The $25k car is going extinct?

The more interesting question is why these cars disappeared in the US. And while many of the factors discussed here are true for both EU and US (inflation, interest rates, manufacturer profit margins etc) I am surprised no one mentioned the 'SUV loophole' of US regulations that effectively boosted the SUVs (off-road vehicles are classified as non-passenger automobiles with everything that entails, notably much less stringent emission standards) and made the small cars unprofitable to make in comparison.

Also Europeans make less money, pay more taxes, and have less access to credit, so they can’t afford more expensive cars like many Americans. Hence the market catering more to people less willing to spend a lot of money on a car.

The poorest American state, Mississippi, is richer per-capita than most European countries, including France.

It's like if smaller cars are taxed at 30% and larger cars at 10%, of course there are going to be more large cars compared to a place that taxes both at 30% or 10%.

GDP and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race

Few caveats:

- those are generally promotional prices

- those prices are generally tied to financing (you really can't buy it cash at those prices, you need to finance it through them at crazy 7/8%+ rates)

- you can wait for the car even 10 months

Also the (semi) compact crossover has kind of killed the compact car. You get more space, better ground clearance, for a decent price.

But this is why Chinese cars are taking over in Europe. Half the new cars I see are from Geely, BYD, Chery, etc. These average about 20,000-25,000 EUR new.

My own opinion, having looked into the matter a bit, is that you'd have to be insane to buy a Volkswagen or BMW at 2-3x the price. If I were in the market for a new car, I wouldn't consider anything but a Chinese car.

https://autoc-one.jp/daihatsu/move/newmodel-5030993/

They partially demand systems that aren't fully developed yet, it is a completely insane thing to do. I guess other manufacturers pushed the EU to install the requirements to protect the dwindling domestic market.

Often the case, but then you can get the loan and pay it off immediately for a fee.

The pricing is meant to hit a price point, in this case just below 200.000DKK. That's a promotional price, chance are that very few cars, if any, with that base package, have ever been made or imported. You can probably get it, but you'd have to wait a few months for it.

The state, maybe. The missisipian, not so much - considering their Human Development Index is right in between that of Hungary and Bulgaria, at the very bottom of the EU. How great is it to be able to buy expansive cars if you can't get access to education, healthcare, retirement, and will find yourself in the street if you lose your job.

The new (and widely liked) Renault 5 EV starts at around €21K, for instance. Probably a bit smaller than something made in China for the same money, but not worlds apart. https://www.renault.fr/vehicules-electriques/r5-e-tech-elect...

Pre-COVID we got a new Leon ST — essentially a Golf estate/station wagon — for about a third off the list price: £13K instead of £20K (I know: those prices sound semi-mythical now).

On the other end you have Audi, whose premise seems to be: "So you want a VW, but you want to pay hugely over the odds for it? Certainly sir, step right this way."

They're also on their out around these parts, very unfortunately.

Funnily your last point invalidates your first. Most Americans are loaded on debt, which impacts how much actual money they have left over at the end of the month. How many Americans can't stomach a $1000 surprise bill again?

> Isn’t your argument basically saying that people choose to buy larger cars when the government doesn’t step in and penalize people for doing so? European regulators basically just forcing people to buy smaller cars is what that sounds like.

No, you're looking at this the wrong way. US regulators make bigger cars more lucrative for manufacturers, so they only do that. EU regulators mostly focus on safety and emissions, which also slightly favours bigger cars (whose bigger price absorbs the safety features better), but not nearly to the same extent. Two of the biggest EU car groups (Stellanti and Renault) both are publicly asking to reduce some of the burden for smaller cars to be able to make cheaper small cars. On the other hand, US manufacturers (even Stellantis' Jeep, Dodge, Ram) don't mind just churning oversized monstrosities.

> The poorest American state, Mississippi, is richer per-capita than most European countries, including France.

GDP per capita doesn't mean what you think it does. Everything being overpriced in the US, and everything needing to have a middleman inflates GDP figures. Take health insurance, Americans pay multiple times what Europeans pay, to stuff the pockets of multiple for profit institutions and middlemen. GDP figures look better in the US, but really, which way is more efficient? Health outcomes are better across the EU, and the amount of medical bankruptcies is also telling.

Because when it comes to features and trim, the average Geely or BYD is essentially on that level (or better). They tend to be quite large and very polished.

It's certainly true that Renault has some inexpensive models -- the Clio is another one that can be had for ~20k EUR -- but they are indeed small.

With your quoted Renault EV models, you really have to be careful, often they don't give the full price but just the price without battery. The battery has to be bought or rented separately.

In fact, it's just a scathing indictment of wealth inequality in Mississippi where life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher than in Bavaria, despite their similar GDPs.

For better or worse the EU is run as a Society whereby the US is run as an Economy, a fact conveniently forgotten in these apples/oranges comparisons.

Even very cheap cars like the “Dongfeng Box” have multiple airbags, emergency braking, lane keeping, etc, and safe to assume a lot of the components VW/Toyota use for these come from the same chinese suppliers.

Dacia Sandero/Duster/Spring exist. (Renault)

Citroen C1, Toyota Aygo, Peugeot 108, (VW up!.)

Considering Volkswagen Group:

With a choice of Skoda Fabia/Seat Ibiza/VW Polo you would go for Skoda or Seat, not the VW brand itself if you dont care about marque but price.

But prestige is a huge factor still, so people would still go for an overpriced Golf for no apparent other reason

Also 20k-equivalent from 2015-2019 is already above 25k just by inflation. Car manufactures have strong unions so that stuff comes around fast.

So you simply can't expect the old sub 20k cars anymore, that's 25k now.

E.g. Mercedes uses Renault engines in the less-fancy models, but most customers are kept in the dark about that.

I can't talk for the rest of the continent, but in the UK we've got "price on the road" advertising laws here. So if you turn up to a dealership with £20k and ask for a new car that's advertised at £20k, you'll be sold a car for £20k in cash. The dealer might try to up-sell you for financing, but you can just say "I'm paying in cash, and I don't want any extras", and they'll complete the payment & paperwork in record time so that they're able to move onto a more profitable financed sale elsewhere.

The problem with these are a few things:

1. service network. When something goes kaput with a VW, BMW, Mercedes, Ford, GM, Toyota and even Tesla, there's ample service stations available to get the car back up and running. With a Chinese manufacturer no one but car nerds has heard about? Good luck finding anyone willing to even touch the thing, much less have that specific manufacturer's tooling to deal with computer problems.

2. spare parts logistics. Even the richest and most successful of the last 20 years worth of automotive startups has serious trouble getting spare parts to broken cars. Why should some random Chinese brand be any better than that?

3. Crash safety. "Chinesium" alloy is a meme at this point, but one based on truth. Who guarantees that the manufacturer didn't cheap out on production runs after the review/crashtest rating units went out?

4. Battery safety. Batteries are already hard enough to pull off at scale without sending an armada of tiny little bomblets around the planet... who guarantees that there is no supply chain fuckery going on?

