The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

Maybe because PHEV are a really dumb idea? You're lugging around two complete powertrains the whole time, a massive waste of energy!

Not really. PHEVs are usually one-and-a-half drivetrains at most. They're almost never as complicated as a separate BEV and ICE drivetrains would be individually.

PHEVs generally weigh much less than a full EV with equivalent range. Doesn’t seem very wasteful to me.

Or, getting at what is actually desired, a car that can be a wall-charged EV for in-town trips and daily commuting but can use the existing gasoline distribution network for long trips or in emergencies. We’re in a transition state, this isn’t an unreasonable ask.

And you get a big energy win with regenerative braking.

GP's argument can be countered with basically every hybrid getting better mileage than its ICE sibling in city traffic.

Nobody wants this, but in an imperfect world, one has to make suboptimal compromises.

You can get an EV, and then have to deal with half a dozen barely competent charging networks each with their own donkey, slow and insecure app, their own quirks and pricing schemes, etc. For some, the tradeoff is worth it, for others it isn't.

You can also get a PHEV, which could allow you to use one car for commuting purely on electric power - even if you are lugging around an entire ICE power train - and then also take the family out to the countryside over the weekend. Without the having to deal with a bunch of annoyed passangers when you are stuck midway through your journey and the charging station you are trying to use is giving you the massively helpeful error message of "Charging failed, please try again later".

I think you'll find most normal people find PHEVs extremely attractive propositions that are a perfect compromise between ICE and EVs.

The Prius gets up to 50 mpg on the highway too, much better than ICE cousins.

I mean, that's exactly what I'm saying. It's a compromise. A pure EV would be much better if the charging infrastructure was great. If it isn't, then you need a compromise...

How is that possible? What's it doing that ICE cars can't do on a highway?

No, even if charging infrastructure was perfect EVs still require a significant amount of time to charge compared to refueling an ICE vehicle. There are other esoteric benefits of ICE but that's the one the vast majority of people are hung up on and that will likely not be fixed anytime soon.

I'd guess it has something to do with its unusual drivetrain. It can operate: 1) fully electric, 2) fully electric but with gas used in generator-mode to supply power to the electric drive train, 3) gas engine mechanically powering the wheels (like a normal ICE car).

I'd expect it operates in mode 2 a lot when at highway speeds, but not accelerating.

Most ICE car engines are massively oversized for highway cruising (so they have power for acceleration) and aren't running efficiently during said cruising. Huge amounts of engineering goes into trying to reduce this effect but it's always there to some extent.

Hybrids use a smaller engine that is running in a more efficient operating range during cruising (i.e. not pulling a huge vacuum and moving lots of parts the whole time). The battery/motor comes in for acceleration.

Unlike combustion engines, electric stuff isn't really inefficient at low load.

> Even if charging infrastructure was perfect EVs still require a significant amount of time to charge compared to refueling an ICE vehicle.

That's just down to charging infrastructure no? Sure, there are physical limits to how much electricity one can move in a given time, but we are nowhere at those physical limits.

So it's just down to infrastructure in the end. If there was infrastructure to quickly and reliably charge EVs, ICE would only have niche advantages.

I believe the Prius is either in mode 1 or 3. Never heard that it has a generator capability, unless newer models have changed?

The ICE engine in a Prius is a special branch of tech that is more efficient at the cost of basically kneecapped performance. Americans cannot stand needing a full ten seconds to get onto the highway, because we all drive like a bunch of roided up chimps who refuse to move over to give the merging onramp any room.

For two decades there has been a roughly free 5% or so in fuel economy available to any ICE car if only we could manage to be slightly more patient drivers, but American car buyers would literally rather spend twice the cost on a V8, gasoline truck, that gets worse fuel economy than it's $8k more expensive diesel variant, worse performance, and often a less reliable engine.

Americans will swear that a ten cent increase in gas prices will drive them to financial ruin, and then choose to buy the SUV made out of a terrible truck chassis that gets 20mpg. They did this despite having to learn the hard way back in 2008 what it actually meant for gas to be expensive.

I'm waiting for an EREV midsize SUV. EREV sounds like the ideal layout as opposed to HEV and PHEV which sound mechanically over complicated with too many components that can go wrong. The new Dodge Ramcharger sounds amazing but I don't want a pickup and it's way outside of my price point.

ICE weigh much much less than an EV with equivalent range. It matters what you're optimizing for. Most people seem to optimize cost, many for range and some for GHG emissions. Based on which camp you're in, your judgment of of something being wasteful will be different.

They don't typically have a full transmission or CVT either. Taking the new hybrid Civic for example: it just has a basic planetary gearbox that handles forward, reverse and highway cruising.

Any time you're not at highway cruising speed, it's just in the normal position where the electric motor drives it (the engine only functions as a generator). It's effectively an electric car with a small, far under provisioned in Civic terms, engine that comes on to top the battery up sometimes if regen braking isn't enough.

At highway speeds, the gearbox has the engine drive. And since it's a less powerful engine, it will have better fuel economy than one that has to ever handle acceleration from a standstill.

