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’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 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.
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 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
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.