About 25% of Mississippians are on free government healthcare (Medicaid/CHIP). About 21% are on very-cheap government healthcare (Medicare.) Additionally, many hospital systems in the state are owned by state and local governments, and offer free services (roundaboutly) to residents.

Mississippians, like others Americans, are eligible for Social Security in retirement, and have access to unemployment insurance.

Of course Mississippi is not some sort of welfare state paradise, but it's tiresome polemic and exaggeration to claim that people "can't get access to education, healthcare, retirement, and will find [themselves] out on the street if [they] lose [their] job."

Well, bigger cars are a factor that makes the roads degrade faster.

10 years ago, a Doener Kebab was also only half the price it is today though ;)

Healthcare is a particularly _atypical_ example to choose, and the particularly poor health outcomes of MS are only partly explicable by healthcare cost/access: it's also cultural and lifestyle issues. So it's rather disingenuous to say "take health insurance", as though it can be used by analogy to comprehensively explain other aspects of American finance.

You don't need recourse to GDP, you can just look at household income which really is higher. Most things do _not_ actually have inflated prices relative to European countries.

Would I rather live in Mississippi than France? Are Mississipians living better lives than French people? I mean it depends on where specifically, but almost certainly no. Of course having more money doesn't necessarily make a place better to live in.

But that doesn't invalidate "people have more money available to spend on cars and easier access to credit to finance that purchase over five years at favorable interest rates" as part of the reason why Americans choose to spend more money on cars.

You really don't have to take every point of discussion of difference between the US and European countries as an obligation to rant about how much better Europe is on tangential topics.

Probably a typo, but accurate. Gotta have my truck.

- Everywhere they're sold there is a service center and parts are cheap. As for "Chinese manufacturer no one but car nerds has heard about":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...

- The "chinesium" meme thing is a joke, you realize that, right? This is not a serious objection. Even the original greentext from ~2013 was really dumb, with the purchaser not running adequate tests.

- CATL is pretty much the undisputed champion of making high-end batteries.

14 Skoda Fabias in stock starting at €17625; €20500 if you want a few options and an automatic gearbox.

You might say that this irrational and that people might be better off renting something on the occasion that they need to tow something, or go on a long road trip, or fit more than five people in their car. But people are irrational and they really do make these choices!

The Forth Power Law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Its not inflation alone ... The same brand/car type, tends to have seen a 75% price increase over the mentioned periode.

Something that used to cost 20k euro in the 2015 periode, is now around 35k euro. That is not "inflation". An we are talking same trim, same electronics, same gasoline engines.

Cars beyond a few items (as long as we do not talk about jump from gas to electric) have really not changed that much. There was a big jump from the 90's to the 2000, in terms of electronics (and sensors that are the bane for most car mechanics).

Prices have gone up so much, that it resulted in my 15 year old second hand car, being sold now for more, then when i bought it (and that inc the increased km's driven and age). That is not a normal market and is not explained by simple "inflation".

Its part inflation, a large part greed, and do not forget the consolidation / lack of competition over the year. People overlook how many car brands are now part of the same group. This resulted in less competition because multiple "brands" increased prices over the same period, when its really the same company, using parts in between each other, and your mostly paying for a different shell and "brand name / past reputation".

That is why Chinese car makers are able to enter the EU market so easily, despite the market protection with import taxations.

If you can offer a true hybrid with all the trims like solar roof, full electronics, the works at 36k, and the next EU competitor for the same options is 48k (and a less efficient hybrid aka, electronic boost only)... And that included the import taxation.

Its ironic that we need to do market protection because our own brands got caught sleeping at the wheel.

It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than, say, a 2 bike crash, and in fact there is a particular type of accident (front-overs of children) than trucks are strongly susceptible to and would never happen with lower mass / shorter vehicles. This all points towards a runaway tragedy of the commons that can be solved by limiting vehicle mass.

Jokes aside, I live in the UK, and occasionality I see vehicles here that are entirely too big and unnecessary for our roads.

There was a lady driving what I think was a Defender 130 (I don't know modern LRs too well), it was far too big for the parking spaces in the tiny car park we were in, she could only just see over the steering wheel, and she had no chance of seeing my 5yo child I was walking back to my car with; who's quite tall for 5 but didn't reach over the height of the bonnet.

A semi truck with a trailer will distribute those 40 tons over a larger area due to more and larger tires, but I am assuming that it still impacts a larger ground pressure on the road than a personal car - at least when loaded.

Income would include the money being immediately spent to cover debt (be it student loans, mortgage, medical, car).

> Most things do _not_ actually have inflated prices relative to European countries

I'm struggling to think of things which aren't inflated. Only one I can come up with is gas/petrol/fuel, because there are much less taxes on it. Everything else I can think of is more expensive in the US - healthcare, transportation, food (groceries, and absurdly so for restaurants, for worse quality at that), various types of recreation (cinema, theatre, netflix and co, cable, watching live sports, concerts) internet, phone bills. Electricity is way too location dependent so I'll skip that one.

> But that doesn't invalidate "people have more money available to spend on cars and easier access to credit to finance that purchase over five years at favorable interest rates" as part of the reason why Americans choose to spend more money on cars.

Are interest rates favourable? There are multiple concerning trends (like car payments being one of the top household expenses and people struggling with that, people owing more on car loans than what the vehicle is worth, etc. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/15/american-consumers-are-incre... )

> You really don't have to take every point of discussion of difference between the US and European countries as an obligation to rant about how much better Europe is on tangential topics.

I'm not ranting, I'm correcting a wrong comparison using a wrong metric incorrectly. I don't know what is it with Americans reassuring themselves with GDP metrics, but it's very confusing why anyone would throw in GDP numbers when talking about disposable income and the car market.

Ford's linup is a great example how you people harping on SUVs actively detract from the discussion. What you call the Flex, the Ecosport and the C-max doesn't really matter. They're obviously by virtue of their attributes much closer to a "car" than they are to a traditional truck-ish SUV.

Every OEM's lineup has examples of this (Honda Crosstour anyone?).

The OEMs could make these things very cheaply if they wanted, look at the Maverick, a brand new model debuting at 25k. But they don't, why?

I still don't understand the urge in the US to own a Truck at any cost

This has become the irrelevant part because "does it have an electric motor in the powertrain" has become more important to fuel economy than vehicle size. There are hybrid SUVs that get better MPG than non-hybrid sedans, to say nothing of the full electric ones.

Which is another reason the average price is increasing. Hybrids have a lower TCO even though they have a higher initial purchase price. People who can do the math realize that paying more up front for a hybrid or full electric is paying less long-term. But then the market for lower priced new cars declines, because the people who can afford a new car can afford to pay a little extra for long-term savings and most of the people who can't afford to do that were buying used to begin with.

While I'm sure there is some amount of the affect you're describing the lion's share of it is likely CAFE rules favoring larger footprint vehicles effectively discounting SUVs causing them to be a better bang for your buck.

>It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than,

It is by the simple physics of having more distance to dissipate force over and less distance between the occupants and stuff in the cabin.

> This all points towards a runaway tragedy of the commons that can be solved by limiting vehicle mass.

Which will never happen because the same exact upper middle class demographics that screech all over the internet about safety are the exact same people who would see their buying choices degrade as a result of such.

So why not skip the middleman and go directly to the source? The only annoyance for me is the ridiculous white labeling. Most no-name brands are seemingly coming from the same factories / same designs, so it’s often impossible to find quality reviews. Probably partly Bezos fault because Amazons review system are less trustworthy than a used car dealership. So I’d rather pay more for known flaws than the hit-or-miss gamble of no-name brands with fake reviews. I hope Chinese merchants catch up, because they’re losing customers for no particularly good reason. I just want the reviews, warts and all.

Ignoring extremists is easier than preventing (or reducing to a point that you stop complaining) these accidents at the limit, so that's what society does. Tough luck.

In a world where ~half of all SUVs are some poof-ed up variant of a compact car a nuance free opinion like yours is just insufferable.

You can think of roads as basically retaining walls as they're a hard compacted mass of stuff "floating" in otherwise fairly fluid ground. Sure, high point loads can damage the top surface (not really a problem since anything on tires is fairly low point load) but it's the overall weight you're asking it to bear that causes the pressure to just kinda mush the wall over.

Standard plan is £5.99 in UK, €7.99 in france, $7.99 in the US. So the US is the cheapest of those after currency conversion

> cinema

US median price in 2022: $10.53. In the UK, £7.69 == $10.54 (uncanny tbh)

> groceries

https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/360768/what-a-basket-o... puts the US at $52.80, France at $51.08.

I'm genuinely struggling to understand where you are pulling these conclusions from because they don't fit the trivially searchable data, nor do they fit the anecdotal conclusions that I think most people would make from spending time in these places.

> Are interest rates favourable? There are multiple concerning trends (like car payments being one of the top household expenses and people struggling with that, people owing more on car loans than what the vehicle is worth, etc. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/15/american-consumers-are-incre... )

Yes, they're more favorable. The interest rates available to US consumers on auto purchases are lower than those available to UK consumers. And again, it's a case where your need to moralize is getting in the way of the topic: I'm saying that easier access to credit is a contributor to Americans spending more on cars. You are saying "oh, but Americans then struggle with auto loans". Yes! These are not conflicting statements. You seem to be attaching a value judgement that isn't there to the statement that "Americans are able to spend more on cars". It doesn't have to be a good thing, but that doesn't necessarily make it untrue.

> I'm not ranting, I'm correcting a wrong comparison using a wrong metric incorrectly. I don't know what is it with Americans reassuring themselves with GDP metrics, but it's very confusing why anyone would throw in GDP numbers when talking about disposable income and the car market.

You were the first person in this thread to bring up GDP per capita! The person you are replying to said "richer". You're the one interpreting this to be a GDP reference, but it doesn't need to be since it's also true with regards to disposable income.

I also don't understand why you think it's people "reassuring themselves". I don't need reassuring of anything on this topic, and I'm not sure why you think you know what beliefs I might hold about the relative merits of living in MS versus various European countries. I think it's a pretty basic ability to be able to decouple the question of "is the median american is willing and able to spend more money on a car than the median german?" from "which country has an overall higher standard of living?".

How is this car not considered a massive SUV?

Is this a personal theory, a hunch, or do you have data or citations?

> of having more distance to dissipate force over and less distance between the occupants and stuff in the cabin.

So what we need are bigger vehicles made out of lighter materials, to increase the distance and reduce the forces, perhaps some comically large Styrofoam bumpers protecting our bikes? Now, I can get behind that.

> safety is only a "nice to have"

Buyers are a diverse group, you know. There is a substantial segment that rates safety as a the top priority, and there is very little doubt the SUV mass race is strongly related to the "perception of safety" larger vehicles provide, of course not to the actual safety reality and externalities they incur to the rest of society.

Another substantial segment is driven by the "perception of masculinity" their large vehicles provides. You couldn't make up this level of lameness.

That's partly explained by inflation, but also by the massive amounts of extra safety equipment mandated by the General Safety Regulation. The bill of materials for cheap cars has increased by thousands of euros, because they're legally required to have cameras and radar.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COM...

Where in Europe are you? Because I've always found food ridiculously cheap in the US compared to the Europeans countries I've lived in or visited for an extended enough period of time that I had to regularly go food shopping (Scandinavia, UK, Germany, Switzerland). You can get 3 chickens, each 3 times the size of the chickens I'm used to, for what I pay for 2 chicken breasts. Many restaurants will give you a serving that could feed a family of 4 for what I might pay for starter back home.

Like you say, the term itself is meaningless but it does encompass the current class of vehicles that are needlessly big, heavy, and so high of the ground that some tanks literally have better forward vision than those SUVs.

I don't really care what Americans drove 50 years ago, I care that most cars sold here (EU) are way oversized for practically no reason that the consumer cares about.

Only if you crash right after you bought the car ...

And yes, your mother is more likely to kill someone in a larger, heavier, vehicle. I don’t see how anything you said refutes that.

But the driver would have to sit lower in a minivan. Which is what SUVs are really about, the ego boost one gets from sitting higher up (and the associated feelings with being able to not have to settle for a minivan, and being able to waste a little money).

Find any "professional" talking on record about small car safety and they will lament the reduced space for crumple zones, reduced distance from head to structure, etc.

>Another substantial segment is driven by the "perception of masculinity" their large vehicles provides. You couldn't make up this level of lameness.

I suspect the number of people who see a big truck as projecting masculinity is in fact smaller than the people who enjoy that other people will assume they bought the truck for that reason and dislike or be offended by it.

Keep in mind nowadays most SUVs aren't trucks with the cab extending to the rear instead of a bed. They're cars that are slightly lifted with a taller profile. As an example, I have a Hyundai Elantra, which is longer than the equivalent Hyundai SUV (Tucsan)...

Can they? In long term maintainability decides. And hybrids usually has it with maintainability pretty bad. Large area of potential breaking, expansive spare parts usually with strong vendor-lock.

Hybrids are very costly in maintainability, even if you are privileged elite that buys hybrid and in two years resell it and buy brand new car, even then hybrids looses comparatively big percent of its original cost.

So people that buys hybrids, usually CAN NOT do the math.

Is this conclusion based just on fuel consumption? From a relatability standpoint, it doesn’t make sense at first blush because you have to have both ICE and EV parts in series in the drivetrain; the total reliability can’t be higher than the individual components of they’re in series.

If you drive a lot, different story.

We all spend the 2000s listening to the "they're less safe because they roll over more" screeching broken record and while statistically that was true to an extent nothing really came of it, everyone decided that yeah they do but they like the tradeoff. You just sound like a 2020s cover of that. Why ought I to take your hand wringing seriously?

I suspect there is a correlation between people who choose big cars, and empathy levels below yours.

Standard with ads, which is distorting because ads have a different cost and benefit (more expensive and lucrative in the US). Standard Standard is 14.99€ in France, £12.99 in the UK, $17.99 in the US.

> US median price in 2022: $10.53. In the UK, £7.69 == $10.54 (uncanny tbh)

2022 is distorted due to Covid.

> > groceries

> https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/360768/what-a-basket-o... puts the US at $52.80, France at $51.08.

I like how you picked France, not Poland at $27, Spain at $35, UK at $35, Ireland at $39, Belgium at $42, Italy at $44, Germany at $46, etc.

> I'm genuinely struggling to understand where you are pulling these conclusions from because they don't fit the trivially searchable data, nor do they fit the anecdotal conclusions that I think most people would make from spending time in these places.

From visiting the US multiple times over relatively extended periods (few weeks at a time) over the past few years, while living and travelling extensively over the EU. Plus anecdotes from the internet. A lot of things are more expensive, when you count everything (tax, tips, etc).

> Yes, they're more favorable

You said they're favourable, not more favourable than e.g. in the UK. What's the average APR?

> You were the first person in this thread to bring up GDP per capita! The person you are replying to said "richer".

The only metric by which Mississipi is "richer" than France is GDP/GDP per capita.

With inflation pressures, layoffs, and other downward pricing pressures, we should expect consumer preferences to change, but I also expect that the global vehicle fleet will continue to age (especially as most vehicles are of sufficient quality that they needn't be replaced).

And then you're also keeping the moving parts more in their happy zone of temperature, speed, and load instead of needing them to operate in as wide of conditions.

A hybrid, by definition, combines an ICE and electric drivetrain. While I understand it could be designed for a more efficient range of operation* how could it negate the downsides of an ICE-only design if it requires an ICE? (Are we conflating EV and hybrid?)

* This also means each segment is less globally efficient, meaning the system is less efficient if it has to limp along if one part is inoperable

- No engine belts

- No starter

- No alternator

- No transmission(1)

- No torque converter

- No turbochargers

- Regenerative braking can significantly reduce brake pad wear

Edit: - AWD is an electric motor on the rear axle. No driveshaft or transfer case required.

As long as you drive it regularly and keep up with scheduled maintenance, you don't have to do anything for well over 100,000 miles.

Replacing the traction battery after 10~15 years is cheaper than the additional maintenance required for regular cars.

1: Yes, it has an “e-CVT”. Which is just a set of fixed planetary gears. All “shifting” is done through varying the power output of two electric motor-generators.

Electric motors outlast the vehicle, and significant battery degradation only results in slightly worse fuel economy.

These typical crossovers that most people buy are more or less a direct replacement for the sedans they used to buy. Sure they're probably statistically worse at the margin but people derive a bunch more utility out of them than the sedans they replaced, which is why the form factor is carried over as best they can to the compact and subcompact hatches (impreza, c-max, etc). You have every right to tell people they ought not to be doing what benefits them because of some nebulous change at the margin that's only visible once you apply a bunch of statistics, and I have every right to call you a moron over it. But what do I know, I drive a minivan.

The Renault 5 prices in gmac's link is with battery.

https://eahart.com/prius/psd/

https://eahart.com/prius/psd/

The pure ICE engine and transmission has to deal with some of the most stressful times the motor can handle, extremely high torque demands coming from a stop. Its far less stressful for an electric motor to generate good torque at such low RPMs.

Just two quick examples.

not sure about this; hybrids require maintaining both an ICE and a electric motor/battery

The Prius may be an exception but that model has been around for a very long time.

A lot depends on gas prices, of course.

Still a €25k car, but that's still a $29k car.

so it's 30 cents cheaper per month on that basis. that doesn't really support the claim.

> I like how you picked France, not Poland at $27, Spain at $35, UK at $35, Ireland at $39, Belgium at $42, Italy at $44, Germany at $46, etc.

I picked France because I had specifically mentioned France previously. I'm aiming to be consistent.

> Plus anecdotes from the internet.

It all becomes clearer.

> You said they're favourable, not more favourable than e.g. in the UK. What's the average APR?

I said "better access to favorable rates", not that every person is getting good rates. For what it's worth I would say that any interest rate that's below the expected return on money in the SP500 is quite favorable.

> The only metric by which Mississipi is "richer" than France is GDP/GDP per capita.

Clearly untrue: it has higher household disposable income, almost certainly the most relevant statistic.

I really don't think you're sincerely interested in this topic, you just want to dunk on America.

A key part of my original statement.

A series hybrid or parallel series hybrid will often have a far simpler transmission in terms of moving parts and what not. You're right, they'll use the gas motor for power going highway speeds, but they're still a lot simpler. Many hybrids effectively only have a single speed for the ICE motor in their "transmission", some have 2-4, compared to modern ICE transmissions which are like 7+ gears.

Note, I do agree, there are some hybrid drive trains that are more complicated than their ICE counterparts, but it is not a given. Many hybrids are a good bit simpler in the end.

One example of a simpler setup would be Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive. e-CVT's can be radically simpler mechanically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive

And I'm old enough that I used to do everything with a beater compact car (Saab 900 Turbo, was lots of fun) when I was young, it was fine, ish. Now I have a family, and if I want to bring along the in-laws as well it's more efficient and generally easier to bring 1 large vehicle versus 2 small ones.

The electric motors are the limiting factor when it comes to continuous performance. You really don’t want to tow anything heavy with a hybrid.

If you need to tow things a lot, get a pickup truck or a heavy-duty SUV with a gas engine.

Slow reaction times, of the kind that could be easily corrected by more strict laws around who and how licenses are given, are easily the #1 reason for preventable pedestrian deaths from cars.

This is a solvable problem and the Euros have far less of these stupid kinds of situations for a reason. I WILL blame most drivers who "kill children" for their laxidazy assumption that they can reduce their idle concentration just because "it hasn't happened to them".

Also all of this discourse is really arguments for requiring all cars to have active automatic emergency braking for pedestrians and other cars.

The math is clear: in series, the system reliability cannot be greater than any single part.

So if the claim is that hybrids are more reliable than ICE, there needs to be some sort of discussion about why you think the ICE is more reliable. You keep bringing up transmissions when the main point is related to the ICE.

Prior to the pandemic's impact on prices, trucks generally offered better TCO. I struggle to imagine that still holds true in the current landscape, but the shift has happened recently enough that we don't really have a good picture of what the total cost is over a sufficiently long period in light of how the world has changed.

So, right now, amid many unknowns, people are gambling on the past being indicative of the future. They might get burned hard, or they might come out smiling in the end. Time will tell. When it does, and assuming it shows that the TCO benefit is no longer there, you will start to see movement away from them. People aren't completely irrational – but they are slow.

- pure ICE needs mechanical gears or a belt-style CVT. a HV power source and 2 electric motors enable the use of a dead simple planetary gear set to change the ratio between ICE and the wheels.

- ICE needs a starter and an alternator. psd hybrids use the existing electric motors and a dc-dc converter to do those jobs

- belt powered components (e.g. A/C, power steering) are replaced by more reliable electric versions powered by the high voltage battery

- ICE needs small displacement, high compression, turbo'd engines to meet power and efficiency targets. Hybrids can get away with wheezy but efficient and reliable low-compression engines because the electric motors make performance acceptable

- ICE cars need to run their engine anytime they are moving. Hybrids will have 20+% lower runtime and that runtime will be spent at optimal RPMs and with minimal stress as bursts in acceleration are assisted by the electric motor.

As to in series being more complicated, starter/alternator + battery already has all the mechanical complexity of a barebones series hybrid. You could technically take a standard ICE car change only electronics and get some of the benefits of a hybrid. Obviously for reliability you’d want beefier electric motors, and … before you know it you’re building a more robust system than a pure ICE.

I didn't limit the original discussion to just an ICE motor versus an entire hybrid power train, I explicitly stated, "Depending on the _drive trains_ being compared, the hybrid _drivetrain_...". In the end people don't give a shit about if the motor is reliable, they care about if the car is reliable. The car, which includes a transmission and a heck of a lot more stuff in it. In the end the reliability of the drivetrain is more important, as that includes the reliability of the ICE and all the other stuff needed to make the car go.

If you want to focus on just the ICE part, then sure mechanically the ICE motor in a hybrid drivetrain will be similarly designed to an ICE-only drivetrain. But an ICE car is more than just an ICE motor. And to have that ICE motor actually be useful, it needs to be paired with other components. As you've aptly stated, the reliability of the system overall is extremely related to the reliability of all the components. Namely, having more complicated and less reliable components anywhere in the system makes the whole system less reliable. Having to have an incredibly complicated transmission with tons of friction points and sliding parts and fluid channels relying on specific viscosities of oil is massively more complicated mechanically than a few fixed-ratio planetary gearsets.

But guess what, even if you ignore the rest of the hybrid drive train and focus on just comparing the ICE motors, the ICE in a hybrid will probably outlive the ICE on a similar ICE-only car experiencing a similar usage pattern. The ICE in the hybrid with an e-CVT or similar will pretty much only exclusively operate in its most efficient and lowest stress ranges, while that pure-ICE vehicle needs that gas motor to work in every condition even if it is high stress.

> there needs to be some sort of discussion about why you think the ICE is more reliable

I don't think the ICE is more reliable than the hybrid. I've been arguing the opposite. The gas motor may be similarly reliable in a full ICE, but a lot of the other stuff around it becomes less reliable.

Even then thinking about things like water pumps and AC compressors and what not, a lot of that gets to be more reliable working with their own extremely reliable DC motors going exactly the speed they want to go at instead of having to be tied to engine RPMs and belts and clutches and what not wherever they want to be instead of needing to be in the path of the belt. You don't have a wimpy barely sized alternator, you have a much more reliable AC motor/generator along with an inverter and well-sized battery supplying plenty of electrical power to the system which then has a much more stable voltage for your 12V system. You don't have to put nearly as much CCA load on your 12V battery, you won't run it down as much, it stays in its optimal voltage more often, etc.

Ok, let's say you go stupid simple for the transmission and have a super basic classic four-speed manual.

Right off the bat, you've got clutch wear. In that e-CVT, there are no sliding clutches. Everything is connected all the time. Immediately, we see a wear component that will eventually need replacing. Not might need replacing, will need replacing. It is a consumable part, designed to wear.

You now have cable assemblies which will eventually stretch over the life of the car. Those will eventually need adjustment. Once again, these just don't exist at all with the e-CVT system.

Now you have a shifter and gear selector. This will need to slip in and out of other gears. Often this is not a perfect shift, imparting wear on the transmission components. Once again, you don't have a gear selector in an e-CVT, this wear never happens. This wear can cause premature failure of the transmission. This is largely controlled by the skill of the operator, sure.

Just a few quick examples. But this is then also an incredibly basic manual transmission, you won't find such a thing on pretty much any recent mass market car. These days you'll see complicated automatics with servos and what not to control the gear ratios, massively more gear ratios, rely on fluid channels to push things around inside, rely on computers to operate them effectively, etc.

And as Retric mentioned, there are analoges for most of the hybrid components in a pure-ICE car. You already have a DC motor set to drive the car in the starter motor. You already have an inverter, the alternator. You're not really adding a ton of new things, you're just massively upsizing some of the things you already have and massively simplifying a lot of the other components.

Many series hybrids do have a way to power the wheels directly with the engine at highway speeds but it's generally much simpler than a full transmission. Most Honda hybrids for instance have a single clutch that connects the ICE to a "6th" gear.

> You keep bringing up transmissions when the main point is related to the ICE.

less parts -> more reliability

The argument goes like this,

ICE cars have an alternator (electric motor 1), starter (electric motor 2), battery, and transmission. A beefier alternator (generator) + starter (electric motor driving the car) + battery adds less complexity than a transmission. That’s the simplest EV design where the engine only ever charges the battery. It’s perfectly viable for a long range plug in hybrid that only ever uses the engine on long trips.

The downside is batteries have conversion losses, so most hybrids have various ways of directly using engine power which then adds complexity. But ultimately hybrids are more complicated than EV’s but very much can be simpler than modern ICE cars.

PS: Technically some old ICE designs like dynastart used to do the same as hybrids where the same electric motor acted as a starter and alternator but in modern ICE vehicles the tradeoff around now little time the starter is needed and how little power the alternator needs to generate means it’s more efficient to separate it out. http://www.isettadoc.com/files/dynastart.pdf

>having more complicated and less reliable components anywhere in the system makes the whole system less reliable.

This is my entire point, because the hybrid has many of the same components. Yet you get focused on individual components like transmissions instead of elaborating on the system reliability. I’ll concede that the hybrid ICE may be more reliable (that’s what I meant by asking you to provide details why the ICE is more reliable). But my point is that a more complicated system in series requires all components to be substantially more reliable to have an overall equivalent system reliability.

Consider the life of a traditional ICE engine is about the same as the batteries of a hybrid. Even if the hybrid ICE has a life 30% longer, it doesn’t make the overall system last longer. For round numbers, say the traditional ICE and hybrid batteries have a 200k mile median life (50% reliability).

That means the combined (series) R(hybrid ICE) * R(planetary gears) * R(hybrid electric motors) has to be greater than R(traditional transmission). Maybe that’s the case, and I’m asking for details and specifics.

Now obviously, it’s more complicated because there are other failure modes in each system and cost differentials as well. From the get-go, you seemed focused on individual component reliability. But unless you’re talking specifics about the system reliability you’re tilting at windmills.

So we both agree, a hybrid and a full-ICE will have many of the same components overall. They both need a battery. They both need some kind of transmission. They both need some kind of inverter. They will both have some kind of electric motor in them. In terms of actual number of components, the hybrid and the ICE are actually pretty similar.

But then we both agree, some of those components in the pure ICE are far more mechanically complicated. Higher mechanical complexity, more moving parts, etc generally means less reliability, agree? And one part of that system being radically less reliable makes the whole system less reliable, correct?

> That means the combined (series) R(hybrid ICE) * R(planetary gears) * R(hybrid electric motors) has to be greater than R(traditional transmission).

No, your math would that for the pure ICE would be R(gas ICE) * R(traditional transmission). Your ICE car isn't going to go very far without a motor to spin the transmission. And that traditional transmission is far less reliable than the fixed planetary gears. Comparatively, electric motors are extremely reliable, and chances are your hybrid gas motor will be more reliable for the same kind of required output. So, R(hybrid ICE) > R(gas ICE).

So yes, generally speaking R(hybrid ICE) * R(planetary gears) * R(hybrid electric motors) > R(gas ICE) * R(traditional transmission). Largely because that R(traditional transmission) is so absolutely terrible in comparison to R(planetary gears) * R(hybrid electric motor). Which is why I'm talking about the transmissions so much, and yet you're continuing to ignore it.

A couple caveats:

1) most modern hybrids use the ICE at higher speeds for efficiency, right? What does that mean in terms of added complexity and reliability?

2) somewhat of a tangent, but in the original post was regarding cost of ownership, and reliability was brought into the discussion because cost is a function of reliability. But the alternator vs electric motor aspect misses the original point about cost, considering the motor may cost 8x-10x to replace.

All that to say, reliability and cost of ownership is complicated. I was pushing back on the overly simplistic takes and appreciate you adding some nuance.

>less parts -> more reliability

This is the general heuristic but only true if the components in each system are equally reliable (and specific to the original claim about cost of ownership, equal in cost). I don’t think that’s true, and am asking for a nuanced breakdown.

For example, the hybrid ICE may be more reliable for good reasons (eg consistent RPM). Or the traditional battery may have half the reliability, but 1/50th the cost. All of that factors into cost of ownership.

The error in this is in assuming the analogs have equivalent reliability or cost in each system.* (The original point is about cost of ownership). They don’t. So, while both have batteries, the reliability and cost of each is very different. Same with the ICE component etc. My issue is broad generalizations about reliability without speaking to the nuance.

I’m not set against the idea of a hybrid being more reliable or cheaper, but more against the superficial generalization.

* also the analogs miss some of the complexity. Yes, both have a battery, but a hybrid requires high voltage and auxiliary batteries, meaning the battery system is by definition more complex.

I’m not super convinced that accessory belts are a major cause of maintenance. I only recall having to do that once at around 120k miles.

I think there is a good argument to be made that implementations like Toyotas HSD are more reliable than plain ICE, but you’re not making it here.

No, that was already baked in. I purposefully linked the R(gas ICE) = R(hybrid batteries). Note they were both dropped out of their respective calculation. Just like a hybrid isn’t going to go very far without batteries, but you left that reliability out of your hybrid equation. It seems you’re more interested in arguing that reading posts in good faith, so I don’t think it’s productive to continue the discussion.

There’s a lot of tradeoffs involved which I’m not an expert on. However, ICE cars need an engine capable of low end torque and a good efficiency across a huge RPM range, hybrids can use a much simpler engine design optimized for where the engine operates best because the EV side handles the low end just fine.

A hybrid engine is also used for fewer hours of operation over its lifespan so in general (because exceptions exist) the gas engine in an hybrid is more reliable than the gas engine in an equivalent ICE. That said, car manufacturers can use up that margin to save weight etc so it’s not a guarantee.

In the end it’s a huge design space, saying something is a hybrid doesn’t actually tell you much about what’s under the hood.

It really depends on the type of hybrid in question. Those are series, series-parallel, or parallel. Some hybrids essentially just use an electric motor to assist in a traditional ICE-like drivetrain (parallel). This is the kind of setup you'll see in something like the Ford Explorer Hybrid or most of Honda's hybrid systems. In these cases, the electric motor just sits in the regular ICE drive train and supplies additional power especially in low efficiency ranges along with regenerative braking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Motor_Assist

In an e-CVT setup (series-parallel) like what you would find in a Ford Escape Hybrid or most Toyotas using a Toyota Hybrid System or Hybrid Synergy Drive, the overall mechanical complexity of the system is considerably less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive

In my experience this kind of nuanced info is unfortunately pretty hard to come by. MFGs know it but have no interest in sharing it. Same for taxi operators (though the number of hybrids in taxi fleets is pretty staggering). Fleet operators usually only look at the first 5 years so longer term maintenance and repairs aren't studied all that rigorously. That said, here's a 5-year fleet TCO analysis where HEVs on average were 6k cheaper than ICE: https://www.afla.org/news/692431/The-Hybrid-Value-Propositio...

Also, here is an analysis from 2016 showing that the 2005 Prius had the lowest 10 year maintenance cost of any model. Toyota had only been making hybrids for 7 years at that point. That level of reliability for a new technology is pretty impressive: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1104478_toyota-prius-hy...

> (and specific to the original claim about cost of ownership, equal in cost).

speaking to this piece, it can be hard to gauge because its not all that common for companies to sell very similar trims in hybrid and non-hybrid. The two PSD hybrid examples off the dome are the corolla which is +$1500 for hybrid and the first-gen maverick which was -$1100 for the hybrid (before Ford knew the hybrid would sell like hotcakes, then they cranked the price up).

Perhaps Ford just wanted to burn cash but imo PSD hybrids are likely very competitive in terms of per unit cost, which would hopefully translate into lower repair costs. Toyota has also just switched to hybrid only for the Rav4, which is one of the best selling models on the planet. That would be a pretty bold move if they weren't very confident about the reliability and TCO (basically their entire brand value) or their ability to make money selling them (cost vs consumer value prop).

The form factor of a typical SUV, such as an X7 or Land Cruiser or Explorer or Suburban, is inherently more wasteful than a minivan. The only thing those offer 99% of people is that they allow the driver to sit higher up, and be able to say they are not driving a minivan. Otherwise, the minivan provides more utility in every way.

>summer roadtrips, ski vacations, visiting family, moving stuff.

All of this stuff (in the manner 99% of people use their vehicle, i.e. not climbing rocky terrain like in the commercials) is easier to do in a minivan than an SUV. And I'm sure an electric minivan would be better than an electric SUV, except at signaling you can afford to forego the extra utility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvnZ0mTCBng

The gas engine has a timing chain and chain-driven oil pump. Everything else runs off the DC-DC converter.

The transmission is two motor-generators and an ICE directly connected by fixed gearing. This is used to start the engine.

The ICE in a hybrid doesn’t need any accessories beyond what the electric drivetrain already provides. Therefore, it does not have a starter or alternator.

There are a lot fewer moving parts that can break or wear out.

It’s a pretty elegant system that bolts a bare ICE to what is otherwise an electric car.

A typical ICE is most efficient when running at moderate load and somewhere between 1800 and 3000 RPM. That's what happens naturally at highway speeds, which is why traditional ICE cars get better MPG on the highway than in the city, and why hybrids run the engine on the highway.

Hybrids gain a large advantage in stop and go traffic because then they can recover energy through regenerative braking and contribute it back when accelerating, which allows the ICE to either run within its peak efficiency range or not run at all.

So on the highway a hybrid is basically doing the same thing as a normal car. It might eek out a little more efficiency by using electric boost when going up hill and regen when going down hill to keep the engine load more consistent, but it's nearly the same. But highway miles are what put the least amount of wear on a car.

It's stop and go traffic that causes the most wear because then you're putting high loads on the engine during acceleration (and using lower gears which require more engine revolutions per distance traveled) and burning through brake pads during deceleration. Which is the thing hybrids avoid doing by using the electric motor.

> But the alternator vs electric motor aspect misses the original point about cost, considering the motor may cost 8x-10x to replace.

When alternators or starter motors go bad it's commonly the components like brushes in DC alternator/generators or the clutch pulley or solenoid that hybrid motors don't have to begin with because hybrids typically use AC motors permanently connected to the drive shaft. AC motors are extremely reliable and will typically outlast the rest of the vehicle.

It’s better in other regions, but you couldn’t pay me to buy a Toyota.

The majority of my comment points out how the equivalent analoge on the pure ICE is massively less reliable than the hybrid. Who is ignoring the reliability of the different components here again?

Sure, there is a HV and a LV battery. They're both solid state devices and thus generally pretty reliable when it comes to cars. The LV battery faces far less wear. The overall system is considerably more reliable in the hybrid than the same in the ICE. It's near impossible to generally talk about the prices of something like the HV battery, it varies greatly based on what models you're talking about. One car might have a replacement used battery that's good for many years be $700, another might be extremely bespoke and rare and be $10k. If I were to judge prices of pure ICE transmissions based on extremely rare hyper cars I might say an ICE transmission replacement costs $20k or more. The details matter greatly when judging TCO on potentially low market cars.

He can’t speak to the last 2%, but I doubt your in the market for a hyper car and really this concerned about TCO.

> The math is clear: in series, the system reliability cannot be greater than any single part.

We both agree with this statement. The system reliability cannot be greater than any single part. In a traditional ICE, there are multiple systems which are radically less reliable than a hybrid with an e-CVT, while generally untrue of the reverse. So, with "the system reliability cannot be greater than any single part", and we can see there are parts of one system that are less reliable, which system is then logically the less reliable one? Not looking at cost at the moment, just reliability.

That is purely talking about e-CVTs and reliability of specific designs, and not necessarily reliability of all hybrids. In the end, the reliability of "a hybrid" can vary wildly. Is it a pure series hybrid we're talking about? A series-parallel e-CVT? A different kind of series-parallel? A parallel? A parallel hybrid is an example of a hybrid that probably does have worse reliability overall, as you still have all the complexity of a traditional ICE but then adding additional systems adding further complication. You're not trading away the complexity of the traditional ICE in this setup, just adding to it. All different reliability metrics on just the basic design concepts, not even then thinking about differences in reliability in manufacturing and what not across different car makers. Some car manufacturers tend to have more mistakes in actually producing things, and a good design might not actually hit planned reliability if they're not actually making the things right.

On top of that, when comparing TCO you'll see differences based on production volumes of that car. A hybrid that was only a compliance car trim level sold in only California in low volumes for a couple of model years with a bespoke battery is probably stupid expensive ($3000+) for a replacement battery after a decade. A hybrid that was mass market with many hundreds of thousands produced with long generations will have tons of used/remanufactured/aftermarket batteries on the market and might only cost $800. A lot of hybrids from the past tend to fall into the first category and not the second and were made as parallel drivetrains with notable exceptions being things like the Prius which routinely is listed as one of the lowest TCO cars out there.

Just asking for a TCO comparison of "a hybrid" compared to "a traditional ICE" is massively oversimplifying and misunderstanding the complexity of that question. Theoretically, one couldn't even say "what is the TCO of a traditional ICE vehicle?" Are we talking an F-250 Superduty or a Kia Rio or a Ferrari F40? Ignoring purchase price, each of these have radically different operating costs per mile. Which vehicle are we talking about?

This is why my original comment started off with "Depending on the drive trains being compared..." I'm not saying every hybrid will always be more reliable than every traditional ICE. It depends on which cars you're comparing.

Where is your 98% claim coming from? The other poster made no such claim.

The irony is there is published info on TCO from companies like Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book. We can take umbrage with some of the factors or weighting, but it’s a better starting point in real data than anything bright up so far. A claim could easily be crafted using such information that addresses everything I’ve raised (maintenance, depreciation, different designs, etc). Yet the discussion seems almost wholly based on vibes and near-ideological bias. It reads to me as conclusions searching for data instead of the other way around.

The best I can tell from that information, TCO is largely a wash. For comparable manufacturers/designs, TCO over the first 5-10 years seems to be about the same. You can pick some designs that favor one side or the other, but in general they are roughly within 10% (usually considerably less) of one another. Given the uncertainty due to the variables in question, it seems reasonable to conclude there aren’t strong conclusions on TCO differences between them.

I’ve already looked at that those real work TCO numbers for a bunch of cars, that’s part of why I’m saying they’re reliable and lower TCO.

But there’s a big difference between saying that on average these things break down less across all hybrids and saying every single hybrid model is more reliable.

That's the thing though, you're lumping all hybrid drivetrains in together and assuming they're all equally reliable and equally have the same TCO math, as if "hybrid" means only one thing. I've been trying to tell you, "hybrid" means a lot of different things and really shouldn't be seen as one technology, "depending on drive trains compared" and all. Which is why I made a big point of mentioning my usage of "series", which flew right over your head.

When I'm talking about a bespke battery on a low-market car, I'm not talking about some hybrid supercar. I'm talking more about the hybrid compliance car trim levels that are only really sold in small numbers in some markets, like the Ford Explorer Hybrid. You practically won't find them in most states, they were essentially only delivered to a few markets in very small numbers. Its components are far more bespoke and thus expensive to find replacements. Pretty much nobody makes remanufactured batteries for this car. It's a parallel hybrid, so it still has all the complexity and reliability of the traditional ICE drive train. This is pretty much true of a lot of "the same ICE car, but now hybrid!" They're often going to be low production models, bespoke batteries, and probably a parallel hybrid. And I agree, good chance the TCO won't work out in the hybrid's favor in the end.

Compared to something like the Prius or Maverick Hybrid or the new RAV4, which are extremely mass market. These have a much different drive train than that Explorer Hybrid, being e-CVTs. There's a big market for remanufactured batteries since there are so many more out there. Parts are considerably cheaper, and thus they have (or will probably have, the new RAV4s are still new) low TCO.

Its not fair to group the Explorer Hybrid and the Maverick together as one category of "hybrid", since they're such different designs on how they operate leading to radically different outcomes on TCO.

I’m not though, you’re just making that assumption. For example, as “comparable manufacturers” if I select Toyota (because it has a reputation for reliability) I can compare the Prius to the Corolla (because they’re both at a similar price point in their respective categories). This “should” favor the Prius because the Corolla has a CVT (which is known to be less reliable) but TCO comes out about 8% lower for the Corolla. I’m not lumping all together, I’m deliberately trying to make reasonable comparisons.

Now I could also pick and choose to go the other way with a similar comparison. The end result seems to be that there is a distribution of differences that are reasonably close, but with enough variance to say it looks like a wash in TCO. Point being, strong conclusions may not be warranted.

>Which is why I made a big point of mentioning my usage of "series", which flew right over your head.

It did not go over my head. In fact, I brought it up in the very first post before you responded. [1] I even reminded you of that [2]. This is why I’m saying it seems like you are reflexively responding without actually reading for comprehension or clarity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44422207

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424531

Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, Toyota Highlander Hybrid, Toyota Prius, Toyota Camry Hybrid, Honda CR-V Hybrid, Ford Escape Hybrid, Ford Fusion Hybrid, and Honda Accord Hybrid which have a lower TCO than their gas’s equivalents.

I don’t think we need to consider low production edge cases, to make a statement about the general case.

That’s not a direct comparison. Toyota sells hybrid and non hybrid corolla’s and the hybrids are cheaper to own @ 5 years here.

https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2024/cost-to-own/

https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla-hybrid/2024/cost-to-o...

> Ah, ok. I didn’t realize “series” is a specific term of art in the EV space.

You acknowledged you did not originally understand what "series" meant when I was talking about a "series hybrid". And your "reminding me" is you continuing to show you were not aware of what my usage of the word "series" meant in terms of hybrid drivetrains and instead "using it in the pure reliability domain sense". And your first comment points out you didn't get the idea that a series hybrid doesn't have a lot of the same ICE components, instead it seems you had a parallel hybrid design in mind.

> but TCO comes out about 8% lower for the Corolla

In what timeframe comparison, 5-year? How many miles? Which gas markets, is gas $3/gal or $5? What does a 10-year comparison look like? Are you including residual value on the cars after that 5-year period to see a total cost after depreciation? What does a used comparison look like? And yes, why not compare the Corolla ICE vs Corolla Hybrid, wouldn't that be a more apt comparison? One is a sedan and one is a hatch, they're different cars with different branding presence.

Looking at the numbers, drawing that out from a 5-year comparison to a 10-year comparison (or more) would probably tilt the math towards the Prius being cheaper in the end, and I'd imagine even more so at a 15-year point. But we don't actually have these numbers, and these are projections of what these cars might have in terms of TCO, not any detailed study of actual TCO.

18-inch wheels Heated front seats Heated steering wheel Partial vinyl and cloth upholstery 13.2-inch infotainment touchscreen Navigation system Adaptive cruise control (adjusts speed to maintain a constant distance between the Escape and the car in front) Lane keeping system (makes minor steering corrections to help keep the vehicle centered in its lane) Evasive steering assistance (enhances the forward collision mitigation system with steering-based collision avoidance) Rear parking sensors (alert you to obstacles that may not be visible behind the vehicle when parking)

Also, the payback for a more expensive upfront car at year 5 on a car likely to last ~26 years doesn’t mean they are also equal for the next 21 years.

The numbers come from the Edmunds site. Eg fuel cost by locality, 15k miles a year etc. You can look at the site for all their assumptions, but some of it is proprietary.

>But we don’t actually have these [TCO] numbers

Exactly! So why are you making strong conclusions in the absence of data?! This is why it comes across as if you are an ideological argument instead of a data-literate one.

“I don’t have any data, but it just makes sense to me” is not the type of curious discussion I was after.

If I had to guess, you may be getting numbers from a high fuel cost locale. In the end, I don’t think the conclusion that it’s largely a wash is unreasonable. There will be areas with higher cost and those with lower cost.

I’m not sure I would use the 25+ life because that doesn’t reflect how long a person will keep it. The depreciation captured by the TCO is a better representation of that effect.

Suppose I’m paying cash and it’s an extra 2,000$ by my TCO drops by 0.1% over 5 years is that a worthwhile investment? Without knowing what the car costs you can’t tell.

What matters is the difference in cost vs the difference in TCO. You’re buying a car either way.

That’s a more nuanced take by adjusting the assumptions. Sometimes adjusting them is warranted, and sometimes it’s just to game the outcome you wanted.

I'm not even making that strong of a conclusion. I'm saying "depends" and what not, because I agree it can be fuzzy and not a hard 100% rule that hybrids are cheaper TCO. But I can make some amount of conclusion because I can look at a trend line and extrapolate especially when equipped with extra knowledge about how these systems work and doing my own projections on potential repair costs at a longer interval.

A 5-year TCO evaluation on a new car generally isn't going to figure in the differences between a motor failure or a transmission failure. They won't include a HV battery failure. Depending on fuel price differences it may not even cover initial pricing disparities but could come close. But I can see a rebuilt transmission can often be $2k or more with a lot of labor, and a rebuilt transmission can still be a roll of the dice. A remanufactured battery is easier to test pack health and know the state of the device and can often be only a few hundred dollars and easy to replace.

As you mentioned, the average ownership period of a car is a little over 8 years. The average life of a car far longer than that. Three years more of gas savings on that average first owner, considerably more over the life of the car. And someone especially concerned with TCO will probably be more interested in buying used and paying cash, not having to deal with as much depreciation and finance charges, and probably have their car longer than average.

> I don’t have any data

We do have some data, we have knowledge of how these systems work, we can see trends in component prices and more can make overall projections from it. Following the trend lines from the data we have, the hybrids do usually pay off in TCO. Am I a bit just taking a gut estimate for a general state of things? Sure. But I think I've sure shared a lot of logic as to why that would probably be that way. It is not just some completely empty guess with nothing backing it at all as you seem to suggest.

Are we sure that inflation numbers have not been underreported ?

I have been putting my trust in these. (Also looking for 3+ years of manufacturer warranty, guarantees of 10ish years for replaceable parts, high reparability scores...)

Hopefully, they won't let me down.

(Also, never buying on Amazon. Had to break that rule a few times of course over the past decade, but only for <100€ items.)

The cash on hand bit isn’t the only take, but if you’re comparing 5 year loans and only keeping the car for 5 years then you can ignore time value of money. Suppose the monthly payment is 50$ more and you save 60$ a month, sure it’s only saving 10$/month but that’s essentially free money.

> They still may be, but nobody has shown good, generalizable data to that point.

The general case of someone keeping a vehicle for 8 years and driving 15k miles per year isn’t close, as long as we’re keeping everything else the same. EX: A 2025 Ford Escape ST-Line Elite has a hybrid option for an extra 1,205$. If the base price is significantly higher than 2,000$ you’re not comparing drive trains but options.

Plug in Hybrids are a separate category dependent on your local electric prices.