And the whole thing weighs about 3200-3400lb, far less than any electric vehicle. So you're "lugging" around less.

An ICE is typically most fuel efficient at about 2000 RPM and 90% throttle (this is different for every engine of course, but those numbers are close enough for discussion). A typical car can be at 45% fuel efficiency if you can pull that off, but 90% throttle when cruising will bring your RPMs and thus ground speed up. A hybrid can use a smaller engine that can just barely keep your car moving at 90% throttle and use the electric to get acceleration up to those speeds.

Prius "eCVT" is a special planetary gearset that all gears are powered. ICE is connected to the planets, input and output has the alternator and traction motors. Difference in resistance between two motors is imparted to the ICE, achieving power mix and generation control.

It's a really simple and clever solution. So much so that brain hurts to think about

Prius uses an Atkinson cycle engine, doesn't it? Inherently more efficient than a conventional engine, albeit at the cost of lower power. You can get that effect with variable valve timing in some power ranges, at the cost of more complexity.

Pure EVs also waste tons of energy, because they lug around a huge battery that you barely use for most trips.

The battery pack in a Model Y weighs 1700 lbs and provides 330 miles of range. A RAV4 Prime (PHEV) has a 14.5 gallon gas tank, which provides 500 miles of range from 90 lbs of gas - in addition to the smaller 300 lb battery pack providing 42 miles range. The additional weight of the drivetrain components offsets the savings from not lugging around a huge battery. Overall, the vehicles end up with similar weight, but the RAV4 has much longer range. By default, the RAV4 prime runs on EV mode until the battery runs down. With both vehicles, you’re taking an efficiency hit on the average drive for having the option of taking longer trips.

Of course, both vehicles are a big environmental win over old ICE cars, because they will move you more miles per carbon emitted. Which one works better for you depends on your use-case. If you want to lower the environmental impact if you commute even more, ride a bicycle or something.

The latest Prius Prime can do 0-60 in 6.7 seconds. It’s no muscle car but that’s hardly “kneecapped performance.”

> Americans will swear that a ten cent increase in gas prices will drive them to financial ruin

Look, come on. There's no need to turn every comment into a chance to bash a whole country. I bet there aren't many countries you think so poorly of that you'd make sweeping statements about their populations. Gas prices affect all prices due to direct logistics costs and the increases every employee needs all along every supply chain. That's the problem with them.

Pretty much all mainstream hybrids run Atkinson cycle (technically not the original Atkinson design, but an otto-cycle engine that keeps the intake valve open longer, to produce the same effect)

Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get better. Good EV charging today is a peak around 300 KW with a much lower average.

Honestly, _averaging_ 300 KW is probably within a factor of 2 of the highest we'll do for light vehicles given economic (how much electric distribution infrastructure can an 8-32 stall charging station have?) and practical (how heavy and stiff can the charging cable be?) limits.

It's unlikely EV charging speed will ever match existing ICEs. Relatively long recharge times are an intrinsic trade-off of BEV technology which needs to be engineered around, mostly by having enormous and heavy batteries.

An SUV version of ramcharger is very appealing

Or you could have drop in batteries? You pull up to a charging station, they take your battery and replace it with one charged to 100%.

Does this require further work? Yes of course. We are definitely not there yet, and we may never get there. But let's not pretend that this is an insurmountable problem.

Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however.

On the engineering side:

- Swapping requires standardization of batteries across models and manufacturers. To accommodate different vehicles the batteries will need to be rather small so most vehicles will need multiple swapped every time

- Requires more space and weight because the battery cannot be structural. This will reduce the overall range of EVs

- Connectors for high voltage, signalling, cooling fluid, and high strength mechanical rated for thousands of cycles in the face of road grime and poorly maintained swap robots will not be small. Cooling system contamination will be a serious concern.

On the financial side:

- Batteries are expensive, how do you track and reclaim them across the entire continent? What about theft? Destruction insurance?

- With swappable batteries the incentive is to store them at 100% then run them 100% to 0%, which is especially bad for battery longevity

- How do you deal with batteries swapped at different 'swap' networks?

On the user side:

- What if the swap station is out of batteries when you need them? Are you always gambling on holiday weekends that you won't need to sit for hours charging (if that is even possible!)?

- Since some batteries will be more worn than others, how do you deal with constant variability of range because maybe last week you got a new set of batteries and next week you'll get an older set with only 80% capacity left.

- Are you allowed to charge at home? How is the wear from that charged?

- Did I buy a battery with my car, or are cars no longer batteries included? If my car came with a battery, how do I know I get it back? Do I get paid for the wear other users put on it? Do I need to retrieve my battery from the same station on the way home after a road trip?

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others. Most of these issues are solvable with unlikely levels of corporate cooperation or immense levels of excess capital expenditure. However, they all cost money and will reduce the economic viability of battery-swap EVs versus every other vehicle type.

The "S" trim of the current Nissan Leaf (with the 40 kwh battery) weighs 3509 lbs.

https://www.autopadre.com/vehicle-weight/nissan-leaf