking regular breaks is recommended when driving for long periods.
Absolutely. A stop is lighting time on fire. It turns a tedious experience into a completely unbearable one.
Yet! It will be an option everywhere eventually…
I don’t think you would get to the charger in 20 minutes. Assume there will be line.
I’d think that too, but I had my first ever ride in a Tesla recently and the way the supercharger network is handled seems pretty clean. Far from a Tesla fan boy but way the car books you a slot and then charges you a fortune if you overstay meant that we had no problem getting a space. Once charging becomes the norm it will be fine.
But it it’s stupid because it doesn’t really relate to anything. Different cars have different ranges with different sized batteries and different efficiencies, at different weights and different volumes, so I have no idea what it means.
Wouldn’t it be both more straightforward and more meaningful to phrase it like: x% more power for the same weight as current LfPO used in Tesla standard range
Most importantly, batteries will always be expensive, so most manufacturers will prefer fewer/smaller for a cheaper and lighter car of similar range. Aside from trucks, I don’t see why we’d ever see many 600mile range EVs, especially if we get truly fast charging
But people don’t care about that. They care “how far can x car go with it”.
I will never even consider buying an EV that can’t go a minimum of 500 miles on a charge. I’m not willing to have short weekend trips held hostage by the availability of charging stations. 500 miles is still not a long round trip.
But most ICE vehicles won’t go nearly that far on a tank of gas, they seem to most commonly go a bit over 300. Why should EVs be any different? Many of them already claim a similar range.
The difference is the ubiquity of gas stations. That infrastructure was built out over a century, and we need to do similar with chargers but ten times as fast
My car is a hybrid that goes 550 on gas without being plugged in. I’m not willing to go below that.
The ubiquity of gas stations is exactly the point. Less populated areas aren’t going to add charging stations, and even if they did, fast charging still sucks.
It’s really weird how emotional some people get about EV range and their completely imagined charging issues. On a 500 mile trip an EV adds maybe 20 minutes of charging, and that’s if you are really trying to maxmin gas stops in an ICE.
Meanwhile never going to the gas station during the week because I charge at home saves way more time.
As someone who does weekend trips in a 300 mile EV all the time, this is hilarious. You do you